By the end of August, the Trump administration had decided to stop funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. Although this could be a second fatal blow to the moribund Middle East peace process, news coverage in Tokyo of this development was insignificant at best.
The U.S. State Department issued a press statement last Friday claiming that the "administration has carefully reviewed the issue and determined that the United States will not make additional contributions to UNRWA" because "the overall international response has not been sufficient."
"We are very mindful of and deeply concerned regarding the impact upon innocent Palestinians, especially schoolchildren, of the failure of UNRWA and key members of the regional and international donor community to reform and reset the UNRWA way of doing business. These children are part of the future of the Middle East," it said. "UNRWA's endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years," and therefore, "the United States was no longer willing to shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden of UNRWA's costs."