Donor Opium: making an argument that needs hearing

Here is an interesting film critical of the role that donor funding has played in making and keeping Palestinians aid-dependent in the occupied West Bank, Donor Opium:

It was produced by Palestinians in the West Bank with funding from the German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation [named after a committed 19th Marxist who starved CORR: see above, here was clubbed and shot to death ].

And, it contains insightful analysis by Palestinian critics of the current situation that does not usually make its way into the mainstream media:
Linda Tabar – Bir Zeit University Center for Development Studies
Iyad ar-Riyahi – Bisan Center for Research and Development
Khaled Nakhleh – Development Expert
Khaled Sabawi – Palestinian entrepreneur
Sani Abdel-Shafei – Business consultant in Gaza

Among the interesting facts: some $9 billion dollars in donor aid has flowed, if not flooded, into the occupied Palestinian territory [West Bank + Gaza] since the start of the Oslo process in late 1993, yet 30% of Palestinians are still classified as poor, and half of them are classified as very poor.

Since the arrival of Salam Fayyad as PA Finance Minister [and also Prime Minister since 2007],
Palestinians in Ramallah alone have signed up for credit that puts them $3 billion in debt

Some 30% of the Palestinian GDP comes from foreign/donor aid.

And, some 20% of the Palestinian budget is spent on security…

UPDATE: More on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation work in Palestine, from the organization’s website, here:

    “For almost 20 years, the international community has been declaring to work towards “the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state alongside Israel”. Billions of dollars have been spent, thousands of projects implemented and civil society initiatives supported. Yet, there is no state, but an artificially fragmented society in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, in A-, B-, and C-Zones, and beyond. There is a lot of talk about ‘development’, but actual research points to the fact that the Palestinians have been de-developed with the help of international aid

More, from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation website:

    Many Palestinians identify the past efforts for “developing Palestine” as having produced negative effects on a big scale:
    * Today everything is paid for. And the huge amounts of external money have destroyed societal networks. ‘Although historically voluntarism was a prominent feature of Palestinian society in the 1970’s and 1980’s as part of the national movement, and the voluntary work initiatives that were encouraged by the leftists, today these types of social networks have largely collapsed’. (Sari Hanafi/Linda Tabar, The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite, 2005)
    * Foreign financial support for the ‘development of civil society’ and the focus on professional NGOs contributed to the decline of democracy in Palestine: ‘By entirely neglecting local party, grassroots and union platforms and committees and also community associations and activities, donors contributed to a de-democratisation of civil society in the West Bank and Gaza instead of increasing the capacity of civil society for democratisation’. (Karma Nabulsi in: Keating/Le More/Lowe: Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground. The Case of Palestine, Great Britain, 2005)
    * Some even speak of ‘a process of societal un-development, as an inherent ingredient of external intervention through “aid”, the apex of which we experience under the relentless pressure of sustained suppression, imprisonment and total disempowerment’. (Khalil Nakhleh, The Myth of Palestinian Development, 2004)
    * And with regards to economic development programmes, Sam Bahour writes: ‘It is clear that economic growth is not necessarily equivalent to economic development, especially in a politically charged, donor-driven environment […]. The development projects proposed by the international community only normalize the illegal occupation, by working in partnership with Israel to fine-tune its mechanisms of control’. (Bahour, Economic Prison Zones, 2010)
    We don’t want to take part in this process that obviously doesn’t contribute to a better future for the Palestinian people. The guiding questions are: What is development? What is its goal? Who decides? Who profits? And what should development look like that serves every member of the society?
    The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation [founded in 1990, it says elsewhere on its website] is affiliated with the German Left Party (DIE LINKE). It is our conviction that a society can only achieve its goals if all its parts participate in social, economic, and political development that is designed to serve the society as a whole.
    In Palestine, we would like to cooperate with progressive democratic institutions that work towards Palestinian development according to Palestinian interests. We can support research and societal dialogue on a national level as well as international dialogue between societies struggling for alternatives to neo-liberal market economy and other unequal relations between the political North and the South.
    We would like to support people and initiatives that work in this regards”
    .

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