The cold calculation behind our aid cuts to Gaza
There’s something ghoulish about the image of truckloads of food sitting vainly outside Gaza while more than a million people on the other side of the border are on the brink of famine.
This is perhaps why it’s the image Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong used this week in announcing Australia would recommence its funding of UNRWA, which she says does “life-saving work” in Gaza, and which has been starved of a significant portion of its funding since late January.
That, you will recall, was a deliberate decision of a suite of Western governments including our own, after, in Wong’s words, “serious allegations were made” of UNRWA staff being “involved in the Hamas terrorist attacks” of October 7.
Now, less than two months later, Wong is confident that the United Nations relief agency “is not a terrorist organisation”, citing “the best available current advice from agencies and Australian government lawyers”. Here, Australia is following the lead of Canada, Sweden and the European Union, which resumed their funding in the past fortnight.
Even so, it raises several questions, especially given UNRWA hasn’t even completed its own investigation into the allegations that triggered all this. Most obviously, what has changed?
We won’t get detailed answers on that. Governments aren’t in the habit of sharing national security briefings, and Wong was predictably general when journalists pressed her on the point.
Part of it, according to Sweden, is that UNRWA has agreed to “allow controls, independent audits, to strengthen internal supervision and extra controls of personnel”. But such safeguards would mean nothing without the broad, aforementioned conclusion that UNRWA is not a terrorist organisation in the first place. And if that’s true, it must surely always have been thus because it’s impossible to believe it was on October 7, but has been transformed since. In which case, why the original funding freeze?
Well, obviously, those are serious allegations. Extremely serious ones. But note how Wong references them in the passive voice: “serious allegations were made”. By whom, she doesn’t say, which conceals the clearly relevant fact that those allegations came wholly from Israel. More specifically they come from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led Israel. That is, they came from an interested party to a war, which has a long-standing beef with UNRWA, accusing it of fomenting antisemitism in its schools and being, in one official’s phrase, “a haven for Hamas’ radical ideology”. Israel says UNRWA is riddled with 1200 Hamas and Islamic jihad terrorists and sympathisers. So, the October 7 allegations were merely an extension of an old Israeli argument.
Of course, an interested party can still make true allegations, so none of this automatically makes Israel’s allegations wrong. UNRWA has fired a small number of employees in the past for their links with Hamas. Its commissioner-general has admitted to finding some antisemitic content in the textbooks used in its schools, and the EU has condemned this in a detailed report. So Israel’s October 7 allegations were certainly worthy of investigation. The context only means they weren’t independent allegations. And it means that if the international community was going to accept them and act on them, they could not simply rely on Israeli intelligence.
Intelligence, as the Iraq War proved, is not evidence. It has to be examined critically.
This, it seems, is where things began to get sketchy. In Britain, Sky News, Channel 4 and the Financial Times all reviewed a six-page Israeli dossier on the allegations, and separately noted it provided no proof of the claims. By mid-February, UNRWA told Haaretz that Israel was yet to provide any evidence to support its claims, despite being invited to do so. Then, earlier this month, UNRWA shared an unpublished report with The New York Times, alleging that several of its staff who confessed to being involved on October 7 “were forced to confessions under torture and ill-treatment” in Israeli prisons. Israel denies this and the Times could not corroborate the details, but did say that some accounts correlated with some of its own interviews.
Of course, it’s likely the media has only limited information. And perhaps Israel hasn’t given UNRWA any evidence because it doesn’t want to co-operate with that organisation. But we would expect Israel to share far more extensive intelligence with its staunchest ally. And in late February, a United States intelligence assessment said that while it did not dispute Israel’s claims about a vast number of UNRWA staff having Hamas links, it could not verify them. As for Israel’s allegations against certain individual staff members, it said these were credible but ultimately, it had “low confidence” in them. None of this is resounding.
This week, Wong confirmed Israel has given Australia “some information”, too. Whatever it is, given Australia’s decision, it cannot be especially resounding, either. Indeed, Australia’s conclusion that UNRWA is not a terrorist organisation reads as a clear rejection of Israel’s claims of widespread Hamas infiltration.
Which takes us back to Australia’s original funding freeze. I won’t sit here in the cheap seats and pretend that would have been an easy decision. I accept that in the fog of war, governments are always acting on imperfect information. I’m enough of a realist to know that in our political environment, the government would have been assailed mercilessly had it left its funding untouched, possibly turning UNRWA into the latest front in a long-term culture war. It’s even possible that the government’s approach has meant its support for UNRWA is more politically sustainable henceforth. And I can well imagine that UNRWA’s largest donors would be rocked by the thought of their funds being used in a terrorist attack, consider it an unacceptable risk, and feel suspending further funding to be prudent.
But that leaves us with one very cold calculation. If Australia believes that UNRWA – whatever its flaws – does life-saving work no one else can, and if we’re in the realm of assessing risk, there were always two competing risks at play here.
First, the extremely serious but uncertain risk that UNRWA funds were criminally misused. Second, the extremely serious and almost certain risk that slashing UNRWA’s funding in the midst of such a profound humanitarian crisis would cost Palestinian civilian lives.
It seems near-certain that Palestinian civilian deaths turned out to be the more acceptable risk. The prudent tragedy to choose. And once it’s distilled that starkly, there’s something ghoulish about that, too.
Article link: https://www.theage.com.au/world/middle-east/the-cold-calculation-behind-our-aid-cuts-to-gaza-20240321-p5fe59.htmlArticle source: The Age/Waleed Aly/22.3.2023
5591