Decolonizing Foreign Aid to Palestinian Civil Society?
by Toufic Haddad*
The call to decolonize foreign aid to Palestinian civil society raises a series of structural issues that need to be addressed before practicalities and courses of action. It should be acknowledged from the start that foreign aid to Palestinian civil society has historically represented no more than 20 to 25 percent of the total aid to come to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) since 1993.
The majority of foreign aid to the OPT does not actually go to Palestinian civil society but is channeled through the Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee, which is the Oslo process’ inter-funder coordination mechanism.
This group of the top 15 donor countries, sets the priorities, parameters, and volumes of the development aid flows to the OPT bi-annually, with the United Nations system and the Palestinian Authority (PA) being the largest benefactors of these aid streams.
In the past, major donor states have justified their interventions as “supporting the Israel-Palestinian peace process”, subsequently supporting “peacebuilding” activities (between 1993-2000); then “reforming” the Palestinian Authority [PA] (2000—2005), and, most recently, “statebuilding” (2006 – 2012). But today the ‘do good’ veneer of foreign aid has collapsed, and no broad basis for donor activity remains.
The bases of donor activity has always been suspicious and problematic, as repeatedly demonstrated over the course of the past thirty years. After the Camp David summit in June 2000, the main donor states blamed PLO Chairman and PA president Yasser Arafat for the failure of negotiations, arguing that ‘PA corruption’ – rather than Israel’s continued and historical violations of international law – explained the talk’s collapse.
Donor states also consistently turn a blind eye to Israel’s selective implementation of the Oslo Accords and accelerated settlement construction across the OPT. Despite the fact that the total settler population doubled between 1993 and 2000, no sanction or penalty was ever imposed by these states against Israel.
Donor state bias was most evident in the wake of the 2006 Hamas electoral victory, when the US attempted to finance a coup against the new government and ensured that all donor states maintained a financial and political siege over it. This showed that donor states were more interested in ensuring Fateh’s exclusive dominance over the PA, rather than supporting Palestinian democracy.
Naturally, these maneuvers ensured that the Palestinian political sphere and leadership remained weak and divided both internationally and locally, allowing Israel to continue its settlement drive while enclosing and fragmenting Palestinians.
Under these circumstances, the majority of donor aid cannot be characterized as engaging in ‘conflict resolution’. At best, donor aid is a form of ‘conflict management,’ and at worst, something far more insidious, serving to constitute and regenerate the conflict.
Foreign aid has been, and continues to be, a form of political intervention within intra-Palestinian political relations to stifle Palestinian democratic and national aspirations. These interventions serve to neutralize and maintain the broader political situation, keeping Palestinians divided and dependent, while Israel gets a free pass for its violations of international law.
In sum, the majority of foreign aid to the OPT should be described as akin to a toxic cocktail of formaldehyde and opium.
Contextualizing Foreign Aid in the Big Picture
Many of the most important states that channel aid to the OPT– mainly the US and most Western European states - also have the strongest relations with Israel, providing vital financial, military, and diplomatic aid and privileges since Israel’s founding. Since 1967, the US alone has contributed at least USD$280 billion, primarily for military aid.
These astronomical sums have played a key role in developing the research and development capacity of the nascent Israeli state, transforming it into the high-tech military industrial juggernaut it is today. As a result, Israel has become a leader in military technologies – such as ‘anti-terror’ techniques, cyber security and weapons, drones, and integrated algorithmic approaches to population control and behavior – that have a high value in the global marketplace.
Moreover, Israel is unapologetically a prominent and key strategic ally for US and Western European interests in the region. The now well-documented reality of apartheid in historic Palestine is ignored by donors, because these states ultimately financed it. US and EU aid literally paid for the dual road system across the West Bank, so that settlers could move freely across it. Donor states do not even take tangible action against settlement businesses, institutions, and donors – even when these entities operate openly racist enterprises in their own states, and for purposes that international law deems ‘war crimes.’
This situation calls for a modicum of intellectual honesty: the main donor states, the US and Western Europe, provide enormous aid and benefits to Israel so that it maintains hegemony over the regional (Arab) and local (Palestinian) order. Far less sums are channeled to the PA, as a dependent, largely security-oriented governance structure, to curtail the possibility of Palestinian democracy, unity, or national rights.
Fractional amounts of aid end up being channeled to Palestinian civil society organizations, although even these sums have increasingly dried up in the face of political conditions attached to them that restrict financing through ‘anti-terror’ and ‘anti-incitement’ clauses, or those that work to curb ‘anti-Semitic activity‘.
In this light, aid to the OPT cannot and should not be hived off from the question of foreign aid to Israel. In this context, what does the call to decolonize foreign aid to Palestinian civil society actually mean? And from where does this call actually emerge?
It is hardly surprising to hear a growing number of voices emerging from within Palestinian civil society demanding that aid coming to the OPT, and to the civil society sector in particular, serve a decolonization agenda.
The call to decolonize foreign aid inherently recognizes that foreign aid is part of the colonial agenda, whether directly or indirectly, and that it is in no way benign or impartial. In fact, the majority of foreign aid should be seen as a key ingredient in the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ that ensures it unfolds in line with Israeli and Western interests for the region.
Efforts to decolonize foreign aid to the OPT should actually start with ending foreign aid and privileges to Israel. Any discussion on improving aid flows and conditions to the OPT is meaningless without speaking of the significantly larger aid, including military aid, that these donor countries provide to Israel - the aggressor state subjugating the Palestinian people.
It is artificial to differentiate funding to Israel from funding to the OPT, given that the funding policies of ‘upstream’ donor states towards either are formed in relation to one another, to further these states’ collective interest in protecting Israel and ensuring its regional position.
Consequently, the aid that actually does make its way to the Palestinians – be this to the PA or civil society groups – fundamentally should be seen as aid provided to the junior party to this arrangement.
The Palestine Question in the Eyes of Donors
From the perspective of donor states, the Palestinians are impossible to ignore altogether because they represent more than 50% of the population ‘between the river and the sea,’ and continue to resist Zionist colonialism and occupation.
At the same time, these states have much more ‘important’, overriding considerations and agendas that they are keen to safeguard - namely, the ‘security’ of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ and reliable Western ally in the region.
As a result of this positionality, these states try to ‘buy off’ and neutralize the Palestinian question through aid and policy instruments. On account of how fraught this agenda is with contradictions, there is no set formula for how to realize these ends, and at what cost.
Donors have thus been periodically forced to revise their policies and aid flows, to manage a complex and ever-changing local, regional, and international landscape. This largely explains the context in which the call to decolonize foreign aid to Palestinian civil society groups arises.
From a Western, capitalist perspective, Israel’s strategic global significance is increasing while that of Palestinians is decreasing.
This became especially true after the Arab revolutions of 2011 shook the regional order and led to the fall of pro-Western allies. Israel was increasingly seen as the only reliable and stable Western ally in the region, while many, if not all Arab leaders, were seen as precarious and subject to the unpredictable potential of revolutionary upheavals.
The US is also in the process of repositioning itself regionally, such as by withdrawing from Afghanistan and most of Iraq. These policy redirections, particularly after the major global financial crises of 2008, diminished US influence in the region.
The US and Western European states in turn have encouraged more open alliances between Arab states and Israel, and the formalization of these once secret relations in normalization pacts like the ‘Abraham Accords’. Israel has been informally been delegated by the Western donor states to act as a kind of subcontractor for Western interests in the region, performing roles previously undertaken in secret, and/or shared with the US and its European allies.
It is equally worth noting that the ongoing war in Eastern Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made Israel an alternative gas supplier for a Russia-dependent Europe. To this effect, Israel signed a pact with Egypt and the EU in June 2022, to supply the latter with 10% of what it formerly received from Russian pipelines.
This backdrop of shifting global pressures and power dynamics helps explain why there is less tolerance for the Palestinian political question today within US and European political circles. It also partly explains why there still is a need to decolonize foreign aid to Palestinian civil society.
Increased measures to restrict, police, bully and persecute Palestinian civil activity, discourse, and fundraising efforts, stem from a basic intolerance towards the Palestinian issue overall. This intolerance has been building ever since the end of the second intifada, and since the consolidation of the Palestinian political realm’s division between Fateh and Hamas (as of 2007).
The entire Palestinian question has been demoted in terms of its political relevance as Western powers maneuver to ensure that they maintain regional influence. Palestinian civil society groups have felt the downstream effects of these policy shifts because the intellectual tendencies and political parties represented by these groups are viewed as inherently in opposition to the Oslo process.
Prior to the creation of the PA, engagement with these groups was unavoidable because they represented the intellectual elite and organizational networks that provided many essential services to the Palestinian people. The donor community also feared that if marginalized, these groups would organize against the Accords and the PA.
However, today these groups are no longer seen as ‘monopolizing’ service provision, and, in many cases, have been out-maneuvered by the PA, its ministries, and its services – all under the auspices of donor aid.
This means Palestinian civil society groups – especially those with ‘harder’ political orientations – are viewed as less politically relevant, or are even ‘dangerous’, and thus subject to being ‘cut down to size’ in response to shifting global and regional political winds.
It is also worth noting that many Palestinian NGOs are seen as financially captive to donor preconditions, and their continued existence functionally acts as a nagging and humiliating reminder of the brutal system donor states sanction across the OPT today.
Decolonizing Aid to Palestine?
What then can or should be done about this obscene situation, especially considering the impetus to ‘decolonize’?
Not all foreign aid that comes to the OPT is inherently colonial. Throughout its history, the Palestinian cause has moved and stirred people politically, creating a rich tradition of aid given in solidarity. As this has been instrumental to supporting the Palestinian people and leadership, it is critical to encourage its continuation and expansion.
But the majority of aid given to the OPT is not solidarity aid, but political aid that aims to serve a malfeasant agenda. Donors have shamelessly attempted to twist the arm of the Palestinian movement through political conditions attached to aid. These efforts must end as focus should be placed on holding Israel accountable for its crimes and addressing the international community’s condoning and facilitation of Israeli crimes.
Ending privileged aid to Israel and the normalization of Israeli and Zionist colonial practices will have a substantially more meaningful impact on Palestinian well-being and human rights, than simply increasing the quantity of aid or removing conditions on aid to Palestine.
While the latter can and should be supported, the more crucial and effective course of action is to cease the means by which crimes that subjugate Palestinians are facilitated.
Rather than a financially intensive commitment – albeit one that cannot be ignored – ending aid to Israel entails greater social and political organization, primarily within donor states themselves. It requires movement building on broad and targeted agendas, pin-pointing the constellation of key actors, institutions, relations, and aid flows through which donor states support Israeli crimes.
Commercial, state, civic, and cultural alliances between Israel and its Zionist periphery in the US and Western Europe represent the primary strategic front for ending the daily and historic crimes that take place in Palestine today. It is critical to research, identify, map, and prioritize understanding these links in order to expose and confront them more effectively. Broad coalitions of actors within these states and beyond, must be mobilized around such an agenda to impose it upon their governments, as the ruling elites who currently oversee donor aid to both Israel and the OPT cannot be relied upon to change their policies without effective pressure.
The conversation about decolonizing foreign aid to Palestinian civil society thus needs to begin with a broader, fundamental discussion on the conditions necessary for Palestinian civil society to exist and function in the first place. The current structure of donor aid operates in a context of continued colonization, occupation and apartheid, and cannot realistically or sustainably serve any civil or civic agenda detached from this political reality. Presently, donor aid aims to effectively neutralize the Palestinian question in its entirety, and sees the marginalization of Palestinian civil society as necessary to this end – especially its Islamist and leftist manifestations which are framed as ‘spoilers’. For those who cannot be fit into this category, donor aid effectively aims to transform civic groups and the Palestinian Authority as a whole, into collaborators or bureaucratic and security subcontractors of occupation.
Neither is conducive to the advancement of genuine civil or liberal norms, nor to effective stability either vis-à-vis Israel or within Palestinian society. The past thirty years has effectively demonstrated this, with a staggering number of lives lost and money spent paying the price of claiming otherwise.
* Dr. Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian academic and author whose work focuses on the political economy of development. He is the author of “Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory” (IB Tauris, 2016) - a study that explores the work of international finance institutions and donor states in the oPt since 1993.