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IINZ
While ‘Gaz-a-Lago’ broke every media platform, and many brains, it also eclipsed several earlier poli-quake announcements. President Trump’s preceding announcements were no less central to the ongoing seven-front existential war that Israel has been forced into fighting, beginning with Hamas’ 7 October 2023 invasion.
The first term Trump administration campaign of maximum pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran was reinstated, and equally pivotally President Trump also announced that the US would be withdrawing from the Orwellian United Nations Human Rights Council, putting a stop to UNESCO funding, and suspending all future donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
The announcements, addressing the US position vis a vis the United Nations, and its various organs and agencies, are an acknowledgement of the eighth front of the war and the rampant politicization of various multilateral international institutions, most notably the UN. It is also notable that it is on this eighth front that New Zealand is most prominently engaged, both domestically and internationally. Although, as Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) astutely observed in an X post that appeared to send NZ government officials into something of a diplomatic panic, NZ is not an especially supportive ally of the United States, and nowhere more glaringly so than in its attitude towards America’s Middle Eastern liberal democratic and geostrategic ally, Israel.
UNRWA, a longstanding jihad manufacturing machine in Gaza, has long enjoyed the considerable support of the international community, entirely misguidedly. At long last not even the collective force of the United Nations various PR outlets, including Secretary General Guterres himself, were able to ‘Gazawash’ their way out of Emily Damari self reporting being held hostage, for more than 400 days, by Hamas in a UNRWA facility.
It was news of Emily Damari’s phone call with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer informing him of this fact that captured the attention of a wide audience. With this revelation some former donor states, whether their funding had been paused or conditioned post October 7 2023, were finally shocked into action. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Antonio Tanjani, unequivocally condemned the use of UNRWA’s installations as ‘a prison for Israeli hostages’ announcing Italy’s refusal to continue working with UNRWA going forward. Fourteen different European UNRWA donor states, represented by thirty MEP signatories, sent a letter to United Nations Secretary General Guterres calling for ‘the dismantling of UNRWA’.
How has New Zealand responded to the latest revelation regarding an actual breach of International Humanitarian Law and Laws of war that would be termed, to use benign UNRWA-speak, a ‘neutrality violation contrary to UNRWA policy by an inappropriate political gathering in a UNRWA installation’? First let’s turn back the clock. In January of 2024 New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, was reported to have said that New Zealand would hold off making payment to UNRWA, pending further investigations into the agency. However, by the end of the first week in June of that year both he, and Foreign Minister Winston Peters were satisfied, by United Nations ‘assurances’, that the agency was a ‘good investment’, and NZ’s annual one million NZD contribution would be paid as scheduled.
Furthermore PM Luxon added that New Zealand had never suspended payments to UNRWA. However, on January 28th of this year, Foreign Minister Peters told The Platform’s Sean Plunket that New Zealand had in fact ‘temporarily stopped’ funding to UNRWA. Prime Minister Luxon, acknowledging that he had no knowledge of either Emily Damari or the circumstances of her imprisonment by Hamas, also referred to ‘suspending’ UNRWA funding in answer to questions put to him by Mike Hosking, Newstalk ZB host, on February 4th. And now, at last we arrive in the present.
On Friday Foreign Minister Peters told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking that he ‘stopped the funding to UNRWA at the time of the United Nations inquiry as to what was going on’ ,which is surprising, primarily due to the fact that FM Peters’ statement was in no way a reflection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s position on the matter. On the contrary, according to MFAT, New Zealand has unequivocally not paused or suspended funding to UNRWA at any time, this is evidenced by the Ministry’s replies to requests made under the Official Information Act. Some of these requests demonstrate a remarkable flair for rabidly unhinged phrasing which can be a little distracting – and this has been MFAT’s predominantly consistent position throughout not only the October 7 war but through preceding years and UNRWA scandals. After all this is hardly UNRWA’s first time in the reputational harm spotlight, it is however long past time for it to be the last, in an existential sense, as articulated by a growing number of donor states.
Rather incredibly the same issues have been repeatedly highlighted by diverse individuals and organizations as matters of grave concern, critique, and policy reform for decades, indicating that the agency’s systemic failure is beyond ‘assurances’ of reform, or rehabilitation.
The current confusion arising from the conflicting statements made by PM Luxon, FM Peters, and MFAT themselves regarding the status of UNRWA funding is not entirely unprecedented, although in that case the confusion appeared to be confined to Ministry officials. In 2019 UNRWA Commissioner General Pierre Krähenbühl faced serious allegations including corruption, nepotism, and sexual misconduct, and the agency itself was also being scrutinized for promoting violent extremism, using antisemitic teaching materials, and the use of UNRWA schools as arms cache storage facilities by Hamas.
Then, as now, some donor states froze funding pending further investigations. MFAT appeared to have suspended funding pending the results of investigations and UNRWA’s response to recommendations, only to reverse their position days later. What is most instructive about this period, beyond the fact that Pierre Krähenbühl is now serving as Director General of the International Committee of the Red Cross, is that MFAT did not appear to have undertaken any independent investigations in order to verify any of UNRWA’s ‘assurances’ regarding various reforms, including removing antisemitic material from texts used in its schools, and -one would like to think- ensuring that its facilities were not used as Hamas’ munitions dumps. And so here we are again, albeit on a previously unimagined scale.
In the wake of October 7 2023, and the multiplicity of ways in which donor states have enabled Hamas via UNRWA funding, MFAT chose to unconditionally rely upon the results of two separate investigations into UNRWA as ‘assurances’ of their ‘good investment’, again without any apparent independent investigation or verification.
One investigation, that of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), which has not been made public, resulted in the termination of a small number (nine) of employees from the agency, which is an incredibly unusual course of action from a UN agency. The reason for their dismissals is evidence provided by Israel that they participated in the 7 October massacre and the UN finding they ‘may have’.
The other source of ‘assurance’ MFAT relied on was the investigation undertaken by UNSG Guterres’ appointed former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna led team. The mandate, team, and resulting review (the Independent Review of Mechanisms and Procedures to Ensure Adherence by UNRWA to the Humanitarian Principle of Neutrality, referred to as the ‘Colonna Review’), suffer from bias and narrow TORs, which nevertheless found gross ‘neutrality violations’ on every level, including of UNRWA installations. This is an even more startling result when you consider that the Colonna Review was only ever intended for donor states to use as a fig leaf to smother any qualms voiced by their constituents vis a vis continued funding being made to available to jihadis who make al Jolani, the newly self appointed (al Quaeda variant, neo Ottoman Sultanate backed) leader of Syria, look positively moderate.
The actions recommended by the Colonna Review? Quite obviously the removal of all antisemitic material from UNRWA school texts, no employment of Hamas members, and agency wide training on the meaning, and implementation, of one of the agency’s fundamental principles, neutrality.
After more than 70 years of operations the Colonna Review found that there was almost no understanding of the principle of neutrality within UNRWA. As ever the fix for this problem of implementation of policy is training and reform, and all of this is supposed to reassure donor states that UNRWA’s motto, ‘Peace starts here’, will be reflected going forward, enhanced even? Well, it seems that this gave MFAT no pause, and the Ministry felt reassured enough to recommend that funding to UNRWA be paid according to schedule.
And so, as Prime Minister Luxon decided to pass the radioactive UNRWA potato to the Foreign Minister, FM Peters quite rightly replied, in answer to Hosking’s question regarding future funding of UNRWA, ‘You’d be irresponsible in the extreme not to be seeing information, hearing information, and asking yourself what is going on here and how can I face the New Zealand people if I don’t make the right stand for what’s right?’.
The next one million NZD is due in June, Peters said. How will he face us if his decision is to continue supporting UNRWA?
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
