UNRWA is not merely an institution that provides education, healthcare, or humanitarian assistance, despite the vital importance of this role for millions of refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. In its deeper dimension, it is a legal and political institution that preserves the collective memory of one of the largest ethnic cleansing operations in modern history, one that took place between 1946 and 1948, resulting in the uprooting of a people from their land and turning their displacement into the longest ongoing refugee case in the contemporary world.

 

From the moment of its establishment, the settler-colonial project in Palestine was built on the instrumentalization of biblical myths that were transformed into political tools to justify control over the land, the displacement of its indigenous population, and the establishment of a settler-colonial entity in 1948 on racist legal and institutional foundations. The state that was declared on the occupied lands at that time was built on a system of systematic racial discrimination, granting rights and privileges on ethnic and religious grounds while denying Palestinians, both within historic Palestine and in exile, their rights to land, citizenship, and return.

 

In this context, the very existence of UNRWA constitutes a direct challenge to the colonial narrative that has sought, and continues to seek, to erase the Nakba and reduce it to a fleeting event in history. UNRWA keeps the legal status of the Palestinian refugee alive, links humanitarian suffering to its political and legal roots, and thwarts attempts to reduce the Palestinian cause to a mere “humanitarian crisis” detached from its deep structural and historical causes.

 

The renewal of the mandate comes at the most dangerous phase in the Agency’s history. Over the past two years, UNRWA has faced unprecedented political, financial, and operational challenges. It has been subjected to systematic smear campaigns and direct political pressure aimed at stripping it of legitimacy, cutting its funding, and undermining its mandate, while its facilities and staff especially in the Gaza Strip, have been targeted amid a full-fledged genocide, organized starvation, and the comprehensive destruction of the civilian infrastructure.

 

In the West Bank, the same project continues through intensified settlement policies, land confiscation, and the imposition of coercive facts on the ground that push Palestinians toward silent displacement, using the classic tools of settler colonialism: repression, economic strangulation, and the fragmentation of spatial and social space.