Weaponizing Aid

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset voted to shut down the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to designate it as a terrorist organization. While this drastic attack on the UN was met with widespread condemnation from the international community, it was not wholly unexpected. For decades, Israel has regarded the number one provider of education and humanitarian services to the Palestinians of Gaza with contempt and suspicion. Just earlier this year, in response to still-unsubstantiated Israeli allegations that UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 attacks, the United States led a series of countries in terminating funding to the UN organization. 

The month of October marked a sustained escalation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, with particular brutality inflicted on Palestinians in the northern Strip. Amid scenes of devastation, bound and blindfolded men, and expulsion marches, the sustained deprivation of aid has caused yet more widespread suffering. A letter from the United States issued on October 13 warned of consequences should the Israeli government not increase aid flows into Gaza in the following thirty days. The deadline has passed, with aid at its lowest level in eleven months, and no consequence has been forthcoming. 

To understand the relationship of Israel and the US to UNRWA, its place within the broader ecosystem of aid organizations across Palestine, and the weaponization and politicization of aid delivery, we spoke with Lisa Bhungalia, author of the recent book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine. The interview, conducted before the Israeli Knesset vote, has been condensed and edited for clarity.

An interview with Lisa Bhungalia

Jack gross: In January, the United States terminated funding to UNRWA. What should we understand about this decision, and its impact on aid provision in occupied Palestine?

lisa bhungalia: Yes, in January the US paused its donations to UNRWA following allegations made by Israel that twelve (this was later increased to nineteen) UNRWA employees, out of roughly 30,000 UNRWA staff, had links to October 7. Even as Israel failed to provide credible evidence to substantiate its allegations, the United States, alongside fifteen other countries, suspended their donations to the refugee agency. Nearly all countries have since restored funding following independent investigations into Israel’s accusations. but notably, in some cases, some of those restored funds have been earmarked for “risk management” (that is, an emboldening of a counterterrorism paradigm and attendant policing and surveillance mechanisms into civilian aid flows). 

Meanwhile, in the United States, Biden signed into law HB 2882 (or the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024) in late March, which includes a provision that prohibits funds from being used for UNRWA—so now there is a legally sanctioned, wholesale cutoff of US funds to UNRWA—the US was UNRWA’s largest donor, providing over a quarter of the agency’s budget. Moreover, the Knesset recently passed legislation designating UNRWA as a “terrorist organization” and banned the UN agency from operating on Israeli-controlled territory. The consequences of this designation are significant due to the fact that the designation mobilizes a “no contact policy” thereby prohibiting any direct interaction between Israel and UNRWA, a prohibition with especially insidious implications as UNRWA must structurally interact with Israel to carry out its humanitarian operations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The legislation is expected to lead to the closure of UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters and will effectively block the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza via Rafah. Israeli lawmakers directly cited the January allegations when drafting this legislation.

Notably, Israel’s original allegations came directly on the heels of the International Court of Justice ruling in January, which determined that Israel is plausibly in violation of the Genocide Convention. I won’t rehearse the political motivations behind Israel’s timely maneuver here, though these are likely clear; rather the story of UNRWA indexes a different kind of war, one enacted through laws and lists which mobilize a politics of ban, sanction, and punishment on targeted entities. 

Just to lay bare the mechanics of what has happened in the case of UNRWA, here we have an agency consisting of nearly 30,000 employees of which nineteen are alleged to be linked to a crime. This allegation, in turn, constitutes grounds for the termination of all funding to the said organization—this is the fungibility argument written into US (and Israeli) counterterrorism law, which holds that any support to a designated terrorist entity could potentially free up other resources to carry out prohibited acts; therefore any support to the said organization is banned. 

The salient point here is that this current moment and developments therein animates the surfacing of a different kind of war, one that has developed largely in the shadows over the course of the last three decades. This war has a history which really takes shape with the Oslo Accords, Bill Clinton and Executive Order 12947, Oklahoma City and the passage of the “material support ban” in 1996, and the subsequent birth of the “list-based approach to terrorism.” The body of law surfacing here, which criminalizes the “financial foundation of the global terror network” (these are George Bush’s words) effectively imposes a relation of ban on the designated entity by prohibiting relations with and financial flows to the blacklisted entity enacting what I have called elsewhere, “asphyxiatory violence,” a modality of violence that realizes its destructive effects through less spectacular means than a bomb or tank, and instead through a quieter, temporally stretched process of constriction, one that progressively erodes conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation. 

Now that Israel has designated UNRWA to be a “terrorist organization,” it is hard to see how UNRWA will be able to continue operating in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza given its forced structural entanglement with Israel, as Israel controls the entirety of the Palestinian occupied territories including the internal and external borders. While Israel’s campaign to undermine UNRWA is decades-long, it appears that the “terrorist” designation might be the act that ultimately collapses the agency, the consequences of which are dire especially, but not exclusively, for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at this very moment.

Jg: Palestinians are “aid dependent” as the term goes, and the politicization of that fact is not a new phenomenon. What is UNRWA, and what is the broader aid landscape throughout occupied Palestine?

lb: Palestinians are heavily aid dependent due to ongoing processes of dispossession and a decades-long occupation, which have, among other things, undermined their ability to develop a self-sustaining economy. This feature was structurally built into the Oslo Accords. Following the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, there was a very sharp uptick in foreign aid—intended, the argument went, to build the institutions for a future Palestinian state. As the occupation never ended, the latter has yet to become a political possibility.

We can start with UNRWA. Established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly in the aftermath of Israel’s founding and the concomitant displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians, UNRWA was tasked with a mandate to provide assistance and protection to Palestinians who lost “both home and means of livelihood” and their descendants. The only UN agency concerned with the plight of Palestinians specifically, UNRWA remains the principal aid agency providing critical humanitarian assistance, food aid, relief, and other services to Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and in the surrounding Arab states of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. 

UNRWA’s mandate is distinct from that of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) the latter of which, as legal scholar Hanin Abou Salem points out, seeks to eliminate refugee status through the “medium of local integration in the host country, resettlement in a third country or repatriation when possible.” UNRWA, on the other hand, has a mandate to administer assistance and protection to Palestinian refugees until a just settlement to their plight is achieved, which includes the option to return to the homes from which they were displaced as enshrined in UN Resolution 194. Accordingly, UNRWA’s mandate does not seek to eliminate refugee status barring this political outcome. As such, UNRWA is unique in that it maintains a longstanding commitment to one group of refugees, the Palestinians—a group that today constitutes about 5.9 million people eligible for UNRWA services. UNRWA today manages what was supposed to be a short-term humanitarian crisis, one that continues apace seven decades later. 

Beyond UNRWA, there are many different aid actors at play, including bilateral and multilateral agencies, international NGOs, Palestinian NGOs, private contractors, and grassroots organizations all of which operate within and are beholden to specific national, institutional, and legal pressures, contexts, and  frameworks. I will focus primarily on USAID in our discussion today—particularly since Washington has indicated its intent to repurpose aid away from UNRWA and towards USAID and its partners on the ground, who manage aid projects on the ground. From 2021–2024, USAID, it is estimated, will distribute about $500 million in Gaza and the West Bank. 

One more scene-setting point here is that everything we are talking about today needs to be seen in a broader context in which the US provides Israel with $3.8 billion of military aid annually. The US has distributed over $228 billion in military aid to the country since its establishment. Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since World War Two, and just since October, it has received over $17.9 billion in aid. Everything must be seen in light of the magnitude of these figures and the relationship it illuminates.

dylan saba: Your book studies how counterterrorism measures in the United States have come to shape every part of the aid complex in Palestine, turning all kinds of aid-dependent activity—from education, to civic engagement, to food and survival—into another arena of surveillance and control by the occupation. How did the securitization of aid developed since the early years of the War on Terror?

lb: There is much to say on this, and the United States is not alone in its weaponization of aid to the Palestinians. It is, however, an especially influential player that has set into motion processes of intensified aid securitization that have been emulated—to different degrees—by nearly all western aid agencies operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. US counterterrorism law is a particularly significant part of the story here. US counterterrorism laws, sanctions and blacklists are infused into US civilian aid flows administered to Palestinians, and the impact of this is what I’ve studied and written about in my book. While the counterterrorism paradigm has been emboldened since September 11, it  is by no means new. In fact, as I argue in my book, the 1990s and the Oslo Accords in particular constitutes a critical period in which the groundwork for everything that happens post-9/11 is established. But it goes back even further. 

The US Foreign Assistance Act of 1969 effectively stipulates that UNRWA must ensure that no US aid goes to “any refugee that is receiving military training from a member of the so called Palestinian Liberation Army, or who was engaged in any act of terrorism.” As Darryl Li points out in a report published jointly by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, this is the first time that the term “terrorism” appeared in a US federal statute.

The 1990s, as noted earlier, was a critical period in which the legal foundation for this counterterrorism infrastructure was established. In 1996, Congress passed into law, as part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), an exceedingly broad ban on providing “material support” to US-designated terrorist entities. And just before that Bill Clinton signed into force EO 12947 in 1995 which blocked assets in the United States of “terrorists who threaten to disrupt the Middle East peace process.” EO 12947 imposed US sanctions on designated entities and prohibited transactions with them. Clinton’s order identified twelve organizations it deemed to pose a threat to the Oslo Accords, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, as well as eighteen individuals associated with them, as “Specially Designated Terrorists” (SDTs). This marks the beginning of the shift to a “list-based” approach to criminalizing support for terrorism, wherein any support to or contact with a blacklisted entity is rendered criminal under US law.

Later on, in the post-9/11 moment, the language of “association” was added to the prohibition on material support, which greatly expanded the activities and relations that could be considered criminal under US law. The “association” framework has been particularly damaging in the case of Palestine as many NGOs and contractors receiving US funds police far and wide to ensure they do not run afoul of US terrorism laws and sanctions policies. 

A number of oversight and compliance mechanisms have been integrated into US aid flows in Palestine to ensure compliance with US laws and sanctions policies. For example, in 2003 USAID integrated anti-terrorism certification (ATC) into its grants and cooperative agreements in Palestine, which served as the entrypoint for my study of aid politics and the security state in Palestine. The ATC is connected to an Executive Order signed by George Bush in September 2001, marking the onset, at least officially, of the “financial war on terrorism.” Executive Order 13224 significantly expanded the power of the US Treasury to target the “financial infrastructure of terrorism” casting an ever-expansive net on who and what could be sanctioned by the US government. The Order, among other things, created the Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) blacklist, consisting originally of twenty-seven organizations and individuals, which has since grown to tens of thousands of entries. It also broadened the scope of those targeted from individuals directly belonging to “foreign terrorist organizations” to those deemed “otherwise associated” with an FTO and nullified the humanitarian exception in the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). So basically now humanitarian actors, NGOs, etc could potentially be prosecuted if they provided aid to designated “terrorist entities” or operate in “terrorist-controlled” territories. 

On the ground in Palestine, what this has meant for NGOs and contractors receiving US funds  is that they must monitor the recipients of US-administered aid to ensure they aren’t working with or associated with anyone designated by the United States as a “terrorist entity”—a classification assigned to a number of Palestinian parties, factions, and political groups.

ds:  Can you tell us more about the crucial role that USAID plays here? How does it operate in Palestine, and what is its role in implementing the antiterrorism legal regime you describe?

lb: USAID operates almost exclusively through what I call the intermediary sphere—that is the broad nexus of international NGOs and private contractors awarded USAID grants and contracts that then, in turn, implement aid projects in Palestine whether through partnership with local organizations or through direct implementation on the ground. These bodies constitute a critical infrastructure or set of nodes through which US counterterrorism law is transmitted and projected onto landscapes and bodies afar. Referred to by one aid worker in Palestine as USAID’s “many arms,” these intermediary bodies are responsible for undertaking a number of policing and surveillance functions to ensure compliance with US legal mandates and sanctions regimes.

The contractual relationship to which these bodies are enlisted is best distilled in a document integrated into the USAID WB/G Mission in 2003, Mission Order 21. Mission Order 21 functions, in essence, as a technology of risk transference as responsibility for upholding the US counterterrorism regime is offloaded onto the international bodies that handle US aid monies resulting, as I have traced in my book, in a diffusion of securitized managerial power. Among the functions these contracting agents are required to carry out some include: collection of the personal information of key individuals and organizations receiving US funds under an award to be screened or vetted against US intelligence and counterterrorism databases; obtaining of anti-terrorism certification from prospective aid grantees, in which the prospective recipient must denounce terrorism and pledge not to work or associate with blacklisted individuals or groups; and upholding restrictive clauses in funding agreements.

Concern over potential violation of US counterterrorism law has meant that many NGOs and contracting agencies receiving any kind of US funding have built expansive surveillance and policing mechanisms into their aid programming, such as screenings, certificates, and restrictive contractual terms, and in some cases have cleaved off entire regions, spaces, and municipalities (coded as “derog”) from aid flows to protect themselves against legal violation and related punitive measures. As the director of one international NGO handling US funds in Palestine remarked to me when I was conducting research for my book, “money does not go to anything that is considered risky by law.” Meanwhile, the director of an organization receiving US funds for a Palestinian youth democracy project shared with me that entire municipalities were simply preemptively eliminated from project inclusion. Routinely, US-funded contractors talked about how they had incorporated expansive policing mechanisms and preemptive strategies to ensure they were viewed as low risk bodies by those administering US aid contracts, in turn, lending a power to the US security state that it might not otherwise have. In the case of one US-funded NGO operating in Gaza, the organization’s activities, in toto, were cast in the ambit of suspicion. The NGO’s Gaza program director revealed that they had to be excessively cautious about initiating contact with any individual or organizational body “outlawed by the US government.” As he told me, a colleague in their Jerusalem office spends the majority of his time checking the names they submit against the US Treasury “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons” list. 

One distinction to underscore here is that between US funds channeled through a multilateral organization, such as UNRWA or another UN agency, and those administered bilaterally through  USAID. UNRWA is not exempt from US security and counterterrorism mandates, though aid securitization in the UN context plays out somewhat differently. Frictions resulting from incongruencies and contradictions between UN counterterrorism regimes and those of individual donor states have long been discussed in legal and policy circles. UNRWA has been mandated to uphold US counterterrorism policies and conditionalities from the late 1960s onwards. The Framework for Cooperation between the United States and UNRWA, for instance, stipulates that UNRWA undertake “all possible measures” to ensure that no part of US money is used “directly or indirectly, to provide support to individuals or entities associated with terrorism.” There is, nonetheless, some level of protection afforded to UN agencies to ensure that the counterterrorism-related policies of foreign states do not entirely usurp other humanitarian and ethical considerations, including those enshrined in international humanitarian law.

This would not necessarily be the case for US bilateral aid flows, as NGOs, contractors, and other intermediary aid agents receiving US grants and contracts would necessarily interface principally with, and are accountable primarily to, Washington. As noted in a study published by the Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Law Project, the United Nations and other multilateral and international humanitarian organizations “do not typically treat counterterrorism measures as a standalone set of concerns” but rather see them as one element among a broader field of considerations that must be weighed when implementing humanitarian programs and practices. Counterterrorism legislation, on the other hand, begins with the premise that one party of a conflict is (or may be) criminal and on this basis can exclude aid. Moreover, even if one is deemed a combatant and thus excluded from receiving aid under international humanitarian law, the relation of exclusion would not extend to the combatant’s family or dependents. This is not necessarily the case with US counterterrorism laws and policies, and the broad associational logic that underwrite them. Thus, the repurposing of US funding from UNRWA to USAID and other agencies could, very conceivably, create new forms of exclusion within the Palestinian refugee pool. The implications of such a possibility are indeed grave both in terms of meeting immediate humanitarian needs in Gaza, as well as for future prospects of rehabilitation and reconstruction.

Jg: Your book describes a number of cases where that compliance role creates incredibly demobilizing divisions among Palestinian groups trying to organize politically and develop various programs for their communities. Could you tell us about how the securitization of aid plays out for civil society groups in Palestine, how people navigate the fear of sanction and the divisions that fear stokes?

lb: Palestinians have adopted numerous strategies to negotiate deepening processes of aid securitization. Some have opted to refuse US funding all together. In 2003, for instance, the Palestinian Nongovernmental Network (PNGO) announced a boycott of USAID in response to the integration of “Certification Regarding Terrorist Financing” (this is connected to EO 13224 which I spoke about earlier) into grants and cooperative agreements which had to be signed by Palestinian NGOs prior to entering into a funding agreement. PNGO expressed concern that Palestinian NGOs were being required to sign a document stipulating that they would sever relations with entities and individuals designated by Washington as “terrorist” – a classification, as mentioned earlier, that includes many figures, movements, and parties long considered part and parcel of the Palestinian liberation struggle. 

And of course it is not lost on Palestinians how almost any activity, behavior, or act of speech that challenges their subjugated position within the current political order in Palestine is scripted as a security threat and is almost reflexively equated to terrorism. To sign the ATC was seen as a direct sanctioning of the conjoined Washington-Tel Aviv position that criminalizes in toto all but Palestinian complacency under conditions of ongoing dispossession. As one interlocutor told me, “No group actually wants to use the funds to support terrorism. Rather, this is a battle over principle. Who has the power to define?” The ATC, in other words, was understood by many in Palestine as a technology of counterinsurgency and proxy warfare.

Other Palestinian groups and organizations opted to accept US funding and to negotiate, to the best of their ability, the security relationship into which they were enrolled. In one instance, a Palestinian youth organization had developed a youth shadow council project in an attempt to imbue a sense of local politics and empowerment among Palestinian youth, especially as the national sphere had been deeply compromised by the deep enmeshment of the Palestinian Authority with Israel. They had completed the first phase of the project with European funding. However, when their funding ran out, they were approached by an international organization that wanted to work with them to complete the second phase of the project with USAID money. This prospect triggered a long series of intense conversations within the Palestinian organization about whether to refuse US funding altogether or operate under the compliance constraints though to do so without compromising their principles. Part of the debate centered on the acknowledgment that foreign aid is so compromised regardless, whether it comes from the US, the EU, or other bilateral and multilateral donors, and thus much of their discussion focused on which restrictions they felt that could work within. The organization eventually decided to take USAID funding.

What is interesting about this case is that the organization could not, with US funding, establish youth shadow councils in any municipality that had elected members on the municipal council belonging to groups designated on US terrorism lists. Accordingly, the organization had to preemptively eliminate any municipality fitting this criteria in the pursuit of its youth democracy project. As predicted, this posed a number of ethical dilemmas for the organization and their longstanding relationships on the ground with “banned municipalities.” In addition, the US counterterrorism requirements profoundly shaped project implementation as the organization was forced to circumscribe their work primarily with smaller municipalities void of city council members belonging to prohibited groups. Moreover, the irony of upholding a foreign prohibition on the inclusion of political parties in a democracy project for Palestinian youth was not lost on this organization, its youth base, and beneficiaries alike resulting in the erosion of this organization’s credibility on the ground. 

In many cases, intensified aid securitization produces very real kinds of fragmentation and division on the ground, including a void of services and critical aid where it’s needed because you have a municipality with a municipal council seat belonging to a proscribed group, whether the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Islamic Jihad, DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), or any number of groups. It’s not just Hamas. That’s the one we most often cite. This fragmentation, these geographies of division and isolation, are produced across multiple scales and sites in Palestine. Obviously we have seen it in the case of Gaza and we’ll see it in much more pronounced fashion if these aid intermediaries—including the private contractors being touted by Washington right now in its latest scheme—are tasked with reconstruction in Gaza, a place where Hamas will invariably have a presence. 

ds: The negative obligations of the aid system are so extreme that they undercut the positive mission of the overall project—to provide humanitarian assistance to a population that needs it. Do you see that as the result of mission drift? Or, to put it another way: given how crucial the ability to cut off aid has been for the genocide in Gaza—and the longstanding tactic of fomenting splits and divisions within the Palestinian national movement, not dissimilar from the story you just described—should we understand control over aid as part of a strategy for achieving particular political objectives? 

lb: It’s a great question, and a difficult one to answer. I hesitate to ascribe too much coherency to this moment. I can offer some speculation regarding how we might make sense of recent shifts and reconfigurations in aid flows (and their arrest) especially in regards to UNRWA.

The pivotal role UNRWA plays in maintaining the political category of the Palestinian refugee is not lost on Israel. Israeli officials have long campaigned, and now more vociferously than ever, that UNRWA be dissolved. As Netanyahu stated bluntly in 2017 following a meeting with then US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, “It is time the UNRWA be dismantled and merged with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.” Situating the recent uptick in attacks on UNRWA in a longer history, Hassan Barari, professor of international affairs at Qatar University argues that these attacks are a continuation of Israel’s longstanding attempt “to defund UNRWA in order to kill the refugee file from any future negotiations.”

It is thus necessary to situate the escalation of attacks on UNRWA within this broader context. Relatedly, the concomitant reshuffling of US aid flows in recent months, including the termination of US contributions to UNRWA and a reshuffling of some aid through the State Department, USAID and “its partners on the ground,” and other UN agencies can read as a clear signaling that Washington has opted to more directly facilitate the goal of UNRWA’s unraveling through a form of “managed collapse” enacted through a gradual devolution of critical aid functions UNRWA has long carried out to other UN and bilateral agencies. This is not a new strategy, as one former UNRWA employee disclosed in a discussion we had this past summer, but rather one that has been discussed in top governmental circles for years. Such a strategy seeks to dissolve UNRWA as an institution while rolling out its functions to other agencies that notably do not serve the specific political category of the Palestinian refugee. Moreover, with respect to the repurposing of aid to “US partners on the ground,” this would serve a hyper-securitized function in direct service of Israel’s broader political aims.

ds: The current war has ushered in untold devastation, both of human life and infrastructure, which I think generally is viewed through the lens of wanton destruction and genocide. There is another dimension developing through these aid flows: the dire need for reconstruction itself creates a political void for the regime of counterinsurgency to fill. What are you looking at when you think about the reconstruction of Gaza? How is targeting UNRWA part of Israel’s broader strategy? 

lb:  Israel’s strategy, it seems, finds coherence on a few different levels. The first seems to be about eliminating the category of the civilian from Gaza—discursively and quite literally. Part of this strategy is about collapsing and subsuming everything and everyone  in Gaza, and now indeed Lebanon, into being “terrorist affiliated”—all infrastructure: hospitals, entire neighborhoods, cities, anyone in a particular WhatsApp group etc. The goal geopolitically and materially, it appears, is to steadily depopulate the Gaza Strip. We are seeing this most aggressively right now in the North with the partitioning of the strip, consistent bombing, and nearly full blockage of all aid. The attacks on UNRWA are part of this strategy: here we are seeing an attempt to eviscerate the political category of the Palestinian refugee through a collapsing of the agency that materially sustains refugee life. UNRWA’s collapse would of course not change international law but it would eliminate the institutional infrastructure that sustains refugee life. UNRWA indeed has to be at the center of any discussion about what’s happening right now—in no small part because of the integral role that UNRWA plays in enshrining and protecting the Palestinian right of return. There’s a clear intent to undermine UNRWA, potentially to the point of collapse, while repurposing those aid flows to other UN agencies without the specificity of UNRWA’s mandate regarding the Palestinian people.