The curse on Mount of Corruption, and India’s compassion towards UNRWA

The crisis confronting the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) may have unanticipated and unintended spillovers in 2025 on diplomatic institutions in locations prone to superstitions.

Long before Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, approved legislation two months ago banning the Palestinian refugee agency from operating within Israel effective end-January, the UNRWA was already in trouble of a curious nature. Its historic landmark office in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of mostly Arab East Jerusalem was believed for centuries by local people to have been the target of a curse. The entire area near it, known from Biblical times as the Mount of Olives, has been disparagingly described by local people from time immemorial as the ‘Mount of Corruption’. According to one prophecy, the Mount of Olives is destined to split into two, open into a valley where decadent people fleeing the catastrophe will be fatally trapped. 

When this author first went to Sheikh Jarrah, local representatives of a non-profit organisation who were escorting me and a multinational team of foreign journalists had no doubts at all that this prophecy of doom was inevitable. It was not a surprise, therefore, that when the UNRWA was driven out of Gaza in 2004 by Israeli bombardment and went to East Jerusalem, an agnostic and secular UN was ambivalent on many aspects of the shift.

The UNRWA made no official announcement that it had moved its headquarters to East Jerusalem. It never confirmed that the relocation of the UNRWA’s leadership and international staff to East Jerusalem was permanent, although logic dictated otherwise. The pretence in the UN General Assembly was also that the shift to premises which were believed to be accursed, was temporary, although it has so far lasted 20 years. Since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, right up to the more recent Knesset legislation, the curse, gnostics will argue, has devastated the UNRWA almost to the point of its extinction. 

The UNRWA has a stellar record in humanitarian services to oldest mass refugee population since World War II. If it succumbs to the current Israeli onslaught, the myths about the ‘Mount of Corruption’ will get a new lease of life in the grapevine of global diplomacy. Superstitions in diplomatic practice are already being catalysed by a comeback of Feng Shui in China, although Mao Zedong outlawed it. Feng Shui is still illegal on the mainland People’s Republic. Diplomats posted in New Delhi from countries with large Indian origin populations, which settled there more than 150 years ago, are known to practice Vastu Shastra while choosing their homes and locations where Vastu can be applied.  

The element of superstition in the UNRWA’s ongoing travails should not obscure anyone to the dangerous precedent that Israel is setting by undermining the UN Charter through its Knesset. Neither the United States not the Soviet Union undermined the UN during the worst years of the Cold War the way Israel is refusing its international obligations by banning the UNRWA. It was set up by the UN in 1949, and was integral to the obligations of the international community towards the creation of Israel.  

In recognition of the UNWRA’s yeoman service for the world’s longest-suffering refugees of our time, Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his then external affairs minister M J Akbar to Palestine in 2016 with a cheque for $1.25 million to the UNRWA. Akbar told his hosts that the cheque represented a 25% enhancement in India’s annual contribution to the UNRWA. When US President Donald Trump and Canada’s then Prime Minister Stephen Harper cut aid to the UNRWA, Modi compensated for this loss of assistance in 2018 by quadrupling India’s annual support to the UN refugee agency to $5 million.  

Such compassion is what India has been known for since it has gone through the experience of being colonised. India’s relations with Israel are not a zero-sum game. That is why the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) informed the Rajya Sabha in 2023 that India had built a super-specialty hospital in Palestine at a cost of $29 million and launched a women empowerment project there costing $5 million. Further, India has supplied equipment worth $5 million for the National Printing Press of Palestine and constructed schools for Palestinian children at a cost of $2.35 million.  

On a lighter side, in the face of all-round gloom in West Asia, Palestine faces its own challenges in dealing with India. A big one is that the MEA routinely posts vegetarian diplomats to this mostly meat-eating State recognised by New Delhi. Every time such Indian permanent representatives have to go calling on Palestine’s leadership, much time is spent by these generous hosts deciding what vegetarian food they should offer at formal lunches and dinners in Gaza and later in Ramallah.

(K P Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.