Mrakic and Lazzarini: A Case Study in How Power Turns Against Palestinians
“It is in the nature of power that it can also lead to abuse.” Immanuel Kant
Few embody Kant’s warning about the corruption of power more clearly than UNDP’s Alessandro Mrakic and the UNRWA Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini whose decisions reveal exactly what happens when authority loses its moral anchor. When they take office, they always start the same way: soft, conciliatory, overly courteous. They walk through the corridors performing friendliness, offering as-salāmu ʿalaykum, ahlan wa sahlan, kulshi tamam? and other canned Arabic pleasantries to appear connected to Palestinians. They charm, they placate, they pretend to “understand the context.” Then comes the classic sequence: charm the staff union, send them to missions and DSA to buy loyalty, promote a few managers to guarantee obedience, and before long, they have secured full control of the entire structure.
And once they feel fully in control, once they believe they are untouchable, that is exactly when the abuse begins. Leaders appointed to serve Palestinian staff lose their sense of reality, responsibility, and basic humanity. They stop seeing the destruction, the fear, the displacement, the daily humiliation Palestinians endure. They stop seeing Palestinians as people with rights, families, trauma, and obligations and start seeing them as obstacles to managerial convenience. Power blinds them, and in their blindness, they act with a level of arrogance that would be unthinkable in any other context.
How else can anyone explain the actions of UNDP Gaza Office Head Alessandro Mrakic? A man with no background in people management decides he can dispose of people like paperwork. He gives direct orders to terminate the contracts of two long-serving Palestinian women ( UNDP Gaza Office staff), one with more than 25 years of service by instructing HR to send an email quoting a clause about contract expiry.
“A temporary or FTA shall expire automatically and without prior notice on the expiration date specified in the letter of appointment.”
How does he even dare to use an “expiry” provision in this context? Do Palestinian staff “expire” because they fled bombardment? Because they fled the horror of death and genocide? Do years of service, loyalty, and survival simply evaporate under Mrakic’s administrative convenience?
Mrakic further threatened that their contracts would end on 31 December 2025 if they did not return immediately to Gaza. This, while Israel has categorically barred all Palestinian UN staff who fled Gaza from returning under any circumstances.
At the same time, Mrakic found it perfectly acceptable to pull USD 400,000 from the UNDP Crisis Bureau funds to hire more than 13 international staff three of them Italian, mirroring Mrakic’s own nationality.
Kant warned that power bends toward abuse the moment it is left unchecked. Mrakic is the textbook illustration: rewarding his own network, expanding his own circle, fortifying his own comfort, all while Palestinian staff are punished for fleeing death. Power, once concentrated, turns inward and corrupts. Instead of safeguarding Palestinian staff under bombardment, Mrakic invests in building a protective wall of internationals around himself. Resources flow upward to the privileged, the safe, the Western European, while the Palestinian staff of Gaza pay the price for surviving a war.
It is indeed in the nature of power that it can also lead to abuse. And the abuse becomes so entrenched that officials no longer see the human cost of their decisions nor the consequences for Palestinian lives and livelihoods.
They stop recognising that each email they sign off on destroys a Palestinian family’s income, pushes Palestinian women further into precarity, or strips long-serving staff of their dignity. What should be moral decisions become administrative reflexes and the suffering becomes invisible to them, because they no longer look for it.
Take Philippe Lazzarini, proudly tweeting a few weeks ago:
“With the ceasefire in place, UNRWA is stepping up its back-to-learning programme both in person and online.”
This, while Lazarrini personally decided to withhold the salaries of more than 600 UNRWA teachers over 400 of them women because they fled Gaza under bombardment. These same teachers continued teaching remotely and they are fully eligible for teaching the online learning programme he tweets so proudly about.
And all of this, while Lazzarini himself works remotely from Geneva, fully benefiting from Alternate Working Modalities (AWM), a policy designed, inter alia , to protect staff during war, insecurity, and displacement. Lazzarini enjoys every safeguard, every exemption, every layer of protection the system offers, while denying those same protections to the Palestinian women and men who kept UNRWA’s education system alive under airstrikes. He promotes online learning publicly, yet refuses to grant the Palestinian staff delivering it access to Alternate Working Modalities (AWM) a UN-wide entitlement available to all staff, specifically created for circumstances exactly like Gaza.
Every international staff member from Gaza and the West Bank has been relocated, placed on AWM, and is now working from the comfort of their own homes, laptops open, coffee mugs beside them, fluffy cushions behind their backs. Meanwhile, Palestinian UNRWA teachers are struggling to survive in Egypt, living in uncertainty, displacement and financial precarity, and still denied the same right.
Lazzarini writes glowing op-eds in The Guardian about UNRWA’s “capacity, expertise and community trust,” praising Palestinian teachers, doctors and engineers as the backbone of public service delivery. This public rhetoric earns him credibility with donors and applause in international forums yet no one bothers to ask how he treats his own Palestinian teachers, doctors and engineers behind closed doors.
What has he done to honour the more than 550 UNRWA staff killed by Israel?
Why is he withholding the compensation their families are owed; compensation that is the bare minimum gesture of recognition for the staff who died delivering the very services he advertises in his speeches?
No one asks, because no one is interested in Palestinians.
No one asks because no one is interested in Palestinian lives, deaths, or the injustice that follows them into every system, including the UN’s.
The ugly truth is Palestinian suffering does not trend. It does not attract donor pledges. It does not move the powerful. It is tolerated, rationalised, or quietly swept aside. Mrakic and Lazzarini, like hundreds of other senior UN officials are invested in realpolitik, in optics, and survival of their own positions. Principles and moral courage do not feature anywhere in their decision-making.
Who will hold such officials accountable?
Kant warned that the moment power becomes enjoyable, judgment collapses. The pleasure of authority blinds reason, distorts duty, and turns leadership into self-preservation. Nothing corrupts faster than the comfort of power and nothing weakens moral clarity more than believing you are untouchable. When officials start enjoying their position instead of exercising it responsibly, conscience fades, principles dissolve, and the people they were meant to serve become collateral damage.
It is indeed in the nature of power that it can lead to abuse. But abuse is not inevitable. Even now, you can choose differently, if you dare look at what you have already done. Look inward, not outward.
This is a decisive moment, the moment you chose to turn your back on your own Palestinian staff. The people who kept this organization standing in the worst conditions imaginable. The people you were appointed to protect, not discard.
In truth, power didn’t corrupt you: you bent it and weaponised it to serve yourselves, and left your Palestinian staff to pay the price.
You have explained it so well Nadine. Well done. Having worked with such people, i can only confirm your observations and findings. This is becoming very difficult to change due to silence of member states. We should join efforts to keep exposing those abusers and pressure donors for action.
We, hundreds of UNRWA staff from Gaza, continue to bear the crisis alone since February, with no salaries and no work, while UN programs in other areas continue normally.
Why are we prevented from working remotely even though we are able to do so like our colleagues?
Enough ignoring us. We demand fairness and our human and professional rights, just like other staff in the UN system.
As an educator directly impacted by UNRWA’s actions, I express my full solidarity with all affected staff. The current decisions undermine both our dignity and the values the UN claims to uphold. Accountability is not optional — it is overdue.
Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini is lying when he laments over the Palestinians, as he collaborates with the occupation in undermining UNRWA’s work by hollowing it out from within. This is done by placing the Palestinian local staff who survived the genocide on unpaid exceptional leave outside Gaza, while allowing foreigners to work remotely. Moreover, the number of vacant positions is in the thousands, and I challenge him to state the truth about how many UNRWA employees there are today.”
Who will hold them accountable? And when will they be held accountable? I am an employee who, along with my family, suffered immensely because of their unjust decisions.
Thank you to the free voices,
thank you, Ms. Nadine.
As an educator directly impacted by UNRWA’s actions, I express my full solidarity with all affected staff. The current decisions undermine both our dignity and the values the UN claims to uphold. Accountability is not optional — it is overdue.
Nadine, if we have to look at the power relations in the UN and then see that monopoly capital, principally from the US dominates it, as shown by the Security Council resolutions then we can deduce that the entire structure is inherently corrupt and they base themselves on what they can get away with in ensuring their rule in the face of opposition by the masses in the world and primarily in the imperial centres.
That is why they control the mainstream media, the universities and international bodies.
How do we fight this injustice? On many fronts including alternative media spaces such as what you are doing. How do we expand such work?