My Mentor, who shall be known as “Promeneur” until he authorizes otherwise, has sent a correction to a description I wrote about Rosa Luxemburg, in my post on Donor Opium [a film critical of Palestinian dependence on donor aid, which was sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation]. He wrote [from London, via email]:
“Starved to death??? How could you!
Clubbed to the ground with a rifle butt by a proto-Stormtrooper, shot between the eyes, dumped in a Berlin canal … precisely 93 years ago today Sunday [15 January]. They’ll have gathered at spot, as they do every year.
Memorise Brecht’s rhyme — ‘She told the poor what life was about / And so the rich have rubbed her out’.
Slight frail fearless she was the real deal. Just who the Occupy movement could do with. Jewish, of course. Where’s her like today? Dare one wonder where she’d stand on … well you know what.”
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