TAKIS GEROS writes: From January 2006 to January 2007, I worked for a Greek NGO which provided aid to the health sector in the Palestinian territories. The following paper was delivered to an international conference at Panteion University in Athens in November 2008. The continuities between 2006 and Biden’s “humanitarian airdrops” today are important, sobering and have a series of serious implications for the Gazan survivors in the future.
Humanitarian Aid and Political Repercussions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
In this paper I focus on a meeting of AIDA, an acronym that stands for the Association of International Development Agencies operating in the occupied Palestine territories. During the period I was in Palestine, there were at least 92 International NGOs that were conducting various projects in the area.
In 2006, AIDA in fact had no formal status vis-a-vis the Israeli authorities. It was more of an informal forum, which provided the International NGOs with an opportunity to meet, normally on a monthly basis, in order to discuss the various problems they faced, as well as to occasionally issue a collective statement. The Israeli military officials, who were responsible for managing the occupation did not recognize AIDA as a formal body. They had adopted instead a divide-and-rule strategy of monitoring the humanitarian workers, according to which the representatives of each International NGO had to go in person and meet with the Army officer who was responsible for each district of the occupied territories.
The Election of the Hamas Government
On January 2006, Palestinians had elected Hamas, the Islamic political and military movement, as their party in government. Although this was the result of a totally fair and democratic electoral process –according to the reporting of all external observers who had monitored those elections– the US and the European Union had decided to boycott the new Palestinian government. The reason was that Hamas had been defined by them as a terrorist organization.
Since then, the European Union, the main provider of aid to the Palestinian Authority, had suspended the provision of economic aid to the Palestinians. Given that many Palestinian institutions and people depended on this aid for their survival, living conditions in the occupied territories soon started to deteriorate on a dramatic scale. By April or May the hospitals lacked very basic medicines, or even basic materials, such as plastic gloves and bandages. The situation was critical for many patients, and, in fact, some people died during that period due to the shortage of medicines. Employees of the public sector also stopped receiving any salaries, as these wages were covered by EU money. At the same time, Israel refused to render to the Palestinian Authority the taxes it received from the imports and exports of Palestinian products, as it was under obligation to do according to signed agreements.
In addition, during the summer of 2006, the Israeli army systematically bombarded the Gaza Strip (as a response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by militants). During that period many Palestinians had been killed and the basic infrastructure of Gaza, including its main power plant, had been destroyed.
I witnessed this dramatic period from the very beginning, as I had arrived in Palestine only three days after the elections of January 2006. For the International NGOs, these were quite tense times as well. All the NGOs addressed continuous calls to their governments and external donors to provide additional humanitarian aid, and many of them got involved in complex bargaining with the governments and the embassies of their countries, which insisted on following the Western boycott vis-à-vis the Palestinian government.
These were particularly hard times for the Palestinian population.
In a meeting at the beginning of September – that is, 7 months after the election of the Hamas government – the AIDA had to deal once again with these issues.
The meeting began with the representative of the United Nations team briefing us on the deterioration of the situation, something that happened in every monthly meeting. However, the technical character of these presentations (delivered through a power point system that demonstrated economic figures and the increase of army checkpoints) somehow accentuated the frustration felt by many of us, who witnessed all these things up close on a daily basis as we moved through the Palestinian areas. Since many of the International NGOs employed local staff as well, some Palestinians were present at the meeting. One of them, who was sitting next to me, commented sarcastically on these presentations: “What’s the point of all this? Every month we learn how many more checkpoints the Israelis have put in place. And then what?”
After the UN representative had concluded his speech, Richard, the head of a big American humanitarian organization who also acted as the head of the AIDA informal executive committee,[1] started to speak to us about a donors’ conference in Stockholm, from which he had just returned. Richard expressed his deep annoyance at the fact that during the Stockholm conference it was only government representatives who monopolized the discussions. In fact, his scheduled speech had been taken off the list at the last moment. Richard had focused his speech on a distinction between what he called the “government discourse” and the “NGO discourse”. “We cannot be heard, they want to put us, the NGOs, out of the picture”, he concluded. For him, this seemed to be the biggest problem in those times of crisis.
But apart from the International NGOs, which since the time of the Oslo Agreements have developed a wide range of activities in the Palestinian areas, there are a lot of Palestinian NGOs as well (PNGOs). The latter have mushroomed over the last years, and many of them work on projects in common with the International NGOs. This was seen as offering advantages to both parties, since local NGOs provided the International NGOs with their local knowledge, while, at the same time, they obtained easier access to Western funding through these partnerships. The representative of the Palestinian NGOs, Khouloud, was always present at the AIDA meetings. Khouloud’s speech, however, had a different tone.
Advocacy and the Boycott
Khouloud insisted that, despite the tragic situation which the territories were experiencing because of the boycott, we should not neglect advocacy. One has to note here that among those 92 International humanitarian organizations many dedicated their work to advocacy issues, treating advocacy either as their sole or their main priority; while other organizations also saw it as an action parallel to their projects focused on aid provision. There were many NGOs, for instance, that would conduct research on the ground and then publicize their reports, with which they tried to exert pressure on the Israeli authorities on a variety of issues. These included the economic devastation that the Separation Wall was inflicting on farmers and the Palestinian economy in general, the number of checkpoints, or the closure of the passages to and from Gaza. One should note here that the Israeli authorities at that period did not allow either humanitarian aid or fuel to reach Gaza, leaving in this way more than a million and a half Palestinians helpless, sick and hungry.
However, the way in which Khouloud construed ‘advocacy’ was quite different from the way in which the International NGOs dealt with it. She told us that a delegation of Palestinian NGOs had recently paid a visit to South Africa, to learn from the strategies that South African activists had deployed in the past to fight the Apartheid regime. That could help them, she said, to expose the similarities between the Israeli and the former South African Apartheids. She then went on to refer to two reports by a well-known Palestinian research centre, which showed that poverty had rapidly increased in the Palestinian areas over the last three months and that 83% of PA revenues were being withheld – due to the western boycott and Israel’s refusal to render the tax money to the PA. Khouloud did not mince her words: “These sanctions are imposed on Palestinian people in order to punish them for voting democratically and freely. So, talking about the Stockholm Conference and the need to push for more money is fine, but it is not enough. It is not possible for the West to continue funding the Occupation of Palestine. We need political solutions”.
Then there was a break, during which I approached Khouloud whom I already knew personally. She seemed a bit irritated, and I asked her what had happened. “Can you believe it?”, she said. “As soon as I arrived here this morning, Richard told me not to speak about politics at the meeting. Let’s focus on the humanitarian coordination”, he had told her in quite an authoritative tone. Of course, Khouloud, had not complied and she had done exactly the opposite. Besides, her interventions in our monthly meetings always revolved around these issues.
Sanctions
When we entered the room after the break, we listened to another speech, this time by Daniel, the representative of the Temporary International Mechanism, the TIM, as we called it. The TIM was the mechanism which the European Commission had established in June 2006, to cope with the worsening situation in Palestine and the lack of funding due to the boycott. The TIM provided limited amounts of money to specific sectors of the economy. It channeled money for buying fuel for the hospitals in Gaza, as well as for some other hospitals and health centers in the West Bank, or for supporting, through allowances and not salaries, an unspecified number of public employees.
TIM was operating on a 3-month basis, this is why it was called “Temporary”. In practice, though, this system ended up being renewed every three months, as the boycott continued. Thus, the previous centralized system of channeling European money to the PA had now been replaced by a new system, of a much more fragmented character in terms of scope and timeframe. What was more important, though, was the fact that the TIM was managed by the World Bank, and that it was channeling money directly through the office of Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who was supported by Western governments and Israel. In this way, the TIM was able to bypass the legitimate Hamas government.
Bypassing the Hamas Government
One should not presume that the International NGOs were indifferent to or happy with this new situation. On the contrary, many NGO workers at the meeting expressed their reservation or their strong disagreement with these developments, as they fully understood the political game that was at play through the new system of aid provision. TIM’s representative, Daniel, was on the defensive, but he insisted that “injecting money to improve the Palestinian economy, within, of course, the constraints of the sanctions, is better than doing nothing”. However, a woman who represented a small Spanish NGO asked him in a rather provocative manner: “But why have you organized the TIM on a 3-month basis? Are you expecting the Hamas government to be overthrown some time soon?” Daniel was quite abrupt in his reply: “We are trying to keep the system from collapsing. These things you refer to are political and we are not touching on political issues. TIM is not political”.
One can easily see here the divergent ways in which the so-called ‘humanitarian’ and ‘political’ issues were being framed and dealt with by those who were involved in humanitarian activities. Richard’s attitude, for example, represented a significant number of International NGO workers, who wanted to keep aloof from the complex political situations in the countries they worked in. However, it was obvious that ‘humanitarianism’ was an integral part of the core problem in the Palestinian territories and not separable from it.
A Post-Conflict Area
As has been pointed out by political sociologists who have written about the aid industry in Palestine, one of the main problems concerns the definition of development in the midst of a national uprising. From the period of the Oslo Agreements onward, the situation in the Palestinian Territories has been defined by donors and International NGOs as a post-conflict area rather than a conflict zone. Thus, donor agencies and international organizations have adopted the role of a ‘neutral’ mediator, a role that ignores the root causes of the issue and its colonial nature. This was evident, for instance, in the attitude of the International NGOs during the 1st and the 2nd Intifada. While the former had been characterized by a solidarity model between local and international organizations, during the 2nd Intifada this solidarity was nowhere to be found. Today, most of the International NGOs have become highly professionalized and, despite their explicit aim of witnessing and advocacy, they had to appear, at least, as ‘neutral’ about the Occupation. Besides, this was, indirectly and/or directly, a kind of prerequisite for the Israeli military authorities to allow the International NGOs to operate in the Palestinian areas.
Similar criticism has been addressed to the Palestinian NGOs as well. It has been noted that, while during the 1st Intifada their activists had been embedded within the popular struggle, Palestinian NGOs have also become professionalized and isolated today, as their links to Palestinian society have gradually loosened.
The Politics of Humanitarianism
The framing of the Palestinian predicament as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ can be seen as having further consequences as well. That is, this de-politicization of the conflict and the focusing upon humanitarian intervention may even be seen as responsible for prolonging the conflict, by relieving Israel of its responsibility for the Occupation. From the beginning of my presence there, I had the feeling that the Israeli authorities did not just tolerate the humanitarian activities of the International NGOs, but, in practice, endorsed them. By providing social services to the Palestinian population, these activities operated, in practice, as a subsidization of an Occupation, which otherwise Israel would find economically hard to maintain for long. Thus, the concern of the Israeli authorities appeared to be the tight monitoring of the NGO workers, and the demarcation of the discursive spaces within which the latter were allowed to position themselves.
But ‘humanitarianism’ was also deployed by Israel to achieve political goals. Such goals were expressed, in an unusually frank and cynical way, by Dov Weinglass, a senior advisor to the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. In the beginning of 2006, that is, at the beginning of the boycott against the PA, Weinglass declared to the press that “the idea is to put Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. It was obvious then that this humanitarian crisis had been induced by Israel as a tool to make Palestinians submit to its political dictates; namely, to stop resisting and accept the transformation of the Palestinian territories into a Bantustan directly dependent on Israel.
Thus, the depiction of what is going on in Palestine as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ is deeply problematic. The political repercussions of the humanitarian industry were already there, from the Oslo period onwards. What the current crisis had done was simply to make them much clearer and more obvious.
However, I think that a structural and macroscopic view of the situation runs the risk of presenting the protagonists of these processes as being somehow mentally trapped in hegemonic definitions and depictions of ‘humanitarianism’ and devoid of agency. On the contrary, based on the material presented here, it seems to me that all protagonists were in fact very much aware of the tight entanglement between ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘politics, and they also deployed ‘humanitarianism’ to different ends. All this, of course, was related to their vested interests and political stance. Richard, for example, belonged to those who held high positions within the humanitarian industry and wanted to perpetuate their role in it, since the activities of the grand International NGOs were not only profitable for these organizations but also brought them high prestige within humanitarian circles.
Khouloud, the representative of Palestinian NGOs, on the other hand, did not totally reject ‘humanitarian’ activities either. Besides, there was so much desperation in the Occupied Territories at that point, and the needs of Palestinians were so immediate, that even those who were very critical about the political role of foreign NGOs would not suggest that they should leave the area. Moreover, it was widely accepted by Palestinians that presence of so many foreigners in Palestine over the years has proved to be of great importance to the Palestinian cause, by publicizing to a global audience what is going on there. But, at the same time, Khouloud was trying to push the limits of the discussions by politicizing the so-called ‘humanitarian issues’ and by radicalizing the conventional meaning of ‘advocacy’.
And, of course, not all NGO workers conceptualized ‘humanitarianism’ in the same way. In contrast to the stance of many grand Anglo-Saxon organizations, a number of humanitarians who worked for small Mediterranean NGOs were much more radical in their thinking and practice, and strategically used ‘humanitarianism’ as a means to a politically oriented activity. Besides, a number of these individuals maintained links both with Palestinian political groups as well as with some Israeli organizations, most of which were anti-Zionist. In fact, these people reacted strongly not only to the boycott itself, but also to the strategy promoted at that time by the European Commission. They viewed the Temporary International Mechanism to create a structure parallel to the Palestinian Authority, which could be managed by foreign agencies and governments through the humanitarian organizations. And one should note here that the project of de-regulating the functions of the Palestinian Authority fitted very well with the neoliberal agenda promoted by the World Bank.
Thus, to conclude, it is not the case that all NGO workers subscribed to the hegemonic definitions of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘development’, as a certain kind of analysis would have it. Israel, Western donors, financial agencies and Western governments might have used such definitions to suit their own ends, but many of the people I am talking about here attempted to re-appropriate and strategically deploy them in different ways. Nevertheless, one might say, the problem is that in the process of using this idiom in alternative ways they also sustained, unwillingly, the myths surrounding ‘humanitarianism’.
Related posts on Anne Bonny Pirate:
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, The Meaning of Ceasefire: Gaza, Genocide, Resistance and Climate Change
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, Greta Stands with Gaza
And this quiet and moving lecture for the London Review of Books by Pankaj Mishra, The Shoah after Gaza
[1] All names of persons and organizations mentioned here are pseudonyms.
Anne Bonny Pirate 