In the words of President Donald Trump, the (symbolic) transfer of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem served to take the Jerusalem problem “off the table.” Trump put a checkmark next to the Jerusalem issue, a conundrum that has cast a shadow on anyone who tried to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians ever since the 1993 Oslo Accord. Now, it seems, Trump is also removing the Palestinian refugee problem from the agenda. This is an issue that the Palestinian narrative views as central and imperative, even more than Jerusalem.

How is Trump accomplishing this? In his own way: The American administration stops recognizing the approximately 5 million Palestinian refugees listed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is charged with aiding them. From now on, only those who were de facto refugees in 1948 will be considered refugees today. It was in 1948 that the Arab countries attacked Israel immediately after the State of Israel was declared, which resulted in the “Nakba’’ ("catastrophe" in Arabic) — the great Palestinian defeat. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from the territories of the Jewish state in the making to cities of refuge across the entire area. Simultaneously with this dramatic change of policy, the United States is making a sharp cutback of about $200 million in the monetary aid it gives the Palestinians. This constitutes a declaration of war on the way the UN has functioned over the last 70 years to empower and perpetuate the problem of the Palestinian refugees instead of acting to resolve it.

Al-Monitor reviewed in an earlier article the issue of cutbacks in the UNRWA budget. Meanwhile, it turns out that the American course of action will be sharper and more aggressive than was originally assessed in Israel. The watershed will be breached on Sept. 1, exactly when hundreds of schools in Gaza and the West Bank operated by the UNRWA are due to open. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet warn that UNRWA cutbacks are likely to cause the security situation to deteriorate unless an alternate program is presented.

“When Sept. 1 rolls around and hundreds of thousands of young pupils remain on the streets without a solution, this will create negative energies and greatly undermine stability,” a high-level Israeli security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity about two weeks ago. Now the assessment is that the sharp cutback in aid will also negatively affect current efforts to reach an arrangement between Hamas and Israel in the Strip. “In Gaza,” explains an Israeli security source to Al-Monitor (speaking on condition of anonymity), “UNRWA not only takes care of education, health and welfare, but also feeds tens of thousands of families of refugees who have no independent economic existence apart from this assistance. If all this will be rolled back, we are likely to find ourselves in a real crisis.”