The Opium of Conditional Funding: Grassroots Organisations are the Weakest Link
by Shatha al-Azza*
In their struggle for survival, the identity of civil society organisations (CSOs) is fragmented when they look for sources, which were not tarnished by politicised agendas. Meantime, a new form of grassroots organisations have emerged, identifying with international donor conditions and policies. These function separately from the standards of Palestinian national liberation, self-determination, and vision. Voluntarily, grassroots organisations have turned into executive institutions, submitting to donor conditions and complying with detailed time-based and thematic restrictions that run counter to civil society needs and interests. This is evidenced in their programmes adapted to donor formalities and impositions, namely, of Zionist US and European financing funds. These organisations stand idly by with a view to maintaining those resources. Consequently, the CSO space has shrunk both quantitavely and qualitatively due to the systematic laws and processes set up by the colonial occupation, donor community, government agencies of the Palestinian Authority (PA). This has had a negative bearing on the performance of civil society as a whole. In particular, CSOs play a role in mobilising, supporting, and promoting the rights and perseverance of the Palestinian people. They carry out socio-political action, popular mobilisation, community engagement, and resistance in their own spaces within Palestinian society.
Undermining CSO activity is attributed to a combination of complex variables, grounded in socio-political and economic dimensions at play since the Oslo process. Fund flows have been channelled to many CSOs, which restructured their agendas to be in line with and serve the “peace process”, “post-conflict” contexts, and donor interests, meeting then current milestones. This has, in turn, moulded institutional structures and development process dictated by conditional policies of foreign aid. The Zionist project has maintained colonial domination over the Palestinian political landscape. Namely, the PA “security” agencies have played a role as mechanisms that facilitates, controls, and activates dominance on one hand, and have taken hold of financial processes on the other. To this effect, according to the Law by Decree No. 7 of 2021 on the Amendment of the Law No. 1 of 2000 on Charitable Associations and Civil Society Organisations, the Palestinian government has managed to thwart civil society action and maintain a stable financial and political position of the PA. However, this exceptional regulation is in conflict with the Basic Law, particularly given the fact that the Palestinian Legislative Council is out of session.
The transformation of CSO goals and agendas over the past three decades has compromised national political action and pave the way for restrictive measures by donors. While the Palestinian struggle is labelled and criminalised as terrorist, CSOs are categorised on the basis of donor visions. These colonial security policies and consequences are more detrimental to CSOs as they restrict the space for civil society action within the occupied Palestinian territory, including by arbitrary detention and campaigns launched to smear and delegitimise those CSOs, which work towards promoting and supporting perseverance of the Palestinian people. To further tighten their grip, other donors and agencies of the United Nations have followed in the footsteps of US and EU institutions, placing more severe constraints and imputing charges of terrorism and anti-Semitism. These allegations are consistent with and serve the Zionist colonial perspective and quest for changing the Palestinian civil society structure and fragmenting CSOs. At the same time, those CSOs which embrace a principled national position against donor conditional funding are effectively eliminated.
In the light of these coercive challenges, grassroots organisations emerge and eke out their existence. For example, the Lajee Centre is a civic institution based in the Aida refugee camp of Bethlehem, surrounded by six Israeli military watchtowers and besieged by the Annexation and Separation Wall. Established in the early 2000s, the Lajee Centre’s vision, mission, and programmes derive from its Palestinian identity as well as struggle for justice, equality, and human rights principles. On this basis, this organisation works towards promoting individual and collective rights of the Palestinian people. In organisational terms, the Lajee Centre consists of five main units: Health and the Environment, Media, Women, Culture and Folklore, and Sports and Performing Arts (Circus). The Lajee Centre is fully dependent on international donors for funding. However, stable functions of grassroots organisations have been impacted by increasingly and persistently dwindling support. Sources of funding have been either cut off or made conditional on the anti-terrorism clause. Over the years, this has resulted in an operational burden on the organisation. Other donor policies have also imposed heavy restrictions on the Lajee Centre.
Like dozens of grassroots organisations, the Lajee Centre has found itself caving in to the demands of international donors, let alone new anti-terrorism conditions. These demands have sneaked into and overlapped with the centre’s institutional setting and organisational structure, reflected in project proposals and diversity, including in terms of staff age, disability, gender, and functional hierarchy. These should be in tandem with donor-imposed agendas and approval of aid. Most often, donors require a depoliticised content that is devoid of references to national liberation, action, resistance, and underlying challenges to activity within the refugee community. To this effect, the organisation sums up the complicated context and agreed language in a simulation of community needs, producing cumbersome narrative and financial reports, providing donors with detailed information and documentation on the local setting in line with donor visions.
The Lajee Centre’s slogan, We think and choose to be creative, involves the names of a number of Palestinian refugee camps. In funded projects, the donor’s slogan should be juxtaposed to that of the Lajee Centre. Fulfilling documentation and evidence requirements, this practice reduces the lives and sentiments of beneficiaries to a picture with a slogan. To fulfil required credibility, lists of the names of refugees, who benefit from the donor’s projects, should include their signatures and telephone numbers. This way, the Lajee Centre has been stripped of its own slogan. Now, it no longer chooses nor thinks to be creative. Instead, the donor has taken the organisation’s role and deprived it of the faculty of thinking and choosing. The duration of projects is mostly so short that they do not achieve the targeted change, making them immeasurable. As a result, the development process initiated by the organisation to empower refugees’ issues and rights is compromised. Essentially, the process has been limited to dealing with symptoms, rather than addressing the underlying root causes of the Israeli colonial structure, which serves as the main obstacle.
Changes to the institutional structure of the Lajee Centre are an outcome of the increasing problem, which has been created by declining relief, educational, health services provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to the refugee population. As a consequence, the Lajee Centre and counterpart organisations have sought to bridge the gap left by the UNRWA. The health project has been launched in response to the needs of persons with chronic diseases (high blood pressure and diabetes) in refugee camps across Bethlehem. This project requires cooperation from the UNRWA in order to facilitate access to test results by patients themselves so that health workers at the Lajee Centre can follow up on their health condition. However, the UNRWA gave up cooperation to provide the most basic health rights as it no longer shared test results with patients. In line with the US definitions and requirements, the UNRWA stipulated that the Lajee Centre provide a detailed statement of its vision, goals, donors, and full names of staff members. Accordingly, the USA could apply it own anti-terrorism rules to the Lajee Centre. Effectively turning the UNRWA into a security agent, this requirement is in breach of UNRWA’s principles of independent and impartial humanitarian action.
Most recently, new requirements have been placed by international donors. In addition to ideological conditionality, normalisation ideas and agendas that oblige grassroots organisations to have an “Israeli” partner so that they can receive funds. This was experienced by the Lajee Centre with the University of York in the United Kingdom, depriving the organisation of an environmental programme estimated at tens of thousands of US dollars. The programme envisaged a project of agricultural work within the framework of resistance economy. It would reflect the Palestinian national identity, including rural symbols and attachment to land. The initiative would use small agricultural holdings in densely populated areas on the roofs of refugee homes inside refugee camps. Beneficiary households are of rural origin, who were dispossessed of hundreds of dunums of their agricultural land several kilometres away from their homes. The project adopts the organic farming method. Though free of chemical waste, organic crops are affected by tear gas canisters which the Israeli occupying army fires, deliberately targeting gardens on house roofs in the refugee camp. On several occasions, the hydroponics unit on the roof of the Lajee Centre was intentionally set on fire. As a result, an iron fence was installed around the unit for protection against systematic practices of the Israeli occupying authorities and partner normalising institutions in community action.
Since 2002, alienation and isolation has crippled and secluded the Lajee Centre from many CSOs. Then, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) conditions were imposed on CSO programmes and visions. Overtime, other funding organisations have increasingly dared to place more humiliating conditions and to criminalise the Palestinian struggle. Consequently, the Lajee Centre has eliminated and boycotted agencies advancing conditional funding from the network of its relations. Interaction with such donors is now nil, reflecting on the presence and representation of the Lajee Centre in respective lines of activity within the civil society. Preserving dignity, such alienation has isolated the centre and its counterparts, but still fighting and exposing accomplices with those Zionist Israeli campaigns.
In such complex circumstances, the Lajee Centre has engaged in and challenged most predicaments for two decades. Within Palestinian society, opposite dimensions have featured a declining national status and political standing at the grassroots level, impacting the Lajee Centre’s activity across Palestinian refugee camps. Against this backdrop, the production of knowledge and adoption of sustainable national projects, which meet the needs of tens of thousands of beneficiaries, are at odds with the donor visions and goals. If donor impositions are not resisted and a national priority vision is not embraced, this will disempower successive post-Nakba generations’ right of return and self-determination.
The growing number of complicit CSOs in the service of donor interests puts at risk the society’s safety net and national status. To ward off prevalent fragmentation, CSOs and grassroots organisations must opt for mutual empowerment, reduce the impact of systematic interruption of Western assistance, and join forces with the civil society and social justice movements against colonisation around the world. This should go hand in hand with a fundamental change in fundraising patterns, creating self-financing sources and putting in place an innovative and sustainable approach to cultural, social, and economic development. A shift must be made from dependence on foreign aid to autonomy and self-sustainability through self-sufficiency, recovery from the West, and prioritisation of national perceptions.
* Shatha al-Azza is a Palestinian environmental activist. she holds a master’s degree in Environmental Studies and she serves as the head of the Health and Environment Unit at Lajee Refugee Center.