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Humanitarianism: Prolonging the Palestinian Political Plight?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Edited Transcript
of Remarks by Dr. Ilana
Feldman
Transcript No. 323 (1 February 2010)
To view the
video of this briefing online, go
toTranscript No. 323 (1 February 2010)
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/8956/pid/3584
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
27 January 2010
Dr. Ilana Feldman:
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak here today. I don’t think actually I’m going to offer any solutions for the catastrophe facing Palestinians but I do want to reflect a bit on some of the challenges surrounding--thinking about what the Palestinians are experiencing in humanitarian terms. I’ll really be focusing on Gaza but I think that some of these issues are broadly relevant.
Last winter, a few months after the devastating Israeli attacks on Gaza in January 2009, a young Capitol Hill staffer came to see me. I’ve learned, now that I’ve been working in DC for a few years, that this kind of thing happens. It never happened to me when I lived in New York. This young man’s boss was a congressman interested in bringing greater attention to conditions in Gaza – an admirable and very rarely pursued goal. As we talked about possible subjects and people that might speak at any hearings on the subject, the staffer commented to me that the main point that the congressman hoped to get across was that pasta was a humanitarian item, not a security threat.
What he was referencing in this comment, some of you may have heard this story, was a widely reported story that when [U.S.] Senator John Kerry visited Gaza last February he discovered that Israel was not permitting deliveries of pasta as part of the food aid going into Gaza. According to reporting in Ha’aretz, when Kerry asked about this, UN officials told him that “Israel does not define pasta as part of humanitarian aid – only rice shipments.” It was only after Kerry’s interference that pasta was allowed in. Much of the commentary on this story focused on the ridiculous and seemingly arbitrary definition by Israel of what constituted humanitarian aid. And much of what people demanded in response was that the full range of humanitarian goods be permitted entry into Gaza. The demand, that is, was for better, more comprehensive, more real humanitarianism. This is what I took to be the import of the hill staffer’s comments about this as well.
Given the devastation in Gaza as a result of both air and ground assaults and the tremendous need among Gazans, the insistence on humanitarian access is both understandable and well placed. What I want to talk about today, though, are some of the potential dangers of identifying the situation in Gaza primarily in humanitarian terms. I want to reflect on several aspects of what could be called the humanitarianism problem in Gaza by considering both how humanitarianism is sometimes deployed as a strategy for frustrating Palestinian aspirations and the often unintended political effects of the most well-intentioned humanitarian interventions. In thinking about the problems of Gaza’s present, I also return to an earlier historical moment, namely the immediate aftermath of the Nakba in 1948, and consider how some of these same challenges were thought about and addressed at the time.
Evaluating humanitarian effects requires identifying what is humanitarian action. One challenge here is that there is no single definition of humanitarianism, nor an agreed upon form of intervention or area of jurisdiction. Rather, humanitarianism is a field defined by debate: should it address the political causes of disaster, or limit itself to addressing its effects? Should it focus only on alleviating immediate suffering, or undertake development projects that might have more structural impact? Should humanitarian actors consider the use of force to support their missions, or must they reject an alliance with militarism as antithetical to their ethic? Irrespective of the differences that exist among the people and agencies who define their work as humanitarian, all such action requires identifying the situations which demand intervention. Naming causes and identifying victims is crucial to what Didier Fassin calls humanitarianism’s “politics of life.” This underscores a point that is often lost in the heated debates about whether humanitarianism should be political. Whatever its intents and however carefully delimited its mandate, humanitarianism always has political effects.
Among what have been called the “paradoxes of humanitarian action” are the possibilities that humanitarian intervention may prolong conflicts which cause the suffering it seeks to alleviate; that principles of neutrality and confidentiality may impede calling perpetrators to account; that, in serving as gateways to assistance, procedures of refugee identification and registration may impose restrictions on victims’ actions; and that the need to mobilize international compassion to support humanitarian endeavors may involve some degree of exploitation of people’s suffering. Thinking about the effects of humanitarian naming and action on causes and victims respectively provides one way to explore this very complicated terrain.
The possibility that humanitarian intervention can impede resolving the situation is of great concern to humanitarian actors. Few humanitarian agencies would consider it within their purview to work actively towards such a resolution, and indeed, most see their recusal from involvement in political processes as crucial to their ability to accomplish their goals. At the same time, they hope that carving out of a humanitarian space within which they can protect lives and alleviate suffering will provide local actors with the political space in which to conclude conflicts and adjudicate responsibility. That warring parties may use the breathing room or even the services that humanitarianism provides to extend their campaigns is a source of great anguish for these agencies.
Humanitarian action’s impact on recipients of aid can be equally contradictory. By reducing people to their victim status--in part by requiring them to appear as exemplary victims and not political actors in order to receive recognition of their suffering, and in part as a by-product of exigencies of aid delivery that restrict their capacities to act--humanitarianism can contribute to the production of what a few people have called a “limited humanity.” Humanitarian agencies depend heavily on donations from governments, foundations and individuals and in turn on the mobilization of compassion. The global circulation of images of suffering becomes a necessity for transforming emotion into donations. At the same time, even if there are these restrictions, there are ways in which humanitarian action, without meaning to, can serve as a space from which people can act politically and can provide a language to press such claims. Limit and possibility are linked in humanitarianism’s effects on those it seeks to help.
I’m sure that all of you have been following, as I have, the coverage of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. The response to this situation illuminates exactly the challenges of humanitarianism that I have been discussing thus far. The victim position, which I’ll talk about in more detail for the Palestinian case, is a precarious one. A variety of commentators have offered readings of the circumstances in Haiti that work against this purity of suffering. I’ll leave aside Pat Robertson’s claim that it was a pact with the devil that has produced repeated catastrophes in Haiti. A more sober-minded commentator, David Brooks, doesn’t blame Haitians for the earthquake itself, but does suggest that their culture may be to blame for much of their suffering. In writing for the New York Times, he said:
Haiti, like most of
the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a
complex web of progress-resistant cultural
influences. There is the influence of the
voodoo religion, which spreads the message that
life is capricious and planning futile. . . .
Responsibility is often not internalized. . . .
We’re all supposed to politely respect each
other’s cultures. But some cultures are more
progress-resistant than others, and a horrible
tragedy was just exacerbated by one of
them.
These kinds of analyses--of Haitians as too backwards, too poor, too violent--have a direct impact not only how people think about what’s going on in Haiti but on the delivery of aid on the ground.
Concerns about the security of aid workers (and it is not at all clear how much of these concerns are actually warranted) have significantly restricted aid deliveries. Again, a lot of people have probably seen the CNN reporting about doctors pulling out of a makeshift hospital at night out of fear of what might happen. But that when the CNN doctor remained no problems materialized. We can leave aside for the moment another problem here that’s been emerging, the doctor-reporter-hero image in the humanitarian scenario. One article discussing these problems of aid delivery in Haiti puts it as: “fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue.” Essentially, aid workers are afraid of Haitians and this is getting in the way of the capacity to deliver aid.
According to other reports on the circumstance, the security restrictions that are imposed on aid workers by governments, by agencies, impede the ability of international organizations to tap into local resources and capacities. Democracy Now reported recently that are Haitians with access to water – people had wells – people had trucks that could deliver the water, lacked only the gasoline to make those deliveries. Because of a long-standing restriction on international personnel moving freely in Haiti, restrictions imposed by the U.S. and other funders out of concern for the security situation and for their safety, most foreign organizations, or many at least, do not seem to have adequate local contacts to be able to coordinate with people on the ground and to help this material support get to people. I am not a Haiti expert by any means. And obviously the situation on the ground there is fluid and changing, but I think the response to that disaster and crisis brings up so many issues that are relevant to what I’m talking about today that I wanted to at least mention it. But now to return to Gaza.
Conditions in Gaza have gotten steadily worse since the start of the second intifada in 2000, deteriorating at an accelerated pace since 2006 and reaching an apogee in the recent Israeli military assault on the territory. As new levels of depredation are reached, the situation has regularly been described as the Strip’s most profound humanitarian crisis since 1948. Given that the Nakba serves as an ever-present comparison, it is helpful to look back at the humanitarian response to this earlier moment and its complicated effects on Palestinian life and community. This earlier experience confirms that, however narrowly humanitarian agencies may seek to define their missions, however carefully they adhere to humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence, the effects of such aid are widespread and long-lasting. The assumption that aid agencies’ non-political approach will have no political impact is a fallacy.
The Nakba created serious political and humanitarian problems in Gaza and in other areas where Palestinians fled in the course of the war over the establishment of Israel. The international response to this situation addressed the primarily the latter; the humanitarian problems. The [United Nations] UN, recognizing both the crisis and the responsibility of the international community to do something about it, responded first by commissioning organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to provide assistance to refugees, and later by establishing the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refuges (UNRWA) to deliver this aid. When UNRWA was created in 1950, its mission was to provide relief and other assistance to Palestinians who had lost their land and livelihoods, been displaced from their homes, were in need of assistance and resided in places close to historic Palestine (Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) or in areas of Palestine that did not become part of Israel (the West Bank and Gaza).
Sixty years after this initial intervention, Gazans continue to reflect on the effects of humanitarian relief and often express very mixed feelings about receiving UN aid at all. Abu Salim, a refugee from Majdal (now the Israeli city of Ashkelon), whom I interviewed during my field research in Gaza in the late 90s, recalled advice he had received from an American relief worker at the time: “This food you eat from UNRWA – I want to tell you something, but do not say that I told you: if you reject the provisions and do not eat, then 20 people will die because of hunger, and then they will take you back soon to your original homes.” Abu Salim went on to comment, “But we did not have that awareness. If we told people to do that, they would refuse.” Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere identified relief as a right (a recognition of international responsibility for their plight), but at the same time they worried that availing themselves of that right might hinder their realization of fundamental political rights, particularly their right to return to their homes. There is no easy answer to the political dilemmas produced by humanitarianism; not in 1948 and not now.
Although all Palestinian refugees shared the anguish and anxiety of the Nakba experience, and most ultimately came under UNRWA jurisdiction, each space of refuge, whether Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, etc., had its own particularities. The Gaza Strip, which came under Egyptian Administration after 1948, was not part of any existing sovereign state. Gaza’s provisional borders were defined by the 1949 Armistice Agreement between Israel and Egypt. Its entire population was Palestinian; the pre-war population of around 80,000 native Gazans was dwarfed by the influx of 250,000 refugees from cities and villages to the north and east of Gaza. All of these factors shaped initial relief projects in Gaza, most of which involved efforts to consolidate and negotiate the new categories of refugee and native as the dominant population and socioeconomic distinctions in Gaza. Those who qualified as refugees received UN aid. Those who did not, including people who remained in their own houses but had lost their lands and livelihoods, were not eligible for this assistance.
In circumstances where much of the native population had lost its land (which now lay on the other side of the border of what had become Israel), even if not displaced from their homes, the creation of operational distinctions, distinctions that were necessary to manage the delivery of relief among the post-Nakba population of the Gaza Strip – these distinctions both were necessary to fit an emerging post-war international humanitarian order and at the same time you have an international newly universalizing definition of what a refugee was going to be and to fit the specific UN mandate for aid to Palestinian refugees – these distinctions clashed with the humanitarian impulse to assist all of those who were in need. So eventually native Gazans’ acute need, and it was quite an acute need for help, was met by other ways. The Egyptian government and organizations like CARE provided aid to this population, and some number of native Gazans made their way onto the ration rolls, either through fraudulent registrations or through the category of Gaza poor. As I have detailed elsewhere, the effects of these population distinctions extended far beyond matters of material assistance. One effect was to help establish these categories as ‘refugee’ and ‘native’ as crucial social and political markers of difference within the community. People in Gaza interacted, and in many ways continue to interact, through these categories and to make claims about national values and political positions in relation to them.
The early humanitarian experience in Gaza confirms that operational categories of aid, along with mechanisms such as refugee camps and rations through which such aid is disbursed, have social and political effects beyond the realm of the humanitarian order. As such, these categories form the materials out of which people identify themselves and their communities and through which they speak to each other and to the broader international community. Humanitarianism does not wholly shut down politics; rather, it helps shape a political field of identity and action in ways that are not within the control of either aid workers or aid recipients.
Thinking about the effects on Gaza of the first relief projects can help clarify some of the stakes of the current humanitarian response. Both 1948 and 2009 on into 2010 are entirely man-made disasters. The first the result of war and Israel’s refusal to allow refugees to return to their homes, the second the result of both the ongoing blockade of the territory as part of a strategy to depose the Hamas-led government and of last year’s Israeli military assault. Humanitarianism is not an arena well-suited for pursuing accountability. Its cause is the redress of suffering, not the crafting of political and military strategies to halt the actions and structures that produce this suffering. The humanitarian assistance provided to displaced and dispossessed Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere did not bring them closer to their primary goal: to return to their homes. It did, however, have significant effects. As I’ve suggested, chief among them was the consolidation of the category of the refugee as a means of humanitarian intervention and distinction, and the creation of the identity and experience of the refugee as a crucial element in Palestinian politics. Responses to Gaza’s current crisis will undoubtedly give rise to new products of humanitarian intervention. What these products will be is not entirely predictable, but we need to think about these possibilities as we evaluate current efforts.
Since its 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has simultaneously claimed and disavowed a humanitarian relationship to the occupied Palestinian population by presenting itself as being motivated by humanitarian compassion even as it rejects the idea that it has any clearly defined humanitarian obligations. It is, in part, the indeterminacies in humanitarianism itself that enable such an apparently contradictory stance. Israel rejected the claim that it had any legal responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Palestinian population from the outset of the occupation, while also affirming that it would nonetheless “respect its ‘humanitarian provisions’.” Most readers of the Fourth Geneva Convention would say that all of its provisions are humanitarian. What Israel understood these humanitarian provisions to be was left strategically undefined. Although this idiosyncratic stance was not accepted by the ICRC or by much of the international community, little has been done to ever compel Israel to comply with the provisions of international law. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was, in part, the latest twist in this long-running disavowal of an occupier’s responsibility.
Israel’s framing of its policies in the occupied territories as “enlightened occupation”, which was no longer tenable after the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, was part and parcel of its deployment of the language of humanitarianism. Not only was it hoped that by making economic and social conditions bearable Palestinian political demands might be defused, the language of humanitarianism provided cover for policies that worked directly against those demands. Policies such as moving people out of refugee camps in the Gaza Strip into new neighborhoods were pursued as part of a declared “‘humanitarian’ policy of urban renewal and health development,” but were understood by Palestinians to be part of an attempt to dissolve refugee status. The idea of a development solution to the Palestinian problem is now being promoted by [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu. The first intifada, which began in Gaza, was seen, in part, as a refusal of the Palestinian population to acquiesce in the position that their problem was primarily of a humanitarian nature. Indeed, one of the great successes of the uprising was the increasingly widespread recognition that Palestinians had legitimate political claims, not just humanitarian needs. Unfortunately, the Oslo Accords and the Palestinian Authority it gave rise to, proved to be weak vehicles for the achievement of these political goals.
Since the second intifada began in 2000, humanitarian language has resumed its central place in Israeli discourse about its relationship to Palestinians –of course, paired with a language of belligerency and danger centered on enemies, enemy territories, terrorists, etc. As part of its efforts to contain the intifada and then to punish the population for electing Hamas, Israel increased the intensity of its closure on Gaza. All the while, Israeli officials continue to insist that they are concerned with the welfare of the population. In 2006, [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert, while denying that there was a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, averred that despite its sanctions against Gaza, “We wouldn’t allow one baby to suffer one night because of a lack of dialysis.” Similar language was heard during and after Operation Cast Lead. Not only did [former Israeli Foreign Minister] Tzipi Livni deny that the war caused a humanitarian crisis, she even seemed to suggest it had improved Gazans’ living conditions: “There is no humanitarian crisis in the Strip . . . . The crossings are open, more than it [sic] used to be before the military operation.”
As international agencies have tried to step up assistance to Gaza in the aftermath of the war, they have run up against the limits of Israel’s definition of humanitarian, as I described at the outset. It is in part the very power of the humanitarian claim that enables a political strategy of focusing international attention on concern rather than obligation, of identifying only the most basic goods as humanitarian necessities, and thereby restricting the political, economic, and social opportunities available to Palestinians in Gaza. To see how this works, one has to turn – not to the use of humanitarian language for political purposes, but also to the incidental political effects of the heart of humanitarian activity.
Humanitarian agencies use a variety of strategies to mobilize compassion, to generate both attention and donation, including highlighting crisis as a cause for immediate action. The language of crisis can be very effective for this mission of generating attention. There are other consequences of this language. One being that the attention it generates is often fleeting. With its focus on the newly catastrophic, crisis response can have the effect of narrowing the range of things that are considered imperatives. Not that other more systemic issues are described as unimportant, but they are relegated to second order status. The repeated invocation of crisis, while certainly warranted, also has the effect of making the last, bad situation the new benchmark for normal. This normalcy effect is evident both in news reports about conditions in Gaza--which, even as they described the enormous destruction, often spoke of a return to normalcy as soon as the actual shelling ended-- and in accounts by humanitarian agencies which use comparisons with conditions prior to the war to illuminate the levels of destruction. Aid agencies, many of which have very long experience in Gaza, are certainly aware of how bad things have been for a long time, but the language of crisis focuses attention on the novelty of a current circumstance.
If crisis has the effect of lowering the floor for normal conditions, another effect of crisis language is the loss of history. A March 2008 report by a group of humanitarian organizations, which was a very powerful report, stated that: “In September 2000, some 24,000 Palestinians crossed out of Gaza every day to work in Israel. Today that number is zero.” This is a very powerful statement of transformation. What the report did not say is that the 2000 figure was itself significantly lower than the number that had worked inside Israel either before the first intifada, about 70,000, or than the number before Israel’s first implementation of the closure policy in 1991, 45-50,000. Departing from the partial integration of Palestinians into the Israeli economy as laborers and consumers, which was the strategy for the first 20 years of occupation, the policy in recent years has been to replace Palestinian labor with imported foreign workers and thereby to render the Palestinian population surplus humanity; irrelevant to Israel except as either enemies or potential objects of humanitarian concern.
While this longer time frame and broader analysis is crucial for understanding economic conditions in Gaza, it does not fit so easily into the clarion call of crisis. A nearly 20 year process of labor displacement is exactly that, a political process, rather than just a moment of crisis. This strategic transformation in labor conditions to meet political goals is beyond the scope of humanitarian reporting, but it’s also vital to understand. In the wake of Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza and its assertion that it no longer occupies the Strip, this process of rendering Gazans distant; a people whose suffering could evoke compassion, but not obligation, has become official Israeli policy.
If crisis is the condition for humanitarian intervention, victims are its targets. Humanitarianism relies on the identification of vulnerability to determine who needs assistance and to compel people to donate to this assistance. In so doing, though, it also introduces new sorts of vulnerability, as the victim category is a relatively narrow one. People risk losing their identification as victims, and therefore their position as proper objects of compassion, if they do not appear innocent enough, or if they do not otherwise conform to the narrative demands of this category. As with many features of humanitarian discourse, the power of the claim and its limiting effects are intrinsically linked.
Reporting on the aftermath of the Israeli offensive, MSF, Doctors without Borders, highlighted the evaluation by Gazan medical personnel in its employ that “every inhabitant of the Gaza Strip, without exception, has suffered in this war.” This statement was echoed by other humanitarian organizations that called attention to the fact that the entire population of Gaza fits the victim category. Similar calls to universal victim status were made in the post-1948 period, when aid workers also insisted that nearly everyone in Gaza was “destitute and proper subjects for public assistance.” In 1948, efforts to expand relief eligibility were hindered by the institutional requirements of the emerging aid regime.
In the current situation, the assertion of universal victimhood may also fail, but on slightly different grounds. Rather than sorting people according to bureaucratic or legalistic taxonomies, current responses to suffering in Gaza have focused more on identifying the proper victim subject. Humanitarian compassion seems increasingly reserved for those who only suffer but do not act. In the eyes of many, Gazans disqualified themselves from the victim category when they elected Hamas in 2006 and then continued to respect the results of that election despite an international blockade designed to compel a change of heart. The power of victim identification is also its peril.
Different forms of intervention into human life require different approaches to space and place. Two sorts of spaces are key for humanitarianism: the space of crisis, which I’ve talked about, which precedes and motivates the intervention, and the humanitarian space, which is both produced by humanitarian actors and makes their work possible. The idea of this humanitarian space, a space apart from conflict, a zone that permits the delivery of assistance, has been crucial to the work of these organizations. The experience during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, when the three-hour daily halt to firing and the establishment of a humanitarian corridor were repeatedly violated, underscores how fragile this space can be.
Aid agencies insist on the importance of this humanitarian space for their effective operations and decry intrusions into it. But they also understand that this space is limited. For many, part of the purpose of the carving out this humanitarian space is precisely to create greater opportunities for actors who occupy the political space to set about the work of imagining solutions to problems and structural transformations of conditions. Even as humanitarian agencies understand the humanitarian space in operational and limited terms, its discursive effects are arguably much broader. In the public imaginary it may become a descriptive, rather than an operational, category. As such, it connotes not a space of action, the capacity for humanitarian agencies to do their work, but a place of living; a place populated by humanitarian subjects who, as I was talking about, either live as proper victims or are unworthy of concern.
The idea of the humanitarian space can have the unwitting effecting of contributing to the separation and fragmentation of social and political spaces. Even so, the primary cause of Gaza’s isolation has been neither humanitarian description nor humanitarian action. Rather, isolation is the direct result of Israeli policies of closure and surveillance--starting most clearly under the Oslo Accords and more acutely during the second intifada, but with earlier roots as well--and has been further exacerbated by Palestinian politics. Israeli closure policy renders Gaza a qualitatively different sort of humanitarian space. It has become a space where, aside from military actors, the only people who can be there are those who are part of a humanitarian operation; whether as victims or as aid-workers. It’s constituted Gaza as a new kind of humanitarian space.
With this mention of the broader humanitarian apparatus, I want to step back from Gaza in particular for a moment and consider the wider Palestinian experience with humanitarianism. Ultimately it is crucial to understand the impact not just of the identification of the Palestinian problem as a humanitarian one, but also of the long experience of living with humanitarianism. This experience has shaped Palestinian community, politics and values in significant ways. And understanding how requires considerable research which I am trying to work on. Let me here say just a few things about UNRWA. UNRWA is obviously the central agency in providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, though it has never been the only player in this field. The fact that UNRWA operates across the multiple spaces of Palestinian exile means, though, that it is one of the central connective institutions which has the dispersed Palestinian population.
UNRWA is an institution that binds Palestinians together in many ways, but it binds them very unevenly. In the first years after 1948 the distinction was fairly stark; people were in or out of the aid regime, deemed bona fide refugees or not, living in an area of UNRWA operations or not, considered needy or not. Those who made it onto the UNRWA rolls were provided with a full basket of aid: food, clothing, shelter, education and healthcare. Over the years the services that UNRWA provides have contracted dramatically, even as the criteria for admission to the rolls have expanded. Since 1993 the Agency has been willing to register any person who fit into the broad UNRWA definition of a Palestine refugee. For those who don’t know the definition it’s a person “whose normal residence was Palestine for a minimum of two years preceding the outbreak of the conflict in 1948 and who, as a result of this conflict, has lost both his home and means of livelihood. ” So they’ve been willing to register people who fit that definition whether in need or not. For a long time, need was a primary category for registration. But what you get by getting onto the rolls is much less than it once was. Except for circumstances of acute crisis, such as in Gaza, almost no one receives any sort of rations from UNRWA any more. The worst off, those classified by UNRWA as hardship cases, receive a small food distribution every three months. An UNRWA employee in Jordan told me that families received about seven Jordanian Dinars, around $10, worth of food every three months; so nearly symbolic.
All registered refugees are eligible for educational and health services, but in practice some people live too far from UNRWA centers to be able to access these services. The head of the Jordan-field health program told me that half the refugees in Jordan do not practically have access to UNRWA health care. Similarly, people who live near the clinics may not be able to get full coverage if they don’t fit the refugee criteria. I’ve been doing research in the Jerash refugee camp in Jordan, which is also known as the Gaza camp, because it is populated by people who came to Jordan from Gaza in1967. Most of these people are not Gazans, but refugees to Gaza who were displaced a second time. Some people in the camp are native Gazan, however, and the fact that they are not registered refugees, but only displaced, means that they once again are shut out of many UNRWA services. They can attend schools-- and in fact UNRWA has an agreement with the Jordanian government that it will accept anyone living in a camps into the schools--and can get basic medical services at the local clinic. They cannot, however, get a referral out of the camp for more extensive treatment. And, as anyone who has battled with an insurance company knows, getting the referral is key. So UNRWA is an institution that connects Palestinians across many places, through services and other things, but it does not incorporate all people in the same way.
As an institution UNRWA is also evaluated differently by different Palestinians – and indeed has become a site for arguing about Palestinian political strategy and political values. Some people see UNRWA as being at the heart of the Palestinian humanitarianism problem. As one person said to me, summing up some attitudes about UNRWA, the purpose of its assistance was that “the Palestinian [would] forget his homeland since he takes the flour sack.”
This sort of suspicion around UNRWA is evident in people’s reactions to recent cuts in UNRWA services in the wake of the global financial crisis. I was in Jordan in December conducting research and nearly everybody I spoke with talked about these cuts. In interviews in the field office in Amman people who were in charge of various program areas described the difficult decisions they were forced to make. The health program, for instance, will no longer pay to send patients to private hospitals, only to government ones. The person who made this policy decision told me that it would have a negative impact on refugees’ health, but also described how dire the budget crisis is. In the Jerash camp, one of the fields where these decisions are being implemented, people were much more skeptical of the claim that the service cutback was a simple matter of international economics. Many are convinced that these decisions to rollback services are strategic, and possibly part of a move towards shutting down the agency and ending crucial services.
These kinds of suspicions indicate just how complicated people’s relationship with UNRWA has been. At the same time, some of you may have heard about a poll that came out--and I have no idea about its validity--but it suggested that UNRWA is the most trusted institution in the occupied territories, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It doesn’t surprise me, no matter how accurate this poll is, that UNRWA could be a subject of both suspicion and frustration and trust and admiration. Many people also view the agency as something other than just humanitarian, especially if by humanitarianism one means charity. As one person said to me, echoing things that I’d heard about relief in the immediate post-1948 period: “UNRWA does not represent a humanitarian service given to refugees. . . The services given to us are our right. Our problem was created by the international community and they are responsible for solving it.” So Palestinians in general, and Gazans in particular, may have a humanitarianism problem, but the nature of that problem is identified differently by different people and becomes a site of political debate.
Let me conclude by returning to Gaza. Repeated humanitarian crises require repeated rebuilding. Whether as development aid during the Oslo years, or as humanitarian assistance in response to repeated IDF [Israel Defense Forces] assaults during the last eight years, huge amounts of money have been spent reconstructing the same buildings, homes, infrastructure and roads in Gaza. As long as foreign donors continue to bear these costs, there is no financial penalty for repetitive destruction. In the aftermath of last January’s operation, talk turned once again to the reconstruction process. The question that dominated discussions between international donors, Israel and the West Bank branch of the Palestinian Authority is how to rebuild Gaza without strengthening Hamas. This is one point on which all parties agreed.
Even as aid organizations are careful to remain neutral and non-political, their ability to motivate humanitarian attention and resources is always embedded in broader political, legal and moral conditions. Not everybody in a crisis situation will receive compassion or be deemed a proper victim. Ignoring the inevitable politics of humanitarian aid and recognition will not make it go away. It is vital to understand both that there have been self-conscious and ongoing efforts to, as Avi Shlaim put it, “ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem,” and also that the most noble humanitarian efforts can unwittingly impede political resolution. As long as Palestinians are dependent on the compassion of others, they are also vulnerable to the perils of being denied that compassion. The humanitarian position is a precarious one. As soon as people express a more robust sense of themselves as social and political actors, they run the risk of losing their categorization as exemplary and proper victims and thus falling outside the frame through which humanitarianism can understand, and therefore assist, them.
So what is the answer for Gaza? I don’t know. But I am not arguing that the work of humanitarian agencies should stop, or that concerned people should stop demanding the delivery of such aid. This assistance is clearly vital. What I am suggesting is that Palestinians and those who are concerned about their fate should seek other frames, legal and political, as well as moral, through which to analyze the situation and intervene in the ongoing cycle of destruction followed by delivery of aid. Gaza’s humanitarian crisis must be seen as a symptom of a political situation, a result of occupation, and any discussion of humanitarian aid should be accompanied by such analysis. The hard fought recognition that Palestinians have legitimate political demands and not just humanitarian needs should not be lost in the face of yet another emergency. Thank you.
Dr. Ilana Feldman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.