Gaza and Charities at War: “All we are saying”

From the Chronicle of Philanthropy, October 30, 2023

In recent years, peace-builders throughout the Middle East, including in Israel and Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond, have endured horrific violence and widespread repression.

As opportunities for people to speak out and advocate for themselves shrink amid authoritarian crackdowns, groups in the region funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — where I lead the peace-building program — have faced arbitrary detention or worse. Brutal online attacks, including doxing and death threats, have become common occupational hazards for our grantees in the United States and Europe.   

The unconscionable Hamas attack against Israeli civilians on October 7 and the subsequent strikes on Gaza mark the beginning of a devastating new chapter. Much of the world, including government leaders and regular citizens, are asking how they can respond to these horrors. The answer, we believe, lies with the civil-society organizations dedicated to building peace in Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Middle East — and whose work is crucial to countering extremist ideology of groups such as Hamas.

Unfortunately, many institutional donors have been reluctant to enter this field. While some step up with humanitarian aid in response to the latest crisis, those critical funds aren’t enough. The political and social changes that can address the root causes of conflict require sustained attention and increased support. Israeli and Palestinian peace-builders need philanthropy now more than ever.

Policy successes years in the making can evaporate in an instant. Organizations engaged in Israeli-Palestinian peace-building often do so at great institutional and personal risk. The stakes are especially high for grass-roots peace-builders in Israel and Palestine, who long before October 7 faced wide-scale repression and criminalization by successive right-wing Israeli governments.

The challenges for foundations engaged in this work, while not comparable to grass-roots groups on the ground, are real. During the past decade, we have been threatened with lawsuits designed to “silence and shut down the work of civil society organizations that support Palestinian rights and operate humanitarian, peace-building and other programs,” according to a report by the Charity and Security Network, a research and advocacy organization that backs the work of peace-builders and humanitarian aid groups.

We have been maligned in the press and social media, where those who disagree with us question our morality and commitment to nonviolence. We’ve faced accusations of both antisemitism and Islamophobia, which we forcefully reject as contrary to our mission and poisonous to our goal of just and durable peace in the region. We conduct robust due diligence to ensure that our grants are used only for peaceful activities and scrupulously comply with all U.S. laws and regulations.

The accusations leveled at peace-building organizations and their funders aim to shut down dissent and new perspectives. But good policy, especially in moments of crisis, cannot be made without open policy debate.

. . . 

darryll k. jones