Akbar Shahid Ahmed
You’re right to locate the genesis of the GHF in that broader environment around Trump. That is where, over the course of decades, a hardline pro-Israeli narrative has tried to undercut the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which has been the backbone of humanitarian aid for Palestinians during this war. It has been essential for them across the diaspora and in Gaza for years.
But there has been such a wellspring of hatred and often deceptive descriptions of UNRWA and the UN more broadly. You see the claim that the UN as a whole is poisoned against Israel, and humanitarian organizations working with the UN are then implicated. That narrative in the right-wing ecosystem here in the United States is now at an all-time high. It was already there prior to October 7.
As US officials failed to effectively counter it by saying, “look, we’ve probed UNRWA, independent investigations have looked at UNRWA, we’ve worked with them — this is not a branch of Hamas,” that failure led to the undermining of the professional humanitarian aid system, which knows how to get aid to people effectively and without aid seekers being killed en masse.
The system was clearly on the chopping block by the time the Trump administration took office. There was a slashing of global humanitarian funding right at the start of Trump’s term. But when it came to Israel-Palestine, there was a sense that here was the opportunity to finally root out this apparatus that they hated.
It was too tempting for people in the Trump ecosystem, by which I mean many Christian Zionists and some hardline pro-Israel voices in congress. They found it so appealing to say, “we can just replace this root and branch and build something different.” It’s clear that “different” has not translated to “better.”
The Gaza Humanitarian…
Auteur: Akbar Shahid Ahmed
