UNRWArranted

The rapid move by the Albanese government to cut UNRWA funding is now based on a “flimsy” Israeli intelligence dossier.

Foreign Minster Penny Wong has set her legacy around the handling of the conflict in Gaza. (Source: YouTube)

When Penny Wong reactively announced that her government would be joining a small Anglospheric group of nations cutting United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) funding to Palestine, breaking with a decades long held bipartisan position to provide aid to displaced Palestinians. In the worsening crisis that has ensued since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) gave Israel notice to provide evidence it was slowing down its ‘plausible’ genocide, the UNRWA cuts were announced the next day, and have been felt on the ground in occupied Palestine. The countries involved in denying it are now complicit in aspects of the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza.

UNRWA was founded in 1949 by the United Nations General Assembly to provide basic support to the refugees that were created in the action known to Palestinians as the Nakba in 1948. Ever since, has been a vital lifeline to Palestinians displaced within their own occupied homelands. UNRWA had its work cut out for it in Gaza before the events of October 7, but since the Israeli response, the UN organisation has been one of the only guardrails preventing the total collapse of Palestinian society in Gaza.

At least 27,840 people have been killed and 67,317 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7, many of them women and children. Currently, 300,000 civilians are at risk of famine in north Gaza, according to Unicef, 17,000 children are orphaned, and 1.7 million people in Gaza are displaced. The withdrawal of UNRWA funding by the Albanese government, along with a small contingent of countries led by the United States, has condemned marginalised Palestinians living displaced in Gaza to further suffering. 

Wong’s admission that she “didn’t have all the facts” highlights the subservience of the Albanese government and its willingness to make such consequential and devastating decisions without proper scrutiny, seemingly at the command of foreign nations. Palestinians in Gaza are starving, and Penny Wong’s career-defining decision has sped up the starvation of the most displaced and disproportionately damaged group of people on the planet.

As the federal government hinted at backflipping on the rash and devastating decision to cut UNRWA aid as soon as is politically prudent (never), Senator Wong was faced was by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi who said that Labor “couldn’t sink any lower on Palestine”, only for Wong to accuse the Greens of “weaponising the conflict”. Earlier in the Senate, when faced with questions about why her government continues to send weapons and components to Israel by Greens Senator David Shoebridge, Wong oddly accused his party of making it a “political issue”, almost mocking the fact that the Federal Senate was an adequate place to make such an enquiry.

After abstaining on ceasefire resolutions at the UN, joining military operations against Yemen, refusing to halt supply of weapons to Israel, and refusing to condemn the Netanyahu government, Anthony Albanese spoke of “like-minded countries” examining claims against UNRWA, the same “like-minded” countries that totally support “Israel’s right to defend itself”, telling Australians that his government decision to suspend UNRWA funding to Palestinians, later found to be based on flimsy evidence, was the right thing to do. In the parliament, the major parties and a bunch of crossbenchers voted to continue their support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

If the Morrison Government set an era of post-Coalition mindset, the Albanese Labor government made sure that we all knew that it was going to stick to the script. While opposition leader Peter Dutton talks about doing more to support Israels genocide, the bipartisan consensus, approved by Zionist lobby groups, continues the way it needs to under Albanese.

Our Foreign Minister may think that those who oppose a genocide are “all about dividing the Australian community and weaponising this horrific conflict”, she may truly believe that her government is taking the most prudent course of action. But as the ground operation intensifies, and the government again urges Israel to “listen to its friends”, it does so knowing that it is supporting Israel as much as it can, and the UNRWA cuts are a gesture of what this government is prepared to do despite what it know and what the nation sees.

As the political class in Canberra talks about being ‘friends with Israel’, whilst ‘urging’ them to listen, many who elected them ask how can we be friends with a country that acts like this in Gaza? How can we urge a country who won’t listen in the first place? What kind of friend does things like this, and what kind of friend lets them? The government may not have considered this enough while it tries to clear the lane for the approach to a second term of government.

Labor wants to talk up its small wins this year, but it has cut vital aid to children eating animal feed and sleeping in animal enclosures to hide from bombs. Among the horrific loss of Palestinian life to the military ordinance of the IDF, the Albanese government starves Palestinians by suspending UNRWA on behalf of Israel, it is actively involved in bombing Yemen to assist Israel, and kills by proxy with weapons and components it provides Israel, all but condemning the Palestinians in Gaza to oblivion. During the live-streamed genocide in Gaza that this government can not condemn, its involvement in its continuation is now substantial, Labor sets a new paradigm on Israel-Palestine entering the fray itself, breaking with decades of bipartisan position, and will be on the minds of Australians on the road to an election.