Palestine experiences not only the material military occupation of the Israeli military but also the ideological and economic occupation of capitalism.
We’ve met with a variety of organizations and individuals throughout the delegation, from LAYLAC to the PSCC, and they have nearly all recounted that foreign NGOs have infiltrated Palestinian political, social and economic spheres. As families we met with in Nabi Saleh recounted, they have seen millions of dollars invested into various projects throughout their area- and the rest of Palestine- with no sustainable results. But this is not the goal of any of those I’ve met with: a member of the Tamimi family succinctly stated they want “not supporters, but partners.”
NGO’s are critical to the functioning of modern capitalism, as they allow for colonizers to redirect insignificant amounts of resources back to their peripheral territories. Their role as the mechanism for this flow cannot be overstated: a Charity Industry is critical in maintaining a smile on the face of capitalism, shielding it from any criticism that it does not care about the humanity of others.
Driving through the West Bank, there is an uncountable number of small, sometimes unkempt buildings with signs larger, or at least more visible, than the projects themselves bolted to the front declaring in no uncertain terms that the viability of “project x” was provided by the generous funds from “country/organization y”. Seeing these structures, and the signs in particular, the purpose is obviously clear: whitewash international complicity with the occupation by funneling large but ultimately insignificant amounts of cash into a project which looks nice on crisp paper in air conditioned offices but does nothing in the long term for those who directly experience Israeli apartheid.
Over 100 years ago, Oscar Wilde stated as much:
[People] find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this…it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it…Charity creates a multitude of sins…It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.
Indeed, the NGO crisis in Palestine is not only a part of the problem but an aggravation of the Zionist project which created the conditions that they claim to be primarily addressing. The money gifted to these NGO’s, especially those coming from countries such as the US, Turkey, Russia, or the EU, who are directly profiting from the death of Palestinians even outside of Palestine itself, like in Syria, is horrifically hypocritical. If a single foreign NGO-or country- felt they wanted to legitimately partner with Palestinians to make their lives measurably better, they would immediately abandon band-aid projects and begin working on ending Israeli apartheid and occupation.
Ultimately, sustainable results will be those that end the military occupation, abolish Israeli apartheid both in reality and legality, and manifest the right of return. In other words, for any international NGO that would want to actually do something, anything, for Palestinians, they would immediately begin supporting BDS. Contrary to the arguments that pervade popular discourse, in the US and France particularly, these tactics are “the most passive political act that anyone can commit” as Kwame Ture reminded us in 1967. By participating in boycotts, divestment campaigns, and even the encouragement of sanctions of Israel until they comply with these three basic demands, we in the US and Europe are simply-utterly simply- saying that we will not have Palestinian blood on our hands.
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