The Chevalier de la Barre, 2/22/2024: Appease the genociders and pass them more ammunition: Say it ain’t so, Joe

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

“I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza; what I saw wasn’t war, it was annihilation.”

— Dr. Irfan Galaria, writing in the Los Angeles Times

Late last week, as the world was learning of the discovery of the body of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in a car entoured by the bodies of five relatives, several meters from the lifeless bodies of the two Red Crescent paramedics dispatched, with Israeli approval, to rescue her, all apparently killed by Israeli shelling and bombing, and less than two weeks after the world heard the girl’s 15-year-old cousin pleading with a Red Crescent dispatcher to send help as an Israeli tank bore down on the car until the girl screamed amidst the rat-a-tat-tat of Israeli gunfire followed by a harrowing silence as well as the dispatcher’s subsequent conversation with 5-year-old Hind as she pleaded for three hours for help to come, an overwhelming majority of 77 United States Senators including all but two Democrats and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders voted to send Israel $14 million more worth of arms, effectively enabling a rogue state which has already killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians including at least 12,000 children — 5,000 since the International Court of Justice ordered it to stop on January 26 and not counting 6,000 buried under the rubble of buildings leveled by Israel — to keep on killing with effective impunity. (Indeed, the mainstream media, at least here in France, has devoted more air time over the past week to playing Where’s Navalny’s body? than it has over the past 130 days interrogating the fate of those 6,000 civilians. And the one public radio report on Israel’s assassination of Hind and her relatives practically made it sound like they were just caught amidst the tank fire, victims of a perpetrator-less tragedy rather than having been targeted as all the evidence suggests.) And Tuesday, just days after the Israeli army besieged, bombed the fourth floor of, forcibly evacuated, kidnapped many of the medical staff of, and cut electricity at the largest hospital in Southern Gaza thus causing between two and eight Intensive Care Unit patients to suffocate to death when their oxygen supply was cut off, and with one of six Palestinian children starving to death and 2.2 million people facing imminent famine according to the World Health Organization, Joe Biden once again vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have ordered an immediate cease-fire, stopped the carnage, and let substantive humanitarian aid in.

Now, before we go on, I want to ask you to just stop, close your eyes, make them the eyes of a 5-year-old child trapped in a car with the dead bodies of five relatives including her 15-year-old cousin, and imagine what it is like staring at the monstrous machine eyes of their assailant, a tank intent on killing you. I don’t know about you, but when I was five years old, my mother was walking me to Alvarado Elementary School in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, the face of authority was not a tank firing bullets at me and my family, it was Miss Stettner, in her high boots and with her long black hair and Karen Valentine dimples, drawing pictures and forming letters on a blackboard and opening my mind up as her smile held me mesmerized, and I still had 57 years of education and teacher crushes ahead of me. And unlike the Palestinian boy who turned up at a Gaza hospital recently with enough of his leg blown away that you could see the bones after Israel bombed the school with UNITED NATIONS written on it where his family had taken refuge thinking they’d be safe, killing the rest of his family as the boy recounted to the American plastic surgeon who tried to treat him (sterile instruments and instruments period are at a minimum at Gaza’s few remaining functional hospitals, with Israel blocking all but a trickle of deliveries of medical and food supplies; the doctor, interviewed on Democracy Now, said he witnessed hundreds of trucks lined up on the Egyptian side of the Rafa border waiting to get in), when I was 14, I was insulting my own nose as Cyrano and wooing Naomi Woolf’s Roxanne in a drama class at Hoover Junior High School. When I was little more than 15, the age of Hind’s sister before Israel nipped her life out as it was budding, I was not screaming as faceless Jewish soldiers were firing real bullets at me determined to kill me until I could scream no more, I was offstage with the rest of the cast of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” crying over our imagined deaths at the hands of an imaginary Gestapo as the final scene — Otto Frank returning to the Secret Annex after the war to discover his daughter’s journal so that he could share its lessons with the world — played out, little imagining that 46 years later the roles would be reversed, with Jewish soldiers hunting down and killing in their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their mosques and their churches another Semitic people, thus crapping on Anne Frank’s most important legacy: Never again and putting to the test her most enduring precept: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart.”

Even for those of us who have observed Israel’s arrogant comportment with the Palestinians subject to its rule and ongoing defiance of international law over the years, particularly in Gaza (where this is not the first time it has killed civilians) and to a lesser extent in the West Bank which like Gaza it has illegally occupied for 57 years, Israel’s vicious, merciless, genocidal acts — by the evidence, those doing the killing and those directing them do not see Palestinians, even children, as human beings — over the past four months, as it over-avenges Hamas’s equally (in degree and dehumanizing optic if not in scale) vicious and inhuman massacre of 1200 people and kidnapping of more than 200 surpasses what History has shown us Man is capable of doing to his fellow man, at least since 1945, as Israel continues to bank on and abuse the latitude accorded it in the United States and Europe and among many Jews because of the last Holocaust to perpetrate another genocide.

Because I have been watching this, watching Israel’s human rights abuses, watching the growth of an Apartheid state which treats people as lesser citizens and human beings because of their race, watching its bombing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon for 18 years, I have long been liberated from the blinders which have made so many Jews refuse to see — to believe — what Israel has become because it is a Jewish state or because they feel we need a Jewish State to protect us from the next Holocaust, refuse to believe the next genocide could be generated by an allegedly Jewish state. In this respect I am not disillusioned that a “Jewish” state could do this because I stopped believing in the intrinsic morality of such a state just because it lays claim to that appellation a long time ago.

I am, however, disillusioned by Joe Biden, who has singularly (well, not so singularly as all that; he had a little help from his secretary of state and those Democratic and Republican senators who voted to keep the bombs coming) destroyed any residue of the belief I once had in the ability and inkling of my country, globally, to be a force for good, a moral beacon. (There are too many good Americans, including Palestinian and Jewish Americans — as there are Israelis, including journalists, members of parliament, and conscientiously objecting soldiers, and of course Palestinians — trying to counter their president’s effective enabling of genocide for me not to believe in our individual power to still do good.)

For despite Anita Hill, despite his approval as a senator of George Bush’s illegal and bloody invasion of Iraq, until he continued sending arms to Israel in the face of this imminent and now in process genocide and blocking any efforts to stop this carnage, I had still believed that Joe Biden was essentially a decent man, a confirmed and sincere anti-racist who cared as much about Black and Brown (including Arab) lives as he does about white (Ukrainian) lives. And despite Iraq, despite Vietnam, despite Cambodia, despite Chili, despite Iran (where we instigated the overthrow of a democratically elected government in the 1950s), despite Kissinger and all the war crimes in which he implicated us, I still believed that my country could be a moral beacon for the world.

But my country’s conduct here, its continued and persistent effective fueling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in the face of Israel’s deliberate enfeebling of hospitals (another tool of genocide) and killing of medical workers and journalists, our continued blocking of efforts by the rest of the world to stop the killing and start substantially funneling in the humanitarian aid, our increasingly brazen cynicism — State Department spokesman Matt Miller telling reporters that the U.S. had confidence in an Israeli investigation of 5-year-old Hind’s killing; if I had a shekel for every time Israel announced it was investigating itself for killing civilians, including Palestinian-American journalists killed by Israeli snipers despite being clearly identified as Press and American defenders of Palestinian homes being leveled by Israeli tractors, and never followed through, I’d be able to found my own Jewish state — for me my country’s ongoing support of this rogue state despite its genocidal rampage is worse than a tragedy. It’s a moral abdication.

And it’s appeasement. It’s appeasement of a genocidal state which, unlike even Germany, which by setting up the model concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where Jews were allowed to create an orchestra and which the Red Cross was invited to tour (Israel, by contrast, is killing Red Crescent workers, 14 to date according to a spokesman for the organization, as well 100 UNRWA employees according to UNRWA), at least indicated it knew that what it was doing would be looked at as wrong by other nations and tried to gloss it over by presenting a counter-image, however false, Israel — which as opposed to conjuring Theresienstadt has resurrected the Warsaw Ghetto, as Masha Gessen has pointed out — doesn’t seem to care what the rest of the world thinks of its atrocities, a law upon itself, here enabled by the sheriff.

As to why that sheriff is allowing Israel to get away with it, if Joe Biden and those 77 senators thinks it’s because if they cut off Israel’s arms supplies and stopped blocking UN efforts to impose a cease-fire and let substantial humanitarian aid in they’d lose the Jewish vote, they haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on on American college campuses, and they must think very little of our own moral values, to believe that we would countenance a genocide because this time around the genociders happen to be wearing Mogen Davids on their tanks.

The Chevalier de la Barre, 2/13/2024: Non, Monsieur Finkielkraut, c’est votre argument qui est ‘absurd’ / No, Mr. Finkielkraut, it’s your argument supporting that Israel is not committing genocide which is “absurd”

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

Imagine that Fox News host Sean Hannity was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the presumably smartest people in the land decreeing that he was fit to be one of them, a person with a certain level of intelligence who could be counted on to exercise it responsibly and whose opinions were supported by a modicum of reason, learning, considered contemplation and reflection, and studied meditation.

Imagine that instead of being confined to the Trumpian universe of Fox “News,” Mr. Hannity was accorded a primetime, Saturday morning perch on National Public Radio on which to parade his particular reading of the facts.

Imagine that instead of being regarded as (or relegated to being) a Fox News host, he was typically described by everyone else in the mainstream media as an accredited Philosopher (by virtue of having a degree in the subject), the implication being that his arguments, whether one agreed with them or not and no matter how ludicrous, were at least supported by a minimum of scholarly (and rigorous) reason; of scientific method.

Add the local nuance of a child of genocide survivors who apparently doesn’t know how to recognize a genocide when he sees one, and you have Alain Finkielkraut, a member of the venerated Academy Francaise (where his predecessors include Anatole France, Paul Valery, and Jean Cocteau) who, on his France Culture public radio program “Repliques” Saturday, implicitly labeled findings by the International Court of Justice of the United Nations — the tribune charged with enforcing the 1948 Convention against Genocide (to which France, the U.S., and Israel are signatories) and the only court with the authority to do so — issued January 26 that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza “absurd” because Israel hands out flyers warning Gazans to get out of town (my wording) and posts warnings on the Internet (regularly put out of commission by Israel) before it bombs their homes to smithereens (my wording again), continuing to bomb or shell them along the routes and in the places it has designated as safe (ditto).

(Important: I am not comparing either Mr. Hannity’s personality nor his views on other subjects with Mr. Finkielkraut’s. Rather, and in considering the latter’s extreme view and ludicrous argument to support it on this particular subject, I am comparing the relative places extreme views unsupported by any logic or fairness are given in the mainstream American media landscape and the French one, at least in this case. If anything, I am disappointed that someone with the academic pedigree of Mr. Finkielkraut (and with whose perspective on other subjects, notably in a recent emission on Pierre Bonnard, I sometimes agree) — a respectable pedigree which cannot be matched by that of Mr. Hannity — has adopted such an extreme position based on such a spurious argument, on this issue. Mr. Finkielkraut’s previous equating of just about any and all criticism of Israel — including the non-violent Palestinian civil-society-lead movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel — with anti-Semitism is unfortunately not unique on either the France Culture or American mainstream media and political landscape.)

In other words, after implicitly granting himself the authority to supersede the only court mandated to decide whether acts Israel has committed in the process of killing more than 28,000 people over four months (since Hamas massacred 1200 people, the majority civilians, on October 7), the majority civilians including at least 11,500 children, constitute genocide, Mr. Finkielkraut not only dismisses the idea that one war crime, genocide, is taking place, he does so on the sole evidence of acts implemented (the flyers distributed by the Israeli army ordering evacuation) in the process of committing another war crime, forced displacement of a civilian population.

Why does this matter? Why do I care? Why don’t I just turn the radio off?

An internationally recognized tribune of judges from around the world, with principles, acting on judiciously prepared evidence presented by a country, South Africa, whose own principles derive in part from its frank confrontation with its own history of racial crimes, and after giving Israel an opportunity to defend itself, has declared that genocide is “plausibly” taking place now, and ordered the incriminated party to stop, now, an order other signatories to the Convention against Genocide with the power to do so are obligated to enforce (by, for example, cutting off arms shipments to Israel). We have the chance to do now what we claim we were not able to do before, in Europe as in Rwanda, and stop the genocide before it takes any more lives and plants any more seeds of future death, sickness, suffering, and irredeemable hate.

For this to happen, for the blood-letting and orphaning and amputating of children without anesthetic and hate-sowing and destruction and starvation to stop, for the famine to be headed off before it’s too late, citizens need to obligate their governments to act. (Hamas also needs to release the more than 100 remaining hostages, and to be brought to account for its mass murders of nearly 1200 people on October 7.) For that to happen, citizens need to be well-informed. This is largely not happening (or if you prefer, rarely happening, although lately more eye-witness testimony from Gaza seems to be filtering through) on France Culture, a public radio chain, where the court’s decision — where its declaration that genocide is plausibly taking place — continues to be downplayed, deformed, downgraded, distorted, and, now, denigrated.

Including, now, by public intellectuals. (Or to be precise — and not tarnish everyone with the same brush — at least one very prominent public intellectual, perhaps the most prominent public intellectual in France today.) The exact same class of people on whom France (and the world) has always been able to depend to lead it out of the moral abyss and away from political peril, with philosophers like Albert Camus risking their lives to sneak back into Occupied France with a false passport to edit an underground newspaper, Combat. With poets like Victor Hugo going into exile for 20 years so that they could continue to attack, in print, the “petit king,” Napoleon III, from abroad. With novelists and art critics like Emile Zola possibly being murdered because he defended Captain Dreyfus and excoriated the army brass which had railroaded this patriotic Jewish veteran into several years of imprisonment on Devil’s Island, falsely treating him as a traitor. And with the General, Charles de Gaulle, who was no slouch in the brain department, refusing France’s surrender in 1940 and leading its Resistance to genocidal fascism.

From this rich tradition (a legacy which also includes Voltaire, thanks to whom we know about this column’s namesake, the pre-Revolutionary 19-year-old whose tongue and arms were cut off before he was burned at the stake after refusing to take his cap off before and chanting impudent ditties at a passing parade of religious notables), we have devolved into a public intellectual who abuses his pulpit to cast doubt on legitimate, evidentiary supported charges of an ongoing genocide.

(I am not saying there are not other public intellectuals in France who are doing the inverse, rigorously examining the possibility of a genocide taking place in Gaza. There are, among them Didier Fassin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the College de France, who explored the question for the online journal AOC on October 31, concluding, “At a time when the majority of Western governments continue to talk about ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’ without imposing any but rhetorical limits [on Israel] and without imagining a similar right for Palestinians, there is in effect an historic responsibility to prevent what could become the first genocide of the 21st century.” And Professor Fassin’s College de France colleagues Henry Laurens, Francois Heran, and Antoine Lilti, if they have not directly addressed the current situation, have provided vital historical, moral, and philosophical context in their recent courses. But these public intellectuals are not getting the attention on France Culture that Mr. Finkielkraut’s efforts to decredibilize the court’s findings with specious arguments are.)

Where do I, an American expatriate, get off criticizing a member of the Academy Francaise and a French public radio chain?

As a journalist, I have a stake in responsible journalism.

As a Jew, it ashames me when a prominent Jew, a presumed intellectual, goes on the air and uses his power, the power of the air-waves and the power of the word, to mask a genocide with such a specious, almost throw-away argument, which can effectively be resumed as suggesting that because Israel handed out flyers (as a tool to implement one war crime — my words and characterization, not Mr. Finkielkraut’s) it is not guilty of another war crime.

And as someone who has believed since he was 16 and read Camus’s “The Plague” for the first time in the French ideal that writers can be a liberating force, it is a grand deception — in both the American and French senses of that word — to see a French public intellectual using his prominent and influential pulpit and exploiting his facility with language (the surveillance of whose proper and correct usage is the Academy Francaise’s most fundamental purview) in a way that results (even if unintentionally) in providing intellectual cover for war crimes.

(Updated, 2/2/2024) The chevalier de la Barre, 2/1/2024: As Israel continues war on Gaza, flaunting Court order, Biden administration suspends funding to lead agency trying to protect and feed War’s victims

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

(See here for our previous piece, “The genocide this time: How did the victims become the perpetrators? Why are we enabling it.”)

“The day after the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, some states decide to defund UNRWA, collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time, and most likely violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

— Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories

“This is a death sentence for Palestinians in Gaza.”

— Dr. Thaer Ahmad, emergency room physician from Chicago who recently spent three weeks in Gaza volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, speaking on Democracy Now.

“The whole case of UNRWA was used by Israel to distract attention from the ICJ [preliminary ruling] which indicted Israel for plausible genocide. Instead of punishing Israel they took up this case where Israel is claiming that some workers of UNRWA have been engaged in military actions without any proof, without investigation, and then… 12 European countries and the United States of America and Canada and Japan cut off support to the only organization that is providing humanitarian aid to Gaza, that is the only bridge to humanitarian aid in Gaza. We are subject to collective punishment, Palestinians who are the victims of the Israeli aggression, of the possibility of a genocide, are subject to collective punishment by these governments, none of whom have condemned the Israeli [recent] attack on the hospital.”

— Dr. Mustapha Barghouti, physician, activist, and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, interviewed Wednesday on Democracy Now

“People are dying of hunger. The massacres — because there’s no other word for it — must be stopped. The hospital [here] is full of women and children. There is no justification for bombardments which result in hospitals full of women and children, extremely intense bombardments which hit hospitals. People are dying because there’s no medicine here to treat them. Humanitarian aid arrives in droplets. It’s a total violation of international law, the Israeli army prohibits this aid from arriving, humanitarian aid is blocked…. UNRWA is the sole actor which manages to bring food to hundreds of thousands of people in the North [of Gaza] . If you cut aid, tens of thousands of people in the North will die of hunger. At a moment when the [International] Court [of Justice] has ordered the prevention of genocide, you have one of the biggest actors of humanitarian aid who will be blocked.”

— Doctors without Borders official in charge of Palestine operations, speaking Wednesday night on French public radio chain France Inter, from a hospital in Gaza

You might think that with Israel having killed more than 26,000 Gazans in less than four months, the majority civilians including an estimated 11,000 children, and put most of the rest of the population of 2.3 million (whose well-being under international law it has the obligation as the occupying power to ensure) on the verge of famine by blockading all but droplets of food, water, medical supplies, fuel, communications, and electricity; the leading international tribune, the U.N.’s International Court of Justice, invoking the Convention against Genocide to which Israel is a signatory, having ordered Israel Friday to prevent and punish genocidal acts and let Humanitarian aid in; and Israel’s responding to the Court’s provisional ruling Friday by continuing to wage war on Gaza and blocking substantive Humanitarian aid from entering the enclave (in the first 15 days of January, Radio France reported this morning, Israel prevented 95 percent of U.N. aid trucks from reaching North Gaza), the United States would fulfill its own obligations as a signatory to the convention by speaking the only language the extremist Israeli government understands and cutting off military aid (which history shows works, Israeli PM Menachem Begin having pulled out of Lebanon in 1982 20 minutes after Ronald Reagan told him he’d cut off the spigot if he didn’t).

Instead, whereas nearly four months of Israel’s bombing, sniping, and shelling of hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities, U.N. facilities, mosques, churches, homes, and Gazans fleeing to areas designated as “safe” by Israel, in the process killing journalists, medical workers, teachers, poets, elderly churchgoers, and U.N. workers and civilians sheltering in U.N. buildings (360 alone in 260 attacks on UNRWA facilities, UNRWA officials say) and sowing the seeds for more future suffering (10 Gazan children lose one or both legs every day, often amputated without anesthetics, and you can forget about post-natal care), plus Israel’s continuing its onslaught and blocking of substantive humanitarian aid after the Court’s provisional ruling have not been enough to incite the Biden administration to cut off the arms supply and stop blocking a U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution which would allow Humanitarian aid to enter, it took only 24 hours for the U.S. to suspend its funding of the leading agency trying to step up where the U.S. has failed and protect and feed Gaza’s assieged civilian population, after Israel accused, without furnishing any proof — conveniently and in an obvious diversionary tactic, a day after the ICJ found that South Africa had made a “plausible” case for claims of genocide and effectively ordered Israel to stop — 12 of the 13,000 employees of the UNRWA, the U.N. refugee agency which has been the lifeline to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1948 as well as the principal funder and operator of schools and other services, of taking part in Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1200 Israeli and other foreign nationals, the majority civilians.

Israel’s strategy is obvious: When you don’t have a defense on the merits, taint the witness, here the United Nations, whose documentation of Israel’s war on Gaza, together with statements by Israeli officials indicating genocidal intent (including the Israeli defense minister’s describing all Gaza residents as “animals” before the invasion began, a window into the soul of Israeli extremists — though not all Israelis, many of whom are resisting, denouncing, writing against, and refusing to serve in Israel’s war on Gaza, notably the courageous 18-year-old conscientious objector Tal Mitnick — if ever there was one), constituted the bulk of the evidence collected by South Africa in the case it brought before the International Court of Justice January 11 accusing Israel of violating articles of the Convention against Genocide and calling for the Court to take immediate measures to stop the genocide.

Israel tried to change the subject, and the Biden administration fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Or rather, cynically seconded it. (We all know this is about Joe Biden being afraid to criticize Israel, even in the face of obvious indications — now underlined by the Court’s provisional ruling — of an ongoing genocide, because of an outdated fear that he’ll lose Jewish votes. How little faith he has in our sense of righteousness! He’s already lost mine. How dare he assume that we would view this through a racial or if you prefer ethnic vector — that historical victims of genocide would not be on the side of contemporary victims of genocide?! Go Cornell West! A presidential candidate who’s not afraid to criticize Israel and has more faith in the collective Jewish conscience than Joe Biden.) Despite that the UNRWA immediately fired 9 of the 12 employees Israel accused of taking part in the October 7 massacre (between one and three of the others are reportedly dead), the U.S., followed by 12 other countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Finland, Japan, Italy, and Germany, suspended aid to the organization which even before the war provided the lifeline to 50 percent of the Gaza population and which has housed and fed up to a million during the current war on Gaza. The suspension threatens UNRWA operations across the Occupied Territories, notably its schools.

(Germany’s decision to suspend funding to UNRWA is particularly stupefying, given its unserendipitous timing. On Saturday, the same day he was announcing the suspension of aid to the lead agency trying to protect and feed civilians in the face of Israel’s onslaught, the German chancellor, commemorating the Shoah, was promising a German audience “Never Again.” If you want to prevent another genocide, suspending aid to the agency leading efforts to protect and feed a population threatened by an ongoing genocide now is not the way to do it. But then, this is also the country where school appearances in Hamburg by an 87-year-old American survivor of both the concentration camps and the Allied fire-bombing of Hamburg were recently cancelled after she criticized the genocide this time.)

We’re not talking about an abstract debate here but a decision which will have dire consequences for the 2.3 million civilians in Gaza efforts to protect and feed whom have been lead by UNRWA as well as on UNRWA schools and other infrastructure in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank for which Palestinians in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967 already depended on the agency.

“This is a death sentence for Palestinians in Gaza,” Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago emergency room physician who just returned from spending three weeks in Gaza volunteering at the Al-Nasser Hospital, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman on Monday. “All two million are dependent on what UNRWA does.” Even before the war, explained Dr. Ahmad, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and board member of MedGlobal, UNRWA was “a lifeline to the Palestinians in Gaza, [for] everything from shelter, schooling, water, health access points, [and] food distribution…. UNRWA did this tremendous job of delivering aid to [the] half of the population that was dependent on it. They were instrumental in being able to allow people to make sure that they didn’t have food insecurity issues, to make sure that the water that they were drinking was relatively clean, to make sure that kids could go to school and that there were shelters in place.

“During the war, it became one of the only places that people whose homes have been destroyed or whose cities and neighborhoods were told to evacuate, that they could go to an UNRWA shelter without being turned away. If you go to Gaza right now, like I was in Khan Younis — and I saw an UNRWA school that had been transformed into a shelter across the street from the hospital — what you saw is that it was packed with people, packed with families and children, people who were staying there who were depending on the staff of UNRWA to be able to provide their daily meals.

“And I just cannot believe that this sort of response came so quickly. It’s sort of sadistic, in a way, to punish the entire Palestinian population for what are serious allegations, but you’re going to punish two million people, and you’re doing it with the backdrop of bombs dropping over them. And you know that many people have fled and been displaced. And now to cut off this lifeline, I just find it unconscionable, and I cannot imagine that this is something that was taken so lightly. It’s such a superficial understanding of what UNRWA does, to be able to say, ‘We’re going to just cut funding,’ and not also recognize the implications that it has on all of the population in Gaza right now.”