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James G. Lindsay at the International Summit for a Future Beyond UNRWA

James G. Lindsay, Former UNRWA General Counsel Below is an excerpt from Mr. Lindsay's remarks: Thank you Hillel. Good afternoon now and thank you for all being here and for that long introduction. During my years with UNRWA, I suggested several ways that the agency could improve its operations. But I found that these sorts of suggestions were not welcome by the people in charge. I started as a senior lawyer, but not the senior lawyer, and neither the senior lawyer nor the other members of the UN staff were receptive to really any changes to be made to UNRWA. After leaving the agency, and as a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, I wrote a monograph entitled, “Fixing UNRWA” which urged UNRWA to make a large number of reforms. It’s now 15 years since I wrote that and other people have also made critiques of UNRWA and suggested ways that it can be improved. As near as I can tell, all of those suggestions, mine and other people’s, have remained unwelcome, and they certainly remain unheeded. With the recent intelligence indicating that large numbers of UNRWA staff are associated with terrorist groups, a lot of the calls for reforming UNRWA have somewhat fallen by the wayside and been replaced by calls to end UNRWA. But how exactly would that be done? There are three ways that I can think of that it could in fact be ended. The first one is, the General Assembly of the United Nations created UNRWA and it could end UNRWA. As a practical matter, that’s probably not going to happen. Most recently in December of 2022, the General Assembly once again renewed UNRWA’s mandate for another three years. The votes on that were: there was 1 vote against renewing UNRWA, there were 10 abstensions, and there 157 votes in favor of continuing UNRWA, so as a practical matter, I don’t think this is going to happen in the General Assembly. Another way to end UNRWA is for the donor nations to withhold their donations. Which is a bit of what we’ve been hearing today already. Moving the donations from UNRWA to somewhere else. In the past that has not been overwhelmingly successful. In 2018, the Trump Administration eliminated all American aid to UNRWA, but other countries, including European countries increased their aid to try to offset the loss of American aid. And to a very large extent that did occur and UNRWA was not forced to make any changes of significance. In 2019, somewhat better story, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands temporarily withheld their donations due to a scandal involving UNRWA’s Commissioner General, and their donations were renewed, but only after the Commissioner General had resigned. So there was a bit of a modest success there. Right now we have, as some of the speakers have mentioned, a situation in which 18 of the largest donors have withheld their denotations. They have paused them. But the language used with this discussion of pausing is suggesting that the donations would resume once the UN internal investigations were completed and UNRWA gave assurances that corrective actions were being taken. Still, that’s not very encouraging really, but still there are two things about this that are unprecedented. Firstly, is the large number of donors pausing their donations. That’s 18 and they constitute at least two-thirds of the money that UNRWA needs to constitute its professed budget. The second thing is that the US is being pressed by the Congress to eliminate funding, and that has forced the administration to mention that it is looking at alternatives i.e. non-UNRWA ways to provide aid to Gaza. Again, that is something that the Americans have not done before. And one can hope that other donors who have paused will be trying to do the same thing. I believe it’s possible that the donor nations could defund and thus end UNRWA. But it is not 100 percent sure by any stretch of the imagination. The third way to end UNRWA is for the host nations to refuse UNRWA access to the areas under their jurisdiction. Now as a practical matter, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon will not take that step. They see themselves, and want to be seen as being supportive of the Palestinian cause. And in addition, they fear that they will be the ones that end up paying the bill. Israel though, which controls the borders of Gaza and the West Bank, is different. Israel has been hinting that it would be using the defeat of the terrorist forces in Gaza and the subsequent Israeli occupation to create a new and peaceful self-governing authority. There have been a lot of rumors in the Israeli press about what that would consist of. But as part of this ambitious plan UNRWA would be replaced by other organizations as quickly as possible without creating some sort of a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli military particularly has been concerned that removing UNRWA immediately would cause them difficulty in their operations For more, go to https://unwatch.org/future-beyond-unr...