Sweden’s decision to stop funding UNRWA threatens the education of an entire generation
After years of rhetorical, operational, and physical attacks, January 2025 sees Israel’s ban on the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) come into force. The legislation, passed by the Knesset in October 2024, dismantles the primary service provider for more than 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza and nearly one million in the West Bank. As a long-awaited ceasefire finally takes hold in Gaza after 15 months of genocidal war, Palestinians will be left to endure its aftermath without even the minimal provisions of the organisation described as the ‘backbone’ of aid efforts in the Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long sought the destruction of UNRWA. While the Israeli government has framed its recent opposition to UNRWA as a necessary response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, it is worth noting that Netanyahu first called for the agency’s dissolution back in 2017 – a full six years ago. Since then, several Western governments have emboldened the anti-UNRWA stance of Israel’s increasingly far-right leadership. The first Trump administration infamously defunded UNRWA in 2018. The current administration has endorsed the same approach. Yet there is a much more surprising source of support for Israel’s position closer to home: at the end of 2024, Sweden announced that it would no longer fund UNRWA. The decision marks an abrupt end to decades whereby Sweden – once UNRWA’s fourth biggest donor – gave the agency its wholehearted political and financial support.
In fact, Swedish Development Minister Benjamin Dousa has openly aligned his country’s defunding with Israel’s ban on UNRWA. He has justified the cuts on the grounds that UNRWA will no longer be able to operate and said that Swedish aid to Gaza will be channelled through other humanitarian agencies like World Food Program, Unicef, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. But many of those organisations rely on UNRWA’s extensive network and expertise to deliver life-saving aid and services across the Gaza Strip. In fact, 15 humanitarian agencies working there have asserted in an open letter that ‘there is no alternative to UNRWA’. In other words, the ban will not just affect UNRWA’s work, it will threaten the entire humanitarian effort.
Critics of the Swedish decision have rightly pointed out that disabling UNRWA will further devastate Gaza, where two million people already face an apocalyptic humanitarian situation. Since October 2023, life expectancy there has halved, virtually the entire population has been displaced (70 per cent were already refugees), and water, sanitation, and health care systems have been deliberately destroyed. While it is almost impossible to imagine this situation getting worse, commentators have underscored the removal of UNRWA will ensure exactly that. What has received less attention, however, are the education-related consequences of the decision.
Since beginning operations in May 1950, UNRWA has provided education to registered Palestinian refugees across five different sites: Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Education is the agency's most continuous service and its biggest programme in terms of budget and staffing. UNRWA is the single biggest education provider in Gaza, where it supports almost 300,000 children and youth in its schools and technical and vocational training centres. In total, more than half a million children attend UNRWA schools. No other international agency matches the scope of its services nor its technical or context-based expertise.
Nor is it just statistics that bear out the importance of the agency’s education programme. Across 76 years of dispossession, the Palestinian people have consistently chosen to prioritise education over other forms of humanitarian aid. After their original expulsion in 1948, Palestinian refugees worked to set up makeshift schools and classes for children in exile. During the Lebanese civil war, Palestinians demanded that UNRWA keep its schools open even at the expense of other services. The schools have often comprised one of the few sources of hope for a better future for millions of Palestinian refugees. And during times of war and escalating violence they have taken on another vital function: as displacement shelters for people fleeing Israeli bombardment.
Given the centrality of education to Palestinian survival, it’s not surprising that Netanyahu and his allies have regularly used UNRWA’s schooling programme to denigrate the agency and curtail Palestinian rights. Since the early 2000s, organisations allied to Netanyahu’s politics have claimed that the Palestinian Authority (PA) curriculum - and by extension UNRWA, which uses PA materials in its schools - promotes antisemitism. Alarmingly, Dousa has recently repeated disinformation promoted by far right actors and the Israeli state, claiming that UNRWA schools teach antisemitism.
This claim can be traced back to the work of a right-wing lobby group, IMPACT-Se that has long sought to undermine the Palestinian curriculum. In fact, IMPACT-Se (formerly known as the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace) has a long history of misrepresenting the PA curriculum and ignoring UNRWA’s independent multi-tiered curriculum and textbook review processes. Indicative of these problems, IMPACT-Se once reviewed teaching materials that are not taught in UNRWA schools in an attempt to discredit the agency. By contrast independent reviews have offered a far more nuanced and positive assessment of UNRWA’s efforts to promote gender equality, reduce bias, and ensure operational neutrality in its schools. Other experts have also sounded the alarm over Israel’s political manipulation of Palestinian education which, since October 2023, has gained traction via a full blown disinformation campaign against the agency’s education programme.
More surprising, however, is the Swedish government’s decision to align itself with Israel. Sweden was once a top-tier donor of UNRWA. The agency’s life-saving and life sustaining services aligned to Sweden’s stated aid objectives of supporting people living in poverty and oppression. UNRWA’s work also meets Sweden’s stated priorities in the Middle East and North Africa: addressing the root causes of irregular migration, combating gender discrimination, promoting economic development and job creation, and supporting children’s health. Indeed, UNRWA is a major actor on all of these fronts, having achieved gender parity in schooling access back in the 1960s, and consistently promoting public health by facilitating mass vaccination campaigns.
As it stands, Sweden’s decision to defund UNRWA compounds an already dire educational environment in Gaza and, increasingly, the West Bank. While Israel’s attacks on education are by no means new, the scale of the last 15 months is unprecedented, leading legal experts to denounce the systematic destruction of Gaza’s education system as scholasticide. An assessment in September 2024 found that Israeli attacks directly hit 378 school buildings in Gaza between October 2023 and September 2024, and damaged another 115 schools: almost 90 per cent of all schools. Israeli bombardments have also destroyed all universities in the Strip. The figures are unfortunately set to rise if the ceasefire holds and aid agencies are able to gather more comprehensive data.
By defunding UNRWA at this time, Sweden is undermining people’s prospects in the Middle East as a whole. Beyond Palestine, UNRWA also provides education to more than a million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria. The former has been wracked by what the World Bank calls the world’s worst financial crisis since the mid-19th century, as well as sustained political paralysis and more recently a devastating war with Israel which destroyed large areas of the country’s south. Syria, still reeling from decades of the oppressive Assad regime and a prolonged civil war, requires extensive rebuilding and reconstruction of basic services including education.
But Palestinians in Gaza are the most immediate victims of Sweden’s decision - including almost 300,000 children there who depend on UNRWA for their education. Over the last five years, children in Gaza have seen their schooling repeatedly disrupted. Even before October 2023, they endured regular Israeli bombardments, the impact of a long-term blockade, and the effects of systemic impoverishment. Sweden’s decision to cut funding just made the prospects for getting their education back on track all the more difficult.
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Jo Kelcey is an Assistant Professor of Education at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.
Anne Irfan is Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London.