In a scathing June 2015 report, Propublica wrote that the Red Cross had raised half a billion dollars for Haiti relief, and all that the money had produced was six houses. Progress by the Red Cross was held back by a reliance on U.S. employees who not only did not have the expertise to do more, they could not even speak the language. “Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” complained one Haitian development professional.25 But people from the United States always see themselves as experts with something to bring, even if they cannot communicate with the people they are claiming to help.
Somali poet Ali Dhux beautifully described the way aid recipients view aid workers:
A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.26
In other words, when your job is international aid, you have an interest in your job continuing forever and a disincentive to pursue systemic solutions. The United Nations, USAID, Red Cross, and Invisible Children are very different organizations, and the people working there come from a wide range of backgrounds but share (let’s assume) altruistic motivations. This is not about any one organization or any one incident or any individual doing that work. Any aid that is not accountable to the community it seeks to serve, and does not address the fundamental systemic issues behind the problems it claims to address, will only reinforce an unjust system.
Another popular innovation from philanthropist-saviors is the microloan. This capitalist innovation was supposed to make money available for poor communities, erase gender disparities, and encourage small local businesses to thrive. Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for inventing the modern microloan.
But studies show that these loans are not as effective in the streets as they are in the minds of people in corporate boardrooms and university economics departments.27 Instead of heralding a novel way of addressing systemic poverty, microloans are an innovation that give the rich a new way to exploit the very poor, ensnaring communities in a debt economy where none existed before, making more of the world subject to the dictates and violence of finance capital, and making the life of the very poor even more hopeless. In just a few months in 2012, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, more than two hundred victims of a microloan scheme committed suicide. An Associated Press report on the deaths reported, “Originally developed as a nonprofit effort to lift society’s most downtrodden, microfinance has increasingly become a for-profit enterprise that serves investors as well as the poor.”28
So what is the answer? If it’s not troops on the ground or humanitarian aid or loans, how can we help people in need? The answer is to support organizations based in the affected area that are accountable to the people they serve. This takes more time than giving to Red Cross or counting on USAID to step in, but it is more likely to achieve results. If we are not challenging our colonial relationships to the so-called developing world, all our charitable efforts just make for a kinder colonialism.
The Palestine liberation struggle offers a political case study of the problems of international aid. While Palestine and Haiti are very different, both are examples of anticolonial rebellions crushed by the false generosity of aid. Billions of dollars have been spent on aid to Palestine since the mid-1990s. Much of that money came from donors, like the United States and Saudi Arabia, which are politically opposed to an independent Palestinian state. In fact, the United States at the same time sent tens of billions of dollars in direct military aid to the Israeli state. Palestinians say that their problems come from the root cause of occupation. Massive amounts of money are spent with the goal of not addressing this root cause, and in fact pacifying Palestinians to get them to accept Israeli occupation, and the result is an endless continuation of the bloody and devastating status quo.
In 2009 in Gaza City, I met Dr. Haidar Eid, an associate professor of postcolonial and postmodern literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and a leader of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As we drove through a city still recovering from massacres and bombings during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008–2009, Eid told me he saw many Westerners who come to Palestine to help but bring their own assumptions of what that help should look like. “This is my problem with white liberal ideology,” he says, “that kind of postmodern politics that does not take into consideration the perspective of the other. It talks about the other; it claims to be recognizing the other, in order to assimilate the other. When the other comes up with something that is completely different from what the Western self is defending, the other becomes terrorist. The other becomes unacceptable.” In other words, if you do not want what we are offering, there must be something wrong with you.
Another manifestation of the “othering” that Eid critiques is that even progressives from the United States often judge the resistance of other cultures through their own lens. For example, they are hesitant to see anticolonial movements as allies if they are “too Muslim.” Eid is critical of Hamas but also sees them as the legitimate elected representative of the Palestinian people and deserving of praise for their principled resistance against Israeli occupation. Many progressives in the United States cannot see this complexity. Postcolonial theorist Edward Said used the term “orientalism” to describe the patronizing attitude that sees Eastern cultures as fundamentally uncivilized and unchanging.
Eid says that aid has been tethered to an endless wait for a frozen peace process to deliver. This “peace industry” taints the entire Palestinian liberation movement, especially the political parties. “Billions of dollars have been poured into the discourse of the two-state solution. The formation of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestine Satellite Channel. TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, telling people ‘two-state, two-state.’”
Eid sees the two-state solution as fundamentally racist and impractical. Racist because it shapes borders based on “exclusive ethno-religious identities.” Impractical because, like the tribal Bantustan system of the apartheid South African government, it does not offer true independence to the Palestinian people. Eid told me that the Palestinian revolutionary parties, like the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, initially resisted this accommodation for just this reason, but were later bought out by international aid, especially through the Oslo peace process, which Eid (quoting Edward Said) says birthed a new “peace industry.”
“From 1993 up until now, what [has] happened is that their revolutionary consciousness has been pacified,” says Eid.
Eid says that Palestinians do not need aid; they need allies to stand in principled solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. He sees hope in the international grassroots movement, following the lead of Palestinian civil society, which has called for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. Eid, who earned his PhD studying in South Africa, sees the movement that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa as key for ending colonial occupation in Palestine. “In the mid eighties, more than 75 percent of white South Africans voted for the apartheid system,” he explains.
And everyone was saying it is impossible for Blacks and whites to live together in South Africa, and that the overwhelming majority of whites do not want to live with Blacks. But the same percentage, more than 75 percent of white South Africans, voted for the end of apartheid in 1994. Now doesn’t that raise a question? What was the reason behind that type of change? I would go back to the BDS campaign. When every single white South African felt ostracized whenever visiting a foreign country. Nobody wanted to buy South African products. Nobody wanted to shake hands with white South Africans. And that is why, in 1994, they understood that there has got to be an end to this. When Israelis start feeling the same thing, Israelis will be forced to look at the world and say, “What do you exactly want?”
Even human rights NGOs sometimes fall into the trap of not listening to the needs of those they claim to support. Activists with Al Qaws (“The Rainbow”), an LGBTQ organization based in Palestine, are critical of international LGBT human rights organizations, saying they do not see the larger issue of occupation. “‘Gay rights’ has become the new global measure of whether different nation states and peoples are progressive or not,” says Haneen Maikey of