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?

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….”