AMP reps attend high-level UN conference

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency invited two representatives from the American Muslims for Palestine to attend a high-level conference in New York that commemorated the agency’s 65th anniversary.

Dr. Osama Abuirshaid, AMP national policy director, and Kristin Szremski, national director of media and communications, attended the daylong conference, which was held on June 2 at the Trusteeship Council Chambers in the UN headquarters. The event was attended by representatives of dozens of member countries, NGOs and invited guests.

The conference highlighted UNRWA’s vast array of programs that cater to the needs of more than 5 million registered Palestinian refugees in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. From education, health facilities, economic microfinance programs to psychosocial treatment for children in Gaza, UNRWA’s programs have been described as a lifeline to a struggling Palestinian refugee population.

“We should not have had to mark the 65th anniversary of UNRWA. UNRWA wasn’t supposed to be here so long. It is a failure,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

UNRWA was created in December 1949 to deal with the Palestinian refugee crisis that happened after the 1947 partition of Palestine and subsequent creation of Israel displaced two-thirds of the indigenous population. Several international laws, including UN Resolution 194 and the Fourth Geneva Conventions guarantee refugees the individual right to return to their homeland, something Israel has prohibited since its inception.

“We are all witness to the failure to find a lasting and just solution to the plight of the Palestinians,” said UNRWA Commission-General Pierre Kraehenbuehl. “One cannot wish this issue away; it must be dealt with in a political way.”

Indeed. Listening to the members’ statements, each country, except Israel, supported Palestine and called for a political solution. France, Belgium, Japan, Senegal and the European Union, among many others, all praised UNRWA for its work and called for justice for Palestinians, based upon international law and human rights.

“What was abundantly apparent to everyone in attendance is that every country, one after the other, supports justice for Palestinians,” Abuirshaid said. “Only Israel stood alone and it’s 

After lunch, several Palestinian refugees from Palestine, Yarmouk Camp in Syria, and Lebanon testified about their experiences growing up in camps and what life is like for Palestinians there now. A Bedouin from the Naqab talked about the ongoing displacement of Bedouins in the Naqab as well as in Area C, an area comprising about 60 percent of the West Bank entirely under Israeli control.

Twenty-two-year-old student Faris Shehabi, a Palestinian from Yarmouk Camp, gave a harrowing account of living in what Ki-Moon described as the “deepest circle of Hell,” is like for those trapped in a camp under siege.

“I can’t forget the day when our camp was bombed,” Shehabi said in Arabic. “The woman I tried to save; I couldn’t distinguish her face from her black clothes. And I can’t forget her child screaming for her mother. I can’t forget the despair.”

In 2013, Shehabi’s father gave him his life savings to go to Egypt and take a “death boat” to Europe, which was packed with at least 800 refugees, he said.

While member countries were supportive of the Palestinian witnesses, Israeli Ambassador David Roet called Shehabi’s statement “hateful.”
“Stop blaming others for your own problems,” he said to Shehabi in Arabic. “Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people.” He also questioned how the Palestinian refugee population could have grown so large and suggested they should be located in another country, such as Jordan.

When moderator Sara Roy, of Harvard, asked Shehabi if he “or any other Palestinians see a place where you are safe,” Shehabi answered, “There is no place anywhere in the world that is better for Palestinians than Palestine.”

And it’s that resilience of spirit that was spoken of repeatedly during the day. Kraehenbuehl quoted from a poem by 11-year-old Ru’a, found in the rubble underneath an UNRWA school bombed by Israel last summer: Hope will never die. Hope may go away but it will never betray you.”