Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground: The Case of Palestine

Nadia Hijab, Middle East Policy, Aug 3, 2007

This article was originally published by Middle East Policy and is republished with the author's permission.

Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground: The Case of Palestine, by Michael Keating, Anne Le More and Robert Lowe. Chatham House Publishers, 2006

Why has $6 billion of taxpayers’ money given in aid to Palestinians between 1993 and 2004 not staved off a collapse of the Palestinian economy, polity and society? Why do donors provide aid, given Israel’s obligations as an occupying power, and fund major infrastructure projects that Israel then destroys? Aid in the absence of a political agreement can do more harm than good, by funding the occupation, postponing the national agenda, creating unaccountable elites, co-opting the leadership needed to achieve freedom and justice, and making donors feel good and powerful, among other things. See, for example, the essays by Nigel Roberts and Rex Brynen on the PA’s system of patronage, and Jeff Halper’s honest and insightful essay into ways to provide solidarity without reinforcing the skewed power dynamic. The problem with the "both sides" approach is that the Israeli settlement enterprise is a clear attempt by one side to settle the conflict in a way that destroys the other side’s national and human rights. The participation in the present Israeli cabinet of far right nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, whose views on "transfer" of Israeli Arab citizens out of the state have been described as racist by many Israelis, does not emerge out of a vacuum but is well within the broad Israeli policy framework.

I would take the analysis a step further and argue that Israel’s strategy has remained unchanged since the earliest days of Zionism: to give life to the myth of "a land without a people for a people without a land." Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank is a clear continuation of the Zionist movement’s five-decades-long settler policy in pre-1948 Palestine. The unwillingness to give up the dream of a Greater Israel in a land as people-less of Palestinians as possible explains the determination to avoid the two-state solution.

As the authors compellingly show, the deliberate policy of closure of Gaza that Israel planned all along as part of its unilateral disengagement could provide an answer to Israel’s "demographic dilemma": civil war among Palestinians. This would result in Palestinians engaging in "self-ethnic cleansing" rather than Israel’s having to do it. This interpretation seems too much of a horror to be true, but it is borne out by the facts on the ground today and the history of the past century.

No one is proposing a cut-off of humanitarian aid. Rather, the aim must be to end the situation that makes aid necessary. The best way forward for the Palestinians, Israelis and the world is to finally apply international law to the conflict, as is well articulated in Claude Bruderlein’s very interesting paper on human security, and Karma Nabulsi’s compelling analysis of the de-democratization of the Palestinian body politic as a result of Oslo, and other papers.

There is a strong element of hypocrisy in the aid boycott of Hamas when "both sides" use measures that violate international law (attacks on civilians by Palestinians, as well as by Israelis, in addition to targeted assassinations, home demolitions, collective punishment, land confiscations and the occupation itself), when Israel blatantly does not recognize past agreements or Palestinian national rights, and when someone like Lieberman serves in the Israeli cabinet.

Providing Israel with huge amounts of aid as well as preferential trade access and other benefits in both Europe and the United States has clearly convinced Israel there is no price to pay for its destruction of Palestinian national rights.

The , Europeans have much more of an interest than the United States in the stability of the region, given their proximity, and they also have considerable clout though they prefer not to admit it. Just a hint that the EU may be considering the application of Article 2 of its trade-association agreement with Israel, which provides for upholding human rights, would do a great deal to get the Israeli government’s attention.

The other option is for donors to witness and collude in the physical, social and political destruction of a people, and, with it, the whole body of international law that the human race put in place during the twentieth century to avoid other global conflagrations that would end its time on earth.

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Nadia Hijab is a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and former UN development officer.