From Sydney to Gaza: ‘Places where life is raw are enormously rewarding’

TOM WHITE's path has taken him from suburban Sydney to head of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza. He tells BEN LYNFIELD about the rewards and challenges of his work.

It might sound daunting to be responsible for an area with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, where an overwhelming majority of people live below the poverty line and where armed conflict can flare up at any moment.

But Tom White, the Australian who more than any single individual keeps the Gaza Strip going on a daily basis, is used to challenging assignments. The director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), who has been in his Gaza post for a year and a half, has a wealth of experience to draw on.

For several years, he played a significant role in relief efforts in Afghanistan, supervising nearly a thousand workers from all its ethnic groups, before the fall of Kabul.

White, 51, has earlier roots in UNRWA, an organisation loathed by some right-wing Israelis for what they see as an anti-Israel raison d’etre. He previously served as deputy head of UNRWA in the occupied West Bank. His current deputy in Gaza, Jenifer Austin, is also from Australia.

Gaza is a long way from Sydney, where White grew up. Relatives ran businesses on both sides of his family and he, too, considered a life in commerce, earning a master’s degree in that subject from the University of NSW. But his sense of adventure and desire to see the world got the better of him.

White got his start working for the UN in post-genocide Rwanda in 1995. That was a turning point. “I saw the impact on the civilian population. Something stuck in my mind,” he told The Jewish Independent. He has spent the past 20 years working with or on behalf of refugees in conflict zones, including two stints in Afghanistan, one of them for Save the Children.

His second spell ended six weeks before the fall of Kabul. “We knew things were not good, but no-one predicted Kabul’s fall. Lots of colleagues were trapped there.”

White also spent several years based in Australia as director of international programs for the Fred Hollows Foundation, which helps treat vision problems in the developing world. But he says he missed the field and took up a post in Damascus running Norwegian Refugee Council efforts to alleviate the refugee crisis from the war in Syria.

It was after the fall of Kabul that he got a call from UNRWA asking whether he would be interested in heading its Gaza operations.

“There is something about being in places where life is raw that is enormously rewarding.”

In Hamas-run Gaza, with the advent of the far-Right Israeli government, things may be about to get even rawer. Under coalition agreements with Benjamin Netanyahu, control of a key body dealing with requests to enter Israel, COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) has been transferred to the hands of a far-Right, anti-Arab politician, Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism party who holds a newly created ministerial post within the defence ministry.

The new Defence Minister, Yoav Galant, is a hawk who oversaw Israel’s military offensive, known as Operation Cast Lead, against Hamas in 2008-09. According to Israeli human rights group B’tselem, most of the Palestinians killed by the Israeli army were not taking part in hostilities.

The Gaza economy has shown some flickers of improvement lately due to the previous Israeli government granting about 10,000 permits a month for Gazans to work inside Israel. Whether this will be sustained, increased or cut is a key question on the minds of many Gazans.

Well over half of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents are registered refugees, whose forebears were expelled or fled from what became Israel in 1948. They rely on UNRWA for schooling, medical care, supplementary food assistance and other needs in an economy whose private sector has been devastated by a 15-year blockade.

White straddles the Israel-Hamas divide, depending on effective working relations with officials on both sides. “We need to be seen as neutral and impartial and to serve people. Full stop. I’d call it humanitarian diplomacy.”

But there’s always the awareness of being in an active conflict zone, he says. UNRWA facilities have been hit by munitions from both sides. “We’ve had incidents over the years of rockets fired in the vicinity of UNRWA buildings and there have been recent reports of tunnels under or near schools and health facilities.”

Recently, there was an explosion of a weapons factory near a school. “This took place when school was on break. There would have been lots of children injured if it had happened a week later.

“We engage with all the parties, stressing to them that international humanitarian law must be respected and that staff is protected and facilities are protected,” he adds.

White seems concerned about the current changes on the Israeli side, which has moved towards ultranationalism, but he chooses his words carefully. “UNRWA has been remarkably adept despite wars and conflicts and crises and we will continue to serve the population regardless of what comes. COGAT did not respond to a query on whether any changes are planned in policy towards Gaza.

“It’s too early to understand really the implications of the new government,” White says. “Without a doubt, there’s a lot of uncertainty. A lot of different dynamics are at play. It might be an inflection point in a long conflict where the dynamics since the Oslo agreement may be about to fundamentally change.”

In particular, the possibility of Israeli annexation of the West Bank, a goal stressed in the Netanyahu government’s guidelines though they do not specify a time frame, “gives a sense change is imminent but we don’t fully understand what the consequences will be,” he says.

As for Gaza, the advent of the new government “means it is unlikely a lifting of the blockade will occur”.

Indeed, the ending of strict curbs on movement of people and goods, which in the view of Palestinian and international observers has turned Gaza into an open-air prison, is the only thing that can save Gaza’s future, White believes. The curbs were initiated after Hamas took control of the Strip in 2007. Israel says they are necessary for security.

Israel’s decision to let in labourers and loosening curbs on import and export was a “really positive” move, White says. But not nearly enough to begin turning things around, he stresses. “Every day people are getting poorer, there are less coping mechanisms, young people are graduating into a workforce with no opportunity.  What we have is really a slow strangulation of the economic and social life of this community.”

White recently visited poorer parts of Khan Yunis and Rafah in the southern part of the Strip. “For a very proud people now living in appalling conditions with sub-standard housing, lack of sanitation, tiny, two-room houses with fibre cement roofs, and sand running down the narrow alleys between houses, life is getting tougher and tougher.”

Yaakov Amidror, former director of Israel’s National Security Council, who held the army rank of major-general, takes issue with White’s blaming of Israeli policy for the poverty. “This is propaganda,” he says. “We are not blockading. We are checking so that they won’t be able to build rockets to fire at us.”

“The border between Egypt and Gaza is as convenient for the Palestinians to use [for importing and exporting] “as the border with Israel, Amidror adds, implying that Egypt could lift the strict constraints imposed on the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. He stresses that the Gaza economy had suffered because Hamas spent vast sums on developing rockets and tunnels rather than improving the lives of people.

In Amidror’s view, UNRWA is inherently anti-Israel. This, he says, is shown by its bequeathing refugee status from one generation to the next. “Their entire vision is against Israel, to keep as many people as refugees for as long as possible, to keep people having the status of refugees, to not let Palestinians integrate.”

However, in Gaza, UNRWA’s continued functioning is seen as vital, according to Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at al-Azhar University in Gaza City. He noted that in the past there have been protests when UNRWA was forced by budgetary troubles to cut services.

White says criticism such as that of Amidror “serves certain political aims. Some people want to make UNRWA a scapegoat.”

He praised Australia’s new Labor government for increasing funding of UNRWA back to the level it was at before the Morrison government, saying this is a recognition of the importance of UNRWA work in the Middle East.

But unfortunately for White, Gaza and Israel, the biggest challenge still lies ahead. “The main concern is that something happens in East Jerusalem or the West Bank and we’ll get into a cycle of war again,” Abusada explains. “A clash between Hamas and the Israeli government is inevitable. It’s not a question of whether, but when.”

Main Photo: Tom White shows students at an UNRWA school in Gaza how to use electronic tablets (MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images)