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US Pariah Status Grows as Finland Resumes UNRWA Funding
"Collectively punishing millions of Palestinians over allegations concerning a few individuals is never acceptable," said one campaigner. "Other E.U. member states must follow."
Mar 22, 2024
As the United States doubled down on banning funds for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Finland said Friday that it would resume contributions to the lifesaving organization in an implicit rebuke of unsubstantiated Israeli claims—reportedly extracted via torture—that staff members were involved in the October 7 attacks.
Finnish Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Ville Tavio announced during a press conference that the country's €5 million ($5.4 million) annual contribution to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) would be reinstated, with 10% of the funding reserved for "risk management."
"Improving UNRWA's risk management, i.e. starting to prevent abuses and close supervision, gives us sufficient guarantees at this stage from the perspective of risk management that support can continue," said Tavio. "As a result, UNRWA's support for this year will proceed."
"In the future, UNRWA will also require annual bilateral discussions with Finland on how to improve the efficiency of risk management," the minister added. "It is of paramount importance to ensure that our money does not end up benefiting terrorism."
Led by the United States, more than a dozen nations including Finland suspended UNRWA funding after Israeli officials accused 12 of the agency's 13,000 employees in Gaza of participating in the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini terminated nine of the 12 employees accused by Israel. However, Lazzarini later admitted to having no evidence to support their firing, calling the terminations an act of "reverse due process." An Israeli dossier cited by countries suspending UNRWA funding also contained no concrete evidence of staff involvement in the October 7 attacks.
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) earlier this week called Israeli claims that UNRWA is a Hamas proxy "flat-out lies."
UNRWA employees say they were tortured into making false confessions about involvement in Hamas and October 7. The staffers accuse Israeli interrogators of severely beating and waterboarding them, as well as threatening to harm their relatives.
The European Union and nations including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, and Australia subsequently resumed funding for UNRWA, while other contributors including Saudi Arabia increased their donations.
"For the time being there is no alternative to UNRWA," Danish Minister for Development Cooperation Dan Jørgensen said earlier this week.
The United States, however, continues to withhold UNRWA contributions, as do other nations including Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. An agreement reached earlier this week between Congress and the White House as part of a $1.1 trillion militarized spending package extends the ban on UNRWA funding until next March.
On Friday, the House of Representatives voted 286-134 on a bill sanctioning UNRWA while giving Israel $3.8 billion in armed aid. The Biden administration is also seeking an additional $14.3 billion in armed assistance for Israel while repeatedly sidestepping Congress to expedite emergency weapons shipments.
UNRWA supports Palestinian refugees not only in Gaza and the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. In Gaza, agency staff provide shelter, food, water, clothing, blankets, and other essential humanitarian assistance amid Israel's genocidal war and siege, which have killed and maimed more than 113,000 Palestinians while displacing around 90% of the embattled strip's 2.3 million people. With deadly starvation spreading rapidly in Gaza, the agency's work is more needed than ever.
It's perilous work. According to figures from the Aid Worker Security Database, at least 196 humanitarian workers—most of them UNRWA staffers in Gaza—have been killed in Palestine since last October. One in every 100 UNRWA workers in Gaza has been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets, the highest toll in United Nations history.
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Finnish Unions Extend Strikes to Fight Right-Wing Attack on Labor, Safety Net
"The policies now pursued by the Orpo-Purra government fulfill long-standing dreams of Finnish big business," said one journalist.
Mar 20, 2024
Labor unions in Finland said Wednesday that they would continue their two-week strike wave through the end of March as they fight attacks on worker rights and social programs by the Nordic nation's right-wing government.
The blue-collar union confederation SAK announced the extension after an unproductive meeting with Finnish Employment Minister Arto Santonen of the ruling center-right National Coalition Party (NCP), state broadcaster
Ylereported.
"From our perspective the meeting was a disappointment and obviously we are very worried over the fact that the government is so stubborn and unresponsive even to our far-reaching compromise proposals," SAK chair Jarkko Eloranta told reporters. "We are ready to suspend the strikes if the government shows an understanding of workers' concerns."
"These policies... were straight from the playbook of the employers' organizations, who generously financed the campaigns of the right-wing parties in the election."
Approximately 7,000 Finnish union members including dock and industrial workers are taking part in the work stoppages, which are disrupting exports, imports, and cargo transportation. Last year, the transport workers' union AKT staged a two-week strike that shut down Finnish ports while demanding higher wages as part of a new collective bargaining agreement. The workers ultimately won a 25-month contract with a 6% raise.
Finland's April 2023 general election saw the defeat of former Prime Minister Sanna Marin's center-left coalition government, which was replaced by a coalition including Prime Minister Petteri Orpo's NCP and the far-right Finns Party, led by Deputy Prime Minister Riikka Purra, who is also the finance minister. The new government angered labor advocates by announcing an agenda that includes making it easier for employers to fire workers, slashing unemployment insurance, cutting social security benefits, weakening sick pay, and limiting solidarity strikes.
Orpo's government also says it will pass legislation creating an "export-driven" collective bargaining model that would cap wage increases, hile localizing collective bargaining, effectively empowering individual companies to negotiate their own contracts with workers.
"These policies... were straight from the playbook of the employers' organizations, who generously financed the campaigns of the right-wing parties in the election," Finnish journalist Toivo Haimi wrote for Jacobin. "It is worth noting that these policies received very little attention during the election campaign, and some of them were even directly opposed by the Finns Party."
"The policies now pursued by the Orpo-Purra government fulfill long-standing dreams of Finnish big business," Haimi added.
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Social Democracies Continue Happy Streak as Neoliberal US Falls Out of Top 20
"It all begins with high levels of trust between citizens and our institutions," said one official in Finland, which was ranked as the happiest country.
Mar 20, 2024
Finland and other social democracies in the Nordic region continued their streak of ranking at the top of the annual World Happiness Report, an accounting of people's attitudes and outlooks in 140 countries that was released Wednesday—but countries including the United States marked striking shifts in the level of happiness among their populations.
The U.S. fell out of the top 20 happiest countries for the first time, driven largely by declining happiness among people under 30.
The report—compiled by Oxford University's Wellbeing Research Center, Gallup, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network—found that people under age 30 in the U.S. rank 52 places behind people aged 60 and up in terms of happiness.
If only the youngest respondents were asked about their happiness levels, the U.S. would rank at number 62 in the annual report, while Americans aged 60 and up ranked at number 10 worldwide.
Researchers told The Guardian that after 12 straight years of young Americans reporting higher levels of happiness than their older counterparts, the trend flipped in 2017.
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Center and editor of the study, told the outlet that the drops in happiness among young people in North America and western Europe were "disconcerting."
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has frequently spoken about the effects of social media on young Americans, spoke to The Guardian and highlighted high levels of social media use as a contributor to unhappiness among young people.
Murthy said it was "insane" that the U.S. has not yet passed laws regulating social media features such as "like" buttons or infinite scrolling to disincentivize frequent use of the platforms, noting that American adolescents spend an average of nearly five hours on social media.
But Jukka Siukosaari, Finland's ambassador to the U.K., attributed the country's high levels of happiness to an "infrastructure of happiness," including relative economic equality and affordable opportunities for Finnish people.
"It all begins with high levels of trust between citizens and our institutions," Siukosaari told The Guardian.
Finland's public healthcare system ranked number 3 worldwide in U.S. News and World Report's survey last year, and a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that in 2019, 64% of the Finnish population reported trusting the government, compared to an OECD average of 45%.
Finland ranked at the top of the list for the seventh year in a row, while other Nordic social democracies in the top five happiest countries included Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.
A 2023 study published in the journal Telematics and Informatics found that similar concerns about frequent social media use among young people exist in Finland as in the U.S., with about 10% of Finnish teens displaying "problematic" use of platforms, including experiencing withdrawal from social media and continuing use even after experiencing negative consequences like anxiety and depression.
Young adults in Finland spend about 20 hours per week, or nearly three hours per day, on social media, according to the study.
Another survey by YPulsepolled young people in Western Europe about their social media use, finding they spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on social media platforms and that 84% agreed with the statement, "My generations are obsessed with social media."
But many Western European countries ranked far ahead of the U.S. in terms of the happiness of people under age 30, including Iceland (4), Denmark (5), Luxembourg (6), and the Netherlands (9).
"Social media is believed to play a part in driving down self-esteem and robbing young people of their wellbeing. But it is the lack of education, skills training, and affordable housing that underpins the decline in the positive outlook traditionally displayed in surveys by those broadly fitting the Gen Z age group," wrote Phillip Inman, an economics correspondent for The Guardian, about the rankings of the U.S. and its peers, such as the U.K. and Australia, in which happiness has also dropped precipitously for young people.
While social media use is increasingly common among young people in many countries, the decrease in happiness and life satisfaction also comes amid the rising threat of the climate emergency, with scientists reporting last year that devastating climate events like wildfires and deadly heat waves were direct consequences of continued fossil fuel extraction and planetary heating.
Young Americans are also coming of age as the wealthiest people in the country have gotten richer since the coronavirus pandemic, while millions of working families are part of what Oxfam last year called a "permanent underclass... who are denied their economic rights, trapped in poverty, and unable to accumulate wealth no matter how hard they work."
The cost of a college education in the U.S. has risen by about 40% in the last two decades, when adjusted for inflation, and housing affordability is no better—with half of renters telling Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies in January that they are paying more than they can afford to in rent.
"Young adults are being hit from all sides by a toxic combination of government policy, a housing affordability crisis, stagnating wages, and a high cost of living," the Intergenerational Foundation told The Guardian in response to the report.
Inman wrote that the latest World Happiness Report "is a warning sign to governments that have put the welfare of older people above that of younger generations."
"If young people cannot establish themselves in the workplace with a decent home and time and money to visit friends and family," said Inman, "the ramifications will boomerang on the old."
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