Nickolay Mladenov, former UN Special Coordinator for Middle East Affairs and now High Representative for the Board of Peace, is no stranger to diplomatic jargon. “Essential supplies, including Ramadan care packages, are once again reaching families in urgent need,” Mladenov stated, as various aid organisations warned of another surge in starvation in Gaza. Ramadan care packages? How does the international community distort a simple iftar into a care package and what gives them the right? Colonialism and genocide, of course.

Mladenov added, “This is the result of sustained engagement with all relevant parties to ensure humanitarian access remains a top priority. The basic needs of Gaza’s population cannot be delayed.” It has been 78 years since the 1948 Nakba, and international diplomats are still treating hunger among Palestinians as a new phenomenon. However, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has faced deficits since its inception, while the politics prioritising Israeli colonisation ensured the subjugation Palestinian refugees by perpetuating various levels of hunger across the decades. 

The Absentees Property Law of 1950 meant that Palestinians were dispossessed of agricultural land and their self-sufficiency eroded. Meanwhile, since the 1950s, UNRWA was operating from a funding deficit. It required assistance from the international community to cover its expenses from July 1951 to 1952 to move from providing relief to assisting the reintegration of Palestinian refugees. 

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Following several Israeli attacks on UNRWA refugee camps in Khan Younis and Rafah in 1957, Israel objected to the UN’s demand to allow Palestinians the choice of return or compensation for forced displacement in 1961, prompting Prime Minister David ben Gurion to state, “Everyone will want to come home, and they will destroy us.” 

Hunger was never just food deprivation in Israeli colonial violence. It was a tool of dispossession, of deprivation and of dependence. A hungry population will focus more on its survival, thus weakening the anti-colonial struggle.

Hunger was never just food deprivation in Israeli colonial violence. It was a tool of dispossession, of deprivation and of dependence. A hungry population will focus more on its survival, thus weakening the anti-colonial struggle.

In turn, the focus on humanitarian aid for Palestine refugees, always lacking due to perpetual funding deficits, dissociates the image of Palestinians prior to Zionist colonisation, owners of an abundant land. Palestinians have for decades been intentionally associated with humanitarian aid. If the focus remains on pretending to alleviate hunger, even as Israel continues to weaponise deprivation and starvation, the link between Palestinians and their land grown weaker. 

With no focus on the connection between the Palestinian people and the land of Palestine  Mladenov can safely promote Ramadan care packages for Palestinians in Gaza as if they were the ultimate gesture of generosity by the international community.

Mladenov will not speak about the dependence created by the 1993 Oslo Accords, nor the Paris Protocol and its restrictions on Palestinian trade. Settler violence in the occupied West Bank which prevents Palestinian farmers from reaching their fields. Israel’s contamination of territory in Gaza which further reduced agricultural land. The Israeli encroachment in Gaza under the guise of security and the Yellow Line. The genocide which decimated Gaza and which gave Mladenov his latest diplomatic post, paid for by genocide backers, participants and accomplices. Ramadan care packages, on the other hand? As absurd it sounds, the mention of a package still has the power to soothe an alienated conscience, while that same conscience turns away from Israeli colonial violence and its international accomplices.

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