AMERICAN FUNDING CUTS RUN DEEP IN THE IMPOVRISHED WEST BANK

In the West Bank, American funding cuts run deep

In Balata, 30,000 people live in an area only twice the size of Dublin’s Temple Bar

Life in Balata is a disaster, says Sadya Khateeb. Balata – a refugee camp in the West Bank – was set up after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was to be a transient home for 5,000 Palestinians exiled from the coastal village of Jaffa near Tel Aviv.

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Born and raised in the urban camp, 43-year-old Khateeb sees the camp on the edge of Nablus as nothing more than a temporary resting place. She is waiting to take her seven children “home” to the Mediterranean Sea, a sight most residents of Balata have never seen. The teacher, however, sees little prospect of a political solution that would allow her to return.

Balata sits at the edge of the city of Nablus in the West Bank, the land-locked area bordered by Israel and Jordan.

The Israeli-occupied West Bank is Palestinian land which is largely under Israeli military control. Under the occupation, Palestinians’ freedom of movement is restricted through a system of checkpoints and roadblocks. While Palestinians have a degree of autonomy in parts of the West Bank, 60 per cent of the land is under complete Israeli civil and security control.

As Balata creeps toward its 70th birthday, its population has ballooned to encompass three generations of refugee families. Yet its physical boundaries cannot expand beyond the land allotted to it 69 years ago, leaving it as by far the most densely populated among the 19 West Bank camps. Its near 30,000 inhabitants are confined to an area barely twice the size of Dublin's Temple Bar.

Tightly squeezed apartment blocks stand shoulder to shoulder in the cramped confines, separated by narrow streets that are measured in inches rather than feet.

Overcrowding, however, is the least of the residents’ worries, says Khateeb. High unemployment rates, low incomes, poor infrastructure, and overburdened health clinics top the long list of problems camp dwellers face. These chronic problems were intensified by a decision made half- way across the globe last year that sent shockwaves through refugee camps across the Middle East.

The decision by US president Donald Trump to withhold $300 million of $360 million in funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) last year threatened the agency’s ability to deliver its core mandate to support Palestine refugees.

The so-called “Trump cuts” (the US had been the agency’s largest donor) were “completely unprecedented”, according to Gwyn Lewis, UNRWA’s director of operations in the West Bank. They left the agency with a $446 million hole to fill last year. The US cut all contributions in 2019.

The agency plays a crucial role in daily refugee life. The Palestinian Authority does not consider itself a first provider, leaving UNRWA with a quasi-governmental role. The agency today finds itself a different entity from the one it was set up to be, as its capacity is outpaced by the growth in refugee population – which has risen from 750,000 in the late 1940s to almost 5.5 million Palestinians in 2014.

It is expected to provide employment to refugees as well as services such as health, education and waste collection across 58 camps in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and blockaded Gaza, where one million people depend on the agency for their basic food needs.

If UNRWA were to shut overnight, Lewis says 94 schools would close in the West Bank alone. Some 830,000 people would lose primary healthcare, and garbage would pile up in the streets, quickly followed by “protests and civil unrest”.

While Lewis, a Dublin-native, has constantly battled funding shortages in her time with the agency both in the West Bank and Lebanon, she says that the US cuts were a “different level of financial challenge and crisis”.

For example, the agency’s cash for work programme, which offers vital short-term employment for unemployed refugees, virtually stopped overnight as it was wholly dependent on US funding, leaving thousands of households without an important source of income.

The cuts to the jobs programme affected up to 500 families in Balata, says Ibraheem Khaleel Saqer, a senior member of the Popular Service Committee of Balata camp. “Those who worked for UNRWA used to spend their money on their families; now they have no money but they still have a family,” says Saqer.

One such example, Khateeb says, is her aunt, a teacher who lost her position in a UNRWA school due to the cutbacks. With two daughters in university, the change “was very big for them”. Khateeb, herself employed in a public school close to Nablus, says the situation is just as hard for those outside the UNRWA system. While the level of education among Palestinians is quite high, job opportunities and wages are low, she says.

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