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 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:

• If Israel is responsible under international humanitarian law for rebuilding Gaza, why are the international donors paying, thus letting Israel off the hook completely for the costs of their damages?

• If international actors are intervening because of a humanitarian imperative, how can they justify the shamefully slow pace of rebuilding in Gaza?

• If international actors truly wish to prevent further violence, why do they allow Israel to profit so much from occupation and war?

• How can international actors credibly claim to be helping while they are simultaneously supporting the Israeli war machine?

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:

• Is aid intended to further the donor government’s foreign policy objectives? Or is it intended to respect the priorities, rights and agendas of recipient communities?

• How are decisions about aid allocations made? Who makes them? Who chooses the decision-makers?

• Does aid only address the symptoms of suffering or does it address the root causes, fundamentally changing power relations?

• What kind of global economic and political system is advanced by international aid and is it contributing to the kind of world we want to live in?

We also need a critical approach to our own charitable contributions:

• Are we giving to international organizations when there are local organizations doing the same work? If so, why are we doing that, and what impact does it have on the capacity for local self-reliance?

• Are we giving to “emergency” needs (like food aid) instead of to longer-term (and harder) efforts to prevent food insecurity in the first place? If so, are we being fooled into supporting simplistic and ineffective approaches?

• Are we making charitable contributions when what is really needed is our political intervention so that we can find just solutions? If so, how can we combine ever act of financial giving with a call to a representative, letter to the media, or public statement of support for a government policy that will lead to self-determination and peace with justice?