IN STEREO

Look, the problem is, if you are dependent on funding from foreign aid organisations, they have all these conditions and ideas about how you should work. You know, they come in and bring somebody to check how you’re doing the work – who doesn’t live here, who doesn’t understand the reality, who doesn’t understand the society. Palestinian society is quite complicated. There are still a lot of tribal, religious, and family lines, and you have the differences among the city, the towns, the refugee camps, [and] the villages. You cannot just come up with a set plan of how things should be. And unfortunately, over the past ten years the Israeli government has also been making it harder for foreign aid organisations to support local Palestinian organisations. Now there are a lot more rules; it’s become much more difficult with bank transfers and with what you are allowed to do here. Most of the organisations want to do everything legally, then you have to abide by rules that Israel imposes.

A lot of organisations now can only transfer money if there is an Israeli counterpart. Some organisations do that, and they are of course looked upon here as ‘normalisation’. Like, how do you work together with part of the oppressors, even if they seem to have good intentions? There is still no equality; it’s very out of balance. Also, what we saw is that a lot of local organisations get all this money, and most of [it] doesn’t go to the community. It goes to paying for the office, it goes to paying the people’s wages... I mean, OK, these people are working – they need to be paid. But in the end, we were looking to the outcome, and we were often disappointed. Or we saw much more potential, but the director is satisfied because he’s being paid, his staff is being paid, [and] they can write nice annual reports. So that was our frustration. – Kristel