On UNRWA's role and its Gaza operations director John Ging

Omar Shaban
Pal-Think for Strategic Studies

It may be very thorny to speak about an extraordinary man who runs a huge institution around which controversy has not ceased since its formation on the eve of the Palestinian displacement in 1949. He is Mr John Ging, who began his work as director of UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip in February 2006. He is an Irishman born in 1965, married and holding a doctorate in political science and law, who worked in many conflict areas in Africa, Europe, Kosovo and Ireland before coming to Palestine.
He came at a pivotal and harsh stage the Gaza Strip in particular and the Palestinian territories in general were passing through. These conditions took shape in an unprecedented stifling siege, security chaos and the spread of the phenomenon of kidnapping foreigners, the weakening of the standing of the Palestinian National Authority and internal infighting, the arrival of the Hamas movement into the Palestinian political system, and the international community's boycott and freezing of its assistance to the National Authority and the Palestinian people. This international community, which applies double standards, demanded that the Palestinians organise democratic elections, which they were by the testimony of thousands of international observers; and on the other hand this international community imposed a harsh siege and boycott when it did not like the results of these elections. The tragedy did not stop there; rather Israel imposed the harshest siege in history after the Hamas movement took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, and then came Operation “Cast Lead”, in which the government of Israel declared an unprecedented war using all the military force at its disposal against the poor and besieged Gaza Strip, causing destruction and killing that is the most concentrated by the measure of the square metre, as millions of kilograms of explosives were hurled onto an area of no more than 400 square kilometres and onto a human mass that is the most densely packed on the face of the earth.

These conditions imposed unprecedented challenges before UNRWA and its director of operations in Gaza, Mr John Ging… How can one work in such complex conditions?? And where does one begin and what are the priorities!! And how can the neutrality that the relief agency must abide by as a UN institution be maintained!! And is neutrality possible before this enormous level of suffering!! The man grasped the scale of the tragedy in Gaza from the beginning, describing the situation in the Gaza Strip precisely by saying: the condition of prisoners in the world's jails is better than the condition of the population in the Gaza Strip, and when we speak about the levels of services and living in the Gaza Strip we can say that prison conditions abroad are better than the existing situation in the Gaza Strip, and that a prisoner in Europe receives more health care than the care the people of the Gaza Strip receive”.

Despite these conditions in which work might seem impossible, John Ging was able, with extraordinary determination, to make the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Refugees equal to the responsibility and equal to the expectations placed on it, as he began to introduce radical reforms to this huge bureaucratic institution, which Palestinian society in general and the refugees in particular regard as their plank of salvation from deprivation, poverty and unemployment. He introduced fundamental improvements in the fields of education, health and social affairs. Such fundamental and unconventional modifications and improvements could not pass without criticism, wounding in most cases, from some segments of society that saw in these improvements a deviation from the traditional orientations of the relief agency and an attempt to Westernise Eastern Palestinian society — to the point that he was subjected to an assassination attempt in March 2007, which he miraculously survived.

John Ging realised that UNRWA's responsibility is not confined to providing the minimum of food, health and education, but must develop to include building the human being himself. Instead of the policy of reducing services towards the Palestinian refugees pursued by the previous administrations, the relief agency moved to providing new services with a developmental dimension, covering new segments and providing high-quality services at international standards. He began implementing new and distinctive programmes targeting children through organising the Summer Games programmes, from which about two hundred and fifty thousand children benefit annually, as well as expanding the employment programmes to include thousands of graduates, aimed at qualifying them to enable them to serve Palestinian society. Recently the relief agency organised, for the first time, summer camps inside hospitals targeting sick children.

When Israel began its aggression on the Strip on 27 December of last year, Mr Ging was spending the Christmas holiday in his homeland, but faced with his responsibilities and his ethical commitments he decided to return to the Gaza Strip to be at the head of his work in those harsh conditions the Strip was living through. He began working night and day, harnessing all of UNRWA's capacities to alleviate the suffering of the Gaza Strip's population, allocating dozens of schools and other premises to accommodate the citizens who had left their homes under the threat of the Israeli shelling that did not stop for a moment throughout the three weeks of the war. Not only that: John Ging worked to acquaint the world with what was going on in the Gaza Strip, sparing no opportunity to appear before the world press explaining the effects of the aggression and demanding that the international community intervene quickly to halt the mad Israeli war machine — which led many Palestinians to describe him as “the spokesman of the Palestinian people”, affirming that the relief agency would not leave the population of the Gaza Strip alone, and that despite the limited funding available it would always work to develop its work, broaden the circle of beneficiaries from its programmes and offer what is new and distinctive.
During the war Mr John Ging continued to call on the leaders of the international community to intervene to halt the fire immediately, describing what was happening in the Gaza Strip as a madness the like of which history had not witnessed. He addressed the world's leaders: you must not sleep and must not drink and must not eat until you stop the killing of innocents in the Gaza Strip; and there are no international journalists in the Gaza Strip to see what is happening in order to convey the truth. Despite all the demands to halt the war, the Israeli response to Mr Ging's statements came with the Israeli aircraft targeting civilians in UNRWA schools, violating the international laws that demand the protection of civilians in wartime, as dozens of citizens were killed and wounded in schools belonging to the agency — evidence that the Israeli aggression did not exempt any place in the Gaza Strip from shelling, including the relief agency's premises, which constituted a real shock, and Mr Ging demanded an official investigation into this crime.
Recently the relief agency organised a distinctive festival that entered the Gaza Strip into the Guinness Book of Records by flying about 4,000 kites from a limited geographical area (700 square metres), with kites made by the children of the Gaza Strip with their own hands, carrying with them their dreams of lifting the siege, achieving peace and living in dignity like the rest of the children of the earth. With this creative idea the children of the Gaza Strip were able to occupy the news headlines on international news satellite channels such as CNN, BBC and others. Mr John Ging believes that the Palestinian people need the international community's justice more than its money, for when justice is achieved everything is achieved, and that if the siege were lifted and the crossings opened for the Gaza Strip the Palestinian people would not need foodstuffs because they would provide them themselves. Three weeks ago the Israeli newspaper Maariv published a false report to the effect that Mr John Ging had fled the Gaza Strip, in an attempt on its part to undermine the scale of the appreciation Palestinian society holds for him; Mr Ging hastened to appear on the al-Jazeera and BBC channels to say: I am present in the Gaza Strip and practising my work as usual.

With his charismatic personality, his tireless work and his humane and highly professional vision, Mr John Ging has been able to bring about a genuine and distinctive movement around the Palestinian cause at all levels. He is constantly speaking about the Palestinian cause in international forums, and he meets everyone who visits the Gaza Strip among distinguished official figures, speaking to them about the justice of the Palestinian cause and about the results of the occupation's policies for Palestinian society, appealing to them to face up to their humanitarian, ethical and legal responsibilities to halt the occupation's practices. He always calls on everyone to visit the Gaza Strip to see the conditions in the Gaza Strip, with the aim of changing the stereotypical image of the Strip's population. Amid the division that has harmed the image of the Palestinian cause and amid the Israeli media machine's monopoly of the international arena, the role of people such as Mr Ging stands out in working to correct the image and place it in the framework it should be in, namely a cause of a people groaning under occupation and struggling to attain its political rights and its right to development and prosperity. Palestinian society, which struggles to realise this dream, feels appreciation and gratitude towards everyone who works to back and support it in its noble endeavour.