Read about Ashraf Fayadh, Palestinian poet sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia here:
Newly Translated: Poems to Read for Ashraf Fayadh on January 14
In solidarity with Ashraf and all cultural workers and activists facing threats to their freedom to speak, I am joining the global reading of Ashraf’s poetry with “The Melancholy of Dough” translated by Tariq al-Haydar.
Update! The death sentence has been removed. Read the story in The Guardian!
This article first appeared on Counterpunch.
Fluorescent lights burn in the homes of Palestinian activists 24 hours a day now. Ambiguity is evaporating. Options lie on the rock-strewn tarmac near the physical and figurative checkpoints – more stark, more risky, yet more promising than in the last 20 years.
“Is this good?” some ask, motioning to the TV.
“Is this bad?” others ask, pointing at the smartphone.
“We don’t know yet.”
1936-1948-1967-1973-1982-1987-1993-2000-2008-2012-2014
Will 2015 also have a section in undergraduate Middle East textbooks? Will the sub-title read: “End of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”?
The status quo was temporary—that was understood. So why are newscasters surprised that the rubble it was built on has shifted, eroded, dissolved? Although the world knew the status quo was unsustainable, a viable Plan B never coalesced. So now, after decades of evidence that Palestinians would not surrender, it is happening. Label it whatever you wish.
Between the stabbing and lynching and stoning and demolishing, some people are appealing for calm. But sadly, when things are calm the most we can hope for is more talk about more talk. Death and injury are tragic, but they have propelled us to this crossroads. Now, good people who have for decades signed petitions for peace have to commit more. We have to run forward through the metaphorical tear gas to reach the future that awaits us on the other side – even if we have not yet envisaged it. If we hesitate we may miss this moment of possibility.
Possibility? Yes, for it may be, I contend, a “perfect storm” of possibility.
None of this would matter, though, without the youth. As in the first Intifada, young Palestinians acting out of conscience and desperation are not waiting for political parties or responding to wrinkled leadership. They leave home, school and work and flock to flashpoints to taunt soldiers, an ostensibly doomed strategy, and yet, it has impact. For now, again, the world is looking at Palestine and Israel, and more than ever before, they are seeing the truth: The Israeli occupation must end.
But what will happen if the Israeli occupation ends? Do we—Palestinians and global allies—know what we are fighting for? Or do we only know what we are fighting against?
In Egypt, Algeria, Iran and other places where inspiration turned into disappointment, smart and fearless heroes and sheroes sought to reclaim history for the people. But good did not come from bad, just more bad. How can we learn from the past, avoid a power vacuum, and finally (finally!) enable Palestinians to unite their people on their land and build a society with dignity?
It depends:
Surprisingly, I am hopeful. For we have tried every process and arrangement and mechanism and have learned that stopgap measures and temporary agreements are impotent. It will take guts to permanently end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but not more guts than we have shown in generations of fighting. It is time – right now – to try the only option not yet tried – true justice and genuine peace.
The article first appeared on Arabic Literature in English.
Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem welcomed the small crowd that came to the launch of Chief Complaint on October 8, 2015 and acknowledged that the event was almost canceled.
The current escalation of violence in Jerusalem and around Palestine makes it hard to know what to do. We respect those who have lost their lives or are injured, and we want to dissuade others from going out into unsafe circumstances, but we also feel there is a kind of resistance we express when we press forward with regular life. In this case, we decided to press forward and were pleased to have 20 or so others who also pressed forward to join us for the event.
What follows is an edited version of my introductory remarks:
“I’m not sure why Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh honored me with the invitation to introduce him and his recent book, Chief Complaint. I can say that I fell in love with the idea of the book from the table of contents: ‘Chapter One, High Fever’; ‘Chapter Two, Chills’; ‘Chapter Three’ (my personal favorite), ‘Hair Loss’; and so on.
“As far as the text, you will find a combination of fact and fiction that builds off the idea of a chief complaint — what a patient states as the reason for a visit to the doctor seems, in this book, never to be the real reason. Dr. Hatim, who spent his career as a physician in his home village of Arrabeh in the Galilee, consolidated the voices, appearances, dreams, and flaws of patients he treated over decades, added in political and cultural detail, imagined some amusing twists, and wrote it all down in what are, as he admits, more like vignettes than plotted stories.
“What I enjoyed was that, like in real life, I learned as much from how these vignettes were told as I did from their content. My own adopted village is Kufr Manda, also in the Galilee, quite close in both distance and spirit to Dr. Hatim’s village of Arrabeh.
“In Kufr Manda you’ll find my 78-year old father-in-law, who is so spry that we once couldn’t find him in his greenhouse. We discovered, instead, that he was scaling the metal bars that hold up the plastic roofing. He has a long room that is the family’s greeting area, so that during the day there are always people coming in and out to visit or get or share information or perhaps to feast on one of my mother-in-law’s meals. Not long ago, I was reading on the couch next to him when my sister-in-law’s husband came in and told the Haj that his grandmother had won her court case and would finally get her share of inherited land, denied her by her brothers. As his grandmother was no longer alive, he needed to figure out how the property would be divided among the living heirs.
“My father-in-law jumped up onto a chair and reached to the top of a bookshelf on which he kept daily things, like his comb and razor, and pulled down what looked like a small plastic wastebasket with rolls of paper sticking out. The old man and my brother-in-law rolled out the old blueprints and began discussing which plot had belonged to so-and-so, but was later divided among so-and-so and so-and so. It was very detailed.
“Later that night, I asked my husband why his father seemed to be in possession of the official blueprints showing land ownership in the village. It was a strange idea for me, a US citizen who generally assumes that official things should be in government institutions under the care of paid officials.
“‘Because people trust him,’ my husband explained, and the conversation was over.
“I tell this story as an example of the kinds of stories that Dr. Hatim relays in Chief Complaint. They are everyday stories of Palestinians who live in villages in the Galilee. They are the kinds of stories that are unremarkable to the people who live them but very rich to those of us who don’t.
“Dr. Hatim tells the stories in Chief Complaint with both an insider and outsider perspective. He not only brings you into a place where you could not otherwise go, but he also explains what you’re seeing and hearing. The explanations may be long or short, and even if you read them twice, you might not grasp all of it. But the prose is strong and beautiful even if you don’t understand all his references.
“When I told my father-in-law in Kufr Manda that I was reading a book by a doctor from Arrabeh, he said, ‘Humpf.’ I thought he hadn’t understood my poor Arabic so I told him again and asked if by chance he knew Dr. Hatim from Arrabeh and he replied with a straight face: ‘Twenty-five doctors graduated from Arrabeh this year alone. The percentage of doctors in Arrabeh is higher than anywhere else in the world.’
“‘Really?’ I asked.
“‘What do you think I’m doing? Eating seeds?’ which is his way of saying that although he only studied until fourth grade, he is no idiot and Dr. Hatim, book or not, is just another guy. I’ve often thought that someone should write down my father-in-law’s stories so they aren’t lost, and Dr. Hatim — despite not knowing my father-in-law — has done just that. By capturing the humanity and the humor, the wisdom and the parochialism, he has saved a vision of this generation of Palestinian village elders.
“If I have a criticism of the book, it’s that, when you finish reading this book about a village doctor and the characters he comes to know and love, you can be sure that you’ve only seen a part of what there is to know. This book begs for another to be written – not by a doctor but by a doctora. Dr. Hatim’s stories are rich and true and important, but so are those told among women. I look forward to reading that book, whoever may write it.
More:
A video interview with Dr. Hatim about his book, Chief Complaint.
This interview was first published in Al-Adab in Arabic.
I met Saleem Zaru, Executive Director of United Palestinian Appeal (UPA), under the strangest of circumstances. UPA had published an appeal to raise money for my friend Nureddin Amro, whose home was partially demolished by Israeli authorities in Jerusalem on March 31, 2015. As a frequent critic of international aid, I was pleased to have the rare chance to say “thank you,” so I wrote to UPA to affirm what a wonderful human being and valuable community leader they were supporting. Saleem answered me personally. He had read my work. He wanted to meet on his next trip to Palestine. With this one act, Saleem distinguished himself from those donors who are too busy to make a human connection and who see philanthropy as a series of transactions rather than as a web of relationships.
I wrote to him again in June, but this time I was not congratulatory. Not only had Nureddin not gotten his money, but there were some strange-sounding dynamics in the discussions about disbursement. I feared it was the same old pattern – donors use a Palestinian tragedy to raise money but in the process of implementing, they manage to harm Palestinian dignity and agency. With Nureddin’s permission, I told Saleem my concerns, and that’s how we entered into a rather deep and honest conversation (see below) co-analyzing his experience as a Palestinian donor.
Nora: There is something different in the way you talk about helping Palestine, but the nature of the difference isn’t clear. Is there an Arab way of being a donor that’s different or better than the western way? Is there a way that is uniquely Palestinian?
Saleem: I’m delighted to hear that you sensed that we are trying to be different from typical aid organizations. It is true that many Arab donors just copy foreign donors. That’s because “aid” is a foreign concept, a form of colonialism, a way to control the indigenous population. When Arabs do “aid” they have to look outside for models. They aren’t necessarily malicious, but sometimes that way of helping doesn’t work.
It is not only donors that have gotten used to a bureaucratic, organization-centric approach to helping; “beneficiaries” are also used to it. Saleem told me that on his recent trip to Gaza, some Palestinian partners were frustrated that UPA doesn’t follow a specific, pre-set funding strategy. Saleem told them, and me, that meeting local needs means being responsive not prescriptive.
Nora: That sounds nice on the surface, especially when you say it is the responsibility of local organizations to articulate what they need. But needs are huge, endless, infinite, and also irrelevant in a way. You could never respond to all their needs, so isn’t it more important to talk about who makes the funding decisions rather than who defines the needs?
Saleem: Of course what we do is a collective drop in the bucket, so let me clarify that we, with the local partner, have to decide how to respond to the urgent and important needs, the ones that are priorities. We also know that our response is incomplete if we only look at emergency needs without having a program that helps people deal with, avoid or be more empowered to cope with similar situations in the future.
Nora: That’s the classic dilemma facing humanitarian actors who are tasked with responding to emergencies despite knowing that there will be more and more of them. It sounds as if you’re reasonably satisfied with UPA’s approach to it: You have both large, long-term projects that build infrastructure and capacity, such as your cranio-facial surgery center in Ramallah. And you have small, one-time “emergency” projects like helping Nureddin, who needed help rebuilding his house.
Saleem: Exactly.
But in the case of Nureddin, UPA’s help did not come as swiftly and easily as Saleem intended. He said there were logistical considerations and legal restrictions. These caused misunderstandings and delays. When Saleem finally traveled from the US and visited Nureddin in August, it didn’t take more than one minute for the two men to sense each other’s authenticity, and one minute later they had agreed on a way to disburse the money that satisfied everyone’s requirements.
Saleem told me later that Nureddin’s situation is harder to address than, for example, when UPA is asked to fund toys for a kindergarten. “The challenges are exaggerated because of the sensitivity of the issues and the magnitude of the project – whether and how he can rebuild or not is a legal and political issue.”
Nora: For Palestinians living under Israeli control, everything is political. And this makes me wonder, why do you respect the constraints rather than target them? Why do you abide by restrictions that aren’t legitimate, helpful or reasonable when they undermine your ability to do what you say you’re doing – to respond quickly to needs as they are defined locally?
Saleem: Nureddin has a full right to get the funds we raised for him in a timely manner so he can do what he needs to do. But we also have a responsibility to the dozens of donors who together contributed to Nureddin’s grant. That responsibility is defined legally in our role as a nonprofit organization in the United States; and morally we are obliged to allocate the funds for the purpose for which they were raised.Fulfilling these obligations sometimes requires procedures we don’t like, but our legal status depends on it.
Nora: Other donors, the ones who aren’t Palestinian, frequently cite “rules” to explain why there is a gap between their philosophy and their implementation. For example, a typical international NGO might say that if you don’t have a permit from the Israelis to rebuild, we won’t pay for your house because our commitment to donors means we cannot waste their money by building what will likely be demolished again. And that’s logical if you look only at cost-effectiveness. How is UPA different?
Saleem: When you talk about the Palestinian struggle and steadfastness, these are all political issues. But there is also a humanitarian dimension. When a home is demolished, families are subjected to violence, children are traumatized. We focus on the humanitarian aspects but we never forget that the humanitarian problem is caused by a political situation. For example, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to address the mental health needs of children in Gaza. These kids don’t need therapy, they need freedom. In an ideal world, life would be easier, the kids would have freedom. But in reality, they do need mental health support so we try to provide it.
Nora: If a donor is going to pay for mental health services in Gaza, does it matter whether the donor is Palestinian or not?
Saleem: Our founders are Palestinian-American, our Board is Palestinian-American and our director is Palestinian, and we see ourselves as a local organization and not as a donor organization. There’s a difference between organizations like UPA and ones that take government funding to implement humanitarian work in Palestine or elsewhere. What we do is we try to find legitimate and important needs in Palestinian communities and go raise the funds for them from our 25,000 donors, some of whom contribute only $2/month or $6 or $100, but their level of commitment is very high.
Nora: Does this high level of accountability to donors seep into a practice that looks like “donor-driven” philanthropy?
Saleem: This would be donor-driven if the donors dictated the need that they wish to fund. In our case our donors are responding to a need that has been decided locally; they do not set policy for any intervention.
Is UPA an example of solidarity philanthropy? It seems so when Saleem says, “Nureddin should be commended for his perseverance and we have to stand by him. How can we not stand by him?” But despite good intentions, UPA does seem mired in some of the same bureaucratic obstacles that face all actors working in Palestine who claim to be apolitical.
I leave the conversation wondering: What does it mean to “help Palestinians” unless one is helping Palestinians to achieve their political rights? What does it mean to be a “humanitarian actor,” Palestinian or not, in a political crisis?
Fortunately, the conversation is not over. Saleem Zaru is sincere in his commitment to continuous improvement, even when it means opening UPA to criticism. He says, “Those who are married to their ideas and get threatened by suggestions might as well be dead.”UPA is certainly not dead, and whether or not UPA has achieved the distinction of “solidarity donor,” it is definitely contributing to the conversation about what it means.
This article first appeared in Huffington Post.
One year after the August 26, 2014 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Abu Fathi Abu Jammous, his 8-month pregnant wife, and four children are living in a sweltering prefabricated caravan.
Abu Fathi’s house was totally destroyed in the brutal attack on Khuzaa in the southern Gaza Strip, and he was forced to move his family into an UNRWA school. “When Human Appeal UK offered the caravan, I felt lucky. Winter was coming. They said it would be temporary.” But one year later, Abu Fathi is still waiting for his home to be fixed.
The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated areas in the world and the 1.8 million Palestinian residents suffer from economy-crippling mobility restrictions. They survived an exceptionally cold winter, in which at least four babies died of exposure in temporary shelters, and are now enduring a summer of record-breaking heat.
During the day, Abu Fathi’s wife takes the children to her mother’s house; there is no money for air conditioning, and, in any case, electricity in most parts of the Gaza Strip is only supplied on an intermittent basis for 6-8 hours per day.
An estimated 28% of the population of the Gaza Strip was displaced at the height of the 50-day attack. Ten months later, the last UNRWA collective shelters were emptied, but displacement is still widespread. No one knows exactly how many people still live in the ruined remains of their homes, but according to the Shelter Cluster, a UN coordination body, well over 100,000 families (over half a million people) are still without adequate housing—including the 500 families residing in caravans.
Abu Fathi says his house reaches 55 degrees Celsius during the day. “My three-year old isn’t moving. I took her to the hospital and they said she’s sick from the heat. They gave her oxygen and provided pills and told me to keep her next to the refrigerator. She’s going to die,” he says frantically. “My six-year old is sick too. He suffers from an enlarged liver and soft bones. We’re all going to die and nobody cares.”
An aid worker who didn’t want to be quoted said that caravans in Khuzaa had been built hastily and poorly “as a public relations measure.” He added most caravan dwellers in Khuzaa had since abandoned them and moved in with relatives or any place they could. “Anyone still living in a caravan in Khuzaa today is truly in crisis.”
A big cause of the problem is that most of the funding for the Gaza Strip is restricted to humanitarian emergencies and cannot be used for permanent solutions. The same pattern happens after earthquakes and tsunamis – donors quickly move on to other emergencies, leaving long-term development needs unaddressed. The situation in the Gaza Strip is even more complex because the causes are political and chronic. One aid worker in Gaza confessed, “As far as I know, no one is planning what to do for these people when winter comes. It is a failure of the system. ”
The shortcomings of these forms of shelter are widely acknowledged globally: caravans are expensive, inadequate and often culturally unacceptable. Prefabricated shelters are therefore only intended to bridge the gap between emergency relief and durable solutions after natural disasters or conflict, but if durable solutions never arrive, then it’s not so much of a “gap” as it is a precipice. In disaster after disaster, “temporary solutions” end up lasting much longer than anticipated. Beneficiaries and aid organizations spend additional funds to fix or modify temporary structures, thereby depleting resources that could be allocated to durable solutions. Abu Fathi, an unemployed laborer, has invested over $1,000 in his caravan and it is still unlivable. Experience shows that extended reliance on temporary solutions can make aid beneficiaries vulnerable to new humanitarian crises.
Abu Fathi’s caravan is one of 50 provided by Human Appeal UK. Their spokesperson explained, “Due to pressures of time, volume, and availability of materials, we needed to provide shelter for as many people as possible, as quickly as possible and caravans were thought to provide better shelter than canvas. We have made some adjustments to make the caravans more comfortable, but they were only ever intended to be temporary structures so do have their limitations.”
Many parties share responsibility for the near-total absence of permanent reconstruction in the Gaza Strip. Whether the cause is donors who have not fulfilled their financial pledges (perhaps fearing their projects will be demolished by future assaults); the Israeli blockade and restrictions on imports of construction materials; or the internal Palestinian conflict between Fatah and Hamas, caravan dwellers do not know where to turn. Abu Fathi said, “The caravan seemed like a blessing at the time, but if I had known how hard life would be, I would have refused it. I don’t know what I would have done instead. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Beneficiaries in the Gaza Strip are in a conundrum and so are aid actors. The Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) was among several Arab donors who provided caravans conforming to the standards established by the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing Asked if QRCS planned to work further with the beneficiaries who received caravans, a QRCS staff person replied: “It doesn’t make any sense to throw more money at temporary solutions.” So, would QRCS help those in caravans to find permanent solutions? “Sadly, as long as Israel maintains its blockade on the Gaza Strip, there are no permanent solutions.”
For its part, Human Appeal UK said they were “exploring further options for improving the caravans to make them more comfortable,” but Abu Fathi fears it will not come in time.
This article first appeared in Cornerstone, the newsletter of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, Issue 72, Summer 2015, pp. 12-14.
Global citizens who care about justice often complement their social activism with financial gifts to organizations they believe in; and they often support their government’s use of tax funds to provide bilateral aid to developing countries. “Aid” means “help” and good people want to be helpful. They give from a sense of obligation, which is often grounded in faith, and in response to the opportunity to make a positive difference in the world.
Palestinians are among the highest recipients of international aid from governments and have been for decades, making them among the most aid-dependent peoples in the world. While most of us would consider aid a good thing, it is obvious that being dependent on aid is a bad thing. But the majority of concerned global citizens don’t realize just HOW bad it is. If they did, they would make aid accountability a priority among their Palestinian solidarity activities.
On one level, the problems with international aid in Palestine are just like the problems with aid that are reported in many parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia – aid is unpredictable and uncoordinated; it reflects priorities of donor countries not necessarily the recipients; it distorts the agenda of local governmental and civil society groups; it undermines accountability to communities in favor of bureaucratic accountability to donor institutions; much aid is repatriated back to donor country economies; and aid is often wasted on consumption and activities that don’t lead to real, long-term development.
Because of these problems, and because of the dialogue around the expiration of the Millennium Development Goals, activists in aid-recipient countries are working together to protest both the methods and the politics of international aid. They are moving beyond a technical critique that implies that we just need more aid, more transparent reporting, more harmonized procedures, and better use of data about what kind of development works. Instead, they are talking about “development justice” and integrating aid issues with other aspects of global inequality such as third world debt. Some are even talking about aid as a form of neo-colonial intervention designed to maintain inequality rather than challenge it and suggesting that poor people reject aid.
In Palestine, aid is such a prominent and visible part of life that even non-experts tend to be quite sophisticated about how it works. Perhaps this is because nearly everyone is directly or indirectly supported by aid. The largest employer, the Palestinian Authority, can’t pay salaries without international aid, and the Palestinian elite and middle class (upon whom the consumer and service industries depend) are nearly all employed by United Nations agencies, international non-governmental organizations or local non-governmental organizations that depend on grants from the internationals. There is really no part of the economy or aspect of life that isn’t affected by international aid.
For this reason, it doesn’t take long for a conversation about aid among Palestinians to turn to a gripe session. Unfortunately, complaining isn’t very effective in making change. Some people feel they should be grateful for donors’ generosity, so although they aren’t happy with aid, they silence themselves. Some people are fearful that if they complain, donors will stop giving, so they only make vague suggestions that can’t be implemented. Others talk about the problems with aid, but don’t address their complaints to the right parties, or don’t understand how to frame their complaints in terms of rights, so they aren’t taken seriously.
To help Palestinians understand the aid system and their rights in it, a group of Palestinian and international activists are launching Aid Watch Palestine, an initiative to start a conversation about aid that is honest, critical and constructive. We want to connect the issue of aid with the struggle for national liberation and with human rights.
For example:
By posing questions like these to Palestinians, aid actors and global citizens, Aid Watch Palestine hopes to challenge people who say, “We are doing the best we can under difficult circumstances.” We want to challenge ourselves to think more creatively about how international intervention can actually help – not by throwing money at the problem, but by addressing root causes of the conflict and further long-term solutions that respect human rights and international law.
Wanting to help isn’t good enough. After 67 years of “aid,” Palestinians are still occupied, dispossessed and colonized and vulnerable to violence, poverty and hopelessness. Where is the accountability? Concerned global citizens should still give, but we think they should ask harder questions about their government’s aid programs:
We also need a critical approach to our own charitable contributions:
This article first appeared on Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace.
Not infrequently, people ask me how community organizations can become independent of international funding. Part of the answer, I believe, lies in reformulating the question.
“Independence,” is a smokescreen. First world countries that claim to be independent are often dependent on the natural and human resources of the global south. Even donors who claim to be independent because they have endowments are hiding the fact that their resources were taken through exploitation of workers and sometimes from war.
Instead of asking how we can become independent, I suggest we ask how we can achieve “dignified interdependence” – a system of relationships that acknowledges that we are all giversand receivers and that recognizes our value to one another.
Here I propose six possible steps that civil society and community philanthropic organizations can take to become less dependent on international funding and more dignified in their interdependence:
1-Act as if you are poor
Poor people don’t take taxis when they can walk; they don’t eat in restaurants when they can cook. If community organizations want to be less dependent on international funding, they need to become more thoughtful about how they use the resources they have. Acting “as if you are poor” means looking hard at all expenses and cutting every possible unnecessary expense, starting with those that don’t contribute to the mission. One way to do this is by sharing with other community organizations and resisting pressure to compete. Does every organization need its own photocopy machine? Does every organization need its own video camera?
2-Act as if you’re rich (it sounds like a contradiction but it’s not)
Rich people don’t obsess about what they don’t have. They don’t say, “I can’t implement my project because it’s not funded.” Rich people have a sense of abundance, of being able to mobilize resources – even if they aren’t already in the bank. Acting “as if you’re rich” means being confident in your ability to use whatever resources you do have to get access to more resources.
3-Generate value from mission-related activities
If our activities are valuable, we should be able to generate resources from them in ways that serve the mission. The obvious way is to charge fees, which many civil society groups resist because they say their beneficiaries can’t pay. But therein lies the whole problem! If “we” are service providers and “they” are beneficiaries, then we’ve stripped them of their resources by framing them only as receivers. When we think in terms of sharing, and we realize the value of all resources (not only money), we not only increase resources available for our work, but we increase the community of supporters that are invested in the organization.
4-Generate money from non-mission-related activities
There are some examples of successful income generating initiatives, like the medical relief group that founded a printing press to produce their own materials and now brings in core funding for relief activities through printing services. However, I still think this option should be pursued with great caution. Not only can a community group get sidetracked trying to run a business (which is hard!), but working for profit is, in many ways, at odds with the kind of society social justice groups are trying to create.
5-Reject bad money
I suspect most civil society and community philanthropic organizations are reactive rather than proactive in fundraising. In other words, they respond to calls for proposals or announcements of grants. This leads to susceptibility to distortion of mission, especially if the grantseeking organization was not clear about its mission/identity/values in the first place.
But there is another way. We can, individually and collectively, decide what kind of donors we want to work with: Sincere? Politically supportive? Compliant with good donorship principles? And we can decide what kind of funding we want: Core? Multi-year? Large? Aimed at human rights? Easy to renegotiate? Submissions in local languages? Etc. We can take our demands to the donor community and tell them what kind of funding would support our objectives, rather than waiting to see if what they offer is “good enough.” We can control funding by not applying for aid that doesn’t meet our standards. But that will only work if we have standards — and if we believe that we have a right to have standards.
In fact, none of these ideas will work if we don’t believe in ourselves and one another. We must have confidence that we can survive without international funding. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t seek and accept funding, but we can’t build our activities, or our identity, around being in need of it.
Do you believe that we can survive without depending on international funding?
See the entire article on Civicus.
“The small Palestinian village of Saffa was the site of Dalia Association’s first pilot of community-controlled grant-making back in 2008. At first glance, the methodology didn’t make much sense. Why would we give small grants when the need was so great? Why would we give unrestricted grants when the risk was so high? Why would we expect the community to contribute so much when Palestinians are devastated by occupation, dispossession and colonisation?
As Palestine’s community foundation, Dalia approached the problem differently from traditional donors who are looking for some kind of return on investment. Dalia is not a donor: the funds that Dalia mobilises already belong to the Palestinian community. Dalia holds them in trust and facilitates transparent, democratic and accountable use of the funds, but it is the community’s right and responsibility to decide how they are used. This might sound like the same ‘participatory approach’ that is fashionable in development circles, but it is not. Dalia’s commitment to community-controlled grant-making is based on respect for the right of Palestinians to control their own resources. Community controlled grant-making is an expression of resistance – to the Israeli occupation and to dependence on aid, both of which undermine Palestinian self-determination….”
One year ago I celebrated my 50th birthday with the launch of a new Gaza Fund at Dalia Association. At the time I wrote that we should strengthen local leaders and local organizations before bad things happen. I suggested that we not only give money, time and raise our voices during wars, but that we take advantage of the periods of calm to invest, work preventively, focus on the long-term.
Of course I didn’t know that just a few months later Gaza would succumb to a terrible war, nor did I know that 8 months later things would be even worse. I didn’t know then that I would be compelled to put aside my novel to work on a new initiative – Aid Watch Palestine – to bring people together to re-envision aid so that it’s accountable to Palestinians and actually helps people.
Now, on the cusp of turning 51, my “profound” words are spoken out and my energy has dispersed. I work day and night to try to make a difference, but without much hope that I can. All around me are friends who are severely depressed, and with good reason.
So what do I want for my 51st birthday? I’m not going to say “peace on earth” or even “an end to the blockade on Gaza.” I’m going to ask for something every personal: I want to learn to find beauty in this ugly world and to find hope against all the evidence that there is none. But lest you say my wish is selfish, I wish this for us all. I wish for humanity to rise to our best selves. That would be a truly happy birthday.
The Gaza Strip from April 2-8, 2015 (but it felt like one year)
This is Kamal in front of his home in Beit Hanoun.
Kamal LOVED his garden and tried to help me imagine how beautiful it used to be. Later he showed me pictures on his phone and his colleagues at Oxfam went on and on about what a beautiful garden it had been and how much work he had put into it. This is what is left.
Kamal became very emotional when his cat jumped from behind a piece of metal into his arms. He said he felt ashamed that he was no longer able to take care of his own cat.
I had seen photos like these before — destroyed factories in Shujaeya. But seeing this factory (ice cream? juice? I forgot) with Kamal made it totally different. I could see reflected in his eyes how it used to be with people working, trucks coming and going, life in action. I could feel the tragedy in a way I hadn’t before.
This severely damaged nonprofit organization served people with disabilities. I found the name of it ironic given all the death: The Society for the Right to Life.
The only action in Shujaeya in the late afternoon were these young men picking up rubble. They took turns posing for pictures delivering rubble to a middleman who would sell it to be ground up and re-used.
I especially liked these two — cousins I think — who held up stones and said, “Five shekels! Tell the world that we work for five hours to earn 5 shekels! And every time they said, “five shekels” they broke into a hysterical laughter that made me laugh. Hard. Amazing.
And here’s a photo from a friend’s house that speaks volumes about the challenges of living in Gaza where electricity comes for 6 hours and then not again for 18 (or 8 on 16 off during good times). How do you use the bathroom at night when there is no electricity?
Still, Gaza is stunningly beautiful. From this balcony, you can see the least affected part of Gaza City, and it looks especially good because the destroyed buildings in the lower half of the photo have been cleared away (unlike Khuzaa and other places) — they were police buildings.
It was a productive trip. Here I am with the Steering Committee members from Gaza of our new initiative, Aid Watch Palestine (Jaber Qudih, left; Ibrahem Shatli, middle and Amal Zaqout, far right) and Heba, our team coordination assistant (2nd from right).
And here I am with Heba and 7 of the 9 writers who will write “glimpses of daily life” stories for the Aid Watch website (at a lovely new cafe).
And although I was really, really, really busy, I did spend a little time going around to talk to people about the reconstruction situation. Here is a cement distribution warehouse that was closed (smack in the middle of a work day).
And here is another cement distribution warehouse that was open but not operational. The manager let me take photos of the empty warehouse and explained that he expected a new shipment “any time now.” He gave me lots and lots of information about how bad the cement situation is, including how he personally had been assessed for cement back in September, but he has yet to receive any information about whether he’ll be getting any cement or when. He also talked about the irony of how people who need cement badly get approved after waiting long period but then don’t have the money to buy the cement, or they borrow money to buy cement and then sell it at a profit on the black market to buy food, since they don’t have enough money to do the repairs to their home anyway.
There was some steel (also tightly controlled because it is considered “dual use” by Israel).
And yes, the place was monitored by camera.
We finally found one cement distribution warehouse in Jabalia City that actually had cement!
Customers were very happy to get it, but there were surprisingly few.
But the manager of the facility was not so happy. He said he’s obligated to accept truckloads without inspecting them, and when he finds damaged materials like these, he’s not allowed to return them. That’s the problem with monopoly.
Then we stopped in to watch some work being done to construct a temporary shelter caravan funded by Jordan.
I was told this is a high quality caravan because the walls are insulated, unlike some of the others.
The caravan is a big improvement over the makeshift home the family is living in now on the site of their demolished home.
The mom was younger than I am but had 11 children (two died in the last war and one permanently disabled). Her grown daughter was sweeping the dirt floor when I arrived. They made me fresh lemonade.
I really liked this woman. Her name is Ghalya.
In case you were wondering, Hamas signs are visible. One time the car I was in was stopped at a checkpoint. The officer said he wanted to remind us to pray for the prophet.
United Nations and international NGO signs are also everywhere like at this World Health Organization voucher distribution center (which was not too busy, for reasons I don’t know).
I was very fortunate to be hosted by dear friends, Najla and Jason Shawa in their super comfortable home — despite the difficulty I had keeping track of which water was for drinking, which for hair washing, and which for body washing. I got to play with baby Zoozoo and meet Najla’s famous (and super nice) mom, Rawya.
As I posted on Facebook earlier today, there is only one word to describe what is happening in Gaza: betrayal.
