Home 
Law
|
|
|
|||||
Perspectives from the Global North and SouthTable of Contents:
International4 Mastery and gratitude Mastery and gratitude: development aid and the colonial condition in PalestineReem Bahdi and Mudar Kassis[1] Introduction Mastery and gratitude are elements of a scheme which follows a certain logic of inversion where “[s]ocial-symbolic violence at its purest appears as its opposite . . Development aid replaces international legal obligations as the matrix through which the Global North’s relationships with Palestine are understood and practiced. Instead of respecting Palestinian’s equal rights to freedom, self- determination, and security, northern states give Palestine development aid. In the process, Palestine and Palestinians are posited as recipients of charity rather than bearers of rights, and the debt relationship or the question of who owes whom what and why is inverted. Palestinians are perceived less and less as a people living under occupation who can claim rights which impose obligations on the international community. Instead, Palestinians come to be perceived as a people who should be grateful to northern states for their generosity. In the process, through a toolset of “[administrative procedures . . . [which] are the very material sites in which international disciplines are at work”,2 northern development agencies that dispense and manage aid assume control over Palestinian priorities and decision-making even as aid policy and aid practitioners insist that they value and promote local control and leadership. Palestinians have come to rely heavily on aid donations from northern states. This aid, the very thing that was supposed to help them build a state and improve their living standards, has contributed to ongoing Palestinian oppression. Aid has overtaken international law as the main paradigm through which donor states engage with Palestine and Palestinians. Drawing in part on our experiences as co-directors of Karamah, a judicial education initiative in Palestine supported by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), we outline the material and symbolic consequences of aid and identify the techniques embedded in aid structures that have helped produce the present state of affairs. When it was introduced in 2005, Karamah was Canada’s largest CIDA-supported judicial education project in the world and the largest of any CIDA-supported project in the Middle East.[2] Our goal is to demonstrate how imperial actors can navigate international institutions, how colonial impulses are driven through international relations, and why decolonization of international institutions and relations remain significant aspects of the global struggle for dignity' and equality'. We analyze donor coordination of Palestinian aid priorities alongside the day-to-day management of aid projects implementation through the logic model as two sites that facilitate control over Palestinians without producing sustainable results to the benefit the Palestinian people. Both sites give a glimpse into the minute techniques embedded in development aid that have advanced the political and economic interests of Israel and donor states at the expense of Palestinian rights. We situate this work within TWAIL praxis which calls for an examination of the ways in which international law, both in its presence and its silences, “unfolds on the mundane and quotidian plane through sites and objects which appear unrelated to the international”.[3] Aid to Palestine from northern states Palestinians have become one of the most aid-dependent people in the world. Over the last 25 y'ears, donations from donor countries to the West Bank and Gaza grew and formed an economic pattern (see Figure 4.1 below): standing at $79 per capita in 1993; jumping to $200 per capita in 1994; averaging $411 per capita during the y'ears 1994-2017, with a peak of $767 per capita in 2009; and decreasing to $451 per capita in 2017. Development aid constituted around one-fifth of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, averaging $1,904 over the y'ears 1994-2017.[4] Donors dispense development aid to help address humanitarian needs, build Palestinian state institutions, advance access to justice, improve living conditions, 
Figure 4.1 West Bank and Gaza net Official Development Assistance received per capita (current US$) Data source: World Bank Group, 2020. ensure security, encourage economic prosperity, and promote human rights - all important goals purportedly aimed at helping Palestinians build better lives and advancing peace with Israel.[5] However, foreign aid has not achieved its promise of assisting Palestinians to live better lives or advancing peace. Development aid has furthered the colonial condition in Palestine, a state of affairs marked by foreign control of people, land, and resources to the detriment of local prosperity and development. As aid to Palestinians has increased, their living conditions have drastically declined,[6] the possibility of arriving at a Palestinian state is decreasing, and Israel’s hold on Palestinian land and resources has tightened.[7] Further, Palestinian civil and political rights have deteriorated,[8] social cohesion within Palestine has begun to break down,[9] and the occupation project has become less expensive if not profitable for Israel.[10] International laxv, peace through negotiations, and development aid International law regards Israel as an occupying power which has control but no sovereignty over Palestinian territory and which owes a duty to protect the civilian population. Israel, however, flouts those duties. It exercises control over Palestinian lives through its army, courts, and civilian infrastructure.[11] Israel has disproportionately re-directed natural resources to the benefit of Israelis over Palestinians. It has contributed to the de-development of Palestine in part by thwarting the Palestinian education system,[12] undermining Palestinian entrepreneurship and economic development through the control of movement of people and goods within and outside of Palestinian centres,[13] and assuming direct and/or de facto control over Palestinian holy sites and tourist attractions.[14] The Israeli government routinely violates Palestinian individual and collective rights by imposing a sophisticated pass system and series of checkpoints or road blocks[15] and arbitrarily detaining and/or torturing Palestinians.[16] It has subjected Palestinians to military violence that has included the use of chemical and explosive weaponry on civilian populations.[17] It has frustrated Palestinian attempts to claim their own state by building a series of roads, settlements, walls, and enclosures that divide Palestinians from each other and make it virtually impossible to carve out contiguous borders necessary for statehood[18] and expropriating resources.[19] Moreover, the Israeli military exercises jurisdiction over Palestinian daily life through Israeli military orders, and Israel’s civil administrative infrastructure directly or indirectly regulates all manners of Palestinian existence including, inter alia, family life, freedom of movement, and access to water and other vital resources while limiting Palestinian judicial jurisdiction[20] Israel, in short, acts as a typical colonizer, expanding into coveted territories, taking resources, and exploiting or oppressing people whom it considers outsiders or foreigners to its own body politic.[21] Israel has pursued its colonial policies notwithstanding the fact that it entered into peace negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993. This agreement led to a series of accords that were supposed to lead to two states, Israel and Palestine, living together side by side in peace. Over 25 years later, it has become increasingly clear that this peace process will not bear fruit. One of the main barriers has been Israel’s insistence that the negotiations should be defined by “the situation on the ground”. The following exchange between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators (UD and SA, respectively) took place at a 2008 meeting over territory. UD: As you know, our guiding principles are UNSC Res. 242, the need for boundaries that can provide security for Israel, and we’re talking about the situation on the ground, as per Pres. Bush’s letter. SA: Do you mean the situation as it was then, or now? UD: Reality now. . . . But we’re not going to argue. We can’t change reality on the ground. We don’t see the 1967 border as a reference, first because we don’t even know exactly where the line is. SA: We have all the maps that were signed by you. UD: But that wasn’t exactly the line on the ground. SA: If not the 1967 line, then what is your reference? UD: We said already, the situation on the ground.[22] Given its already almost total control and ability to disrupt Palestinian land, people, and resources, Israel has had virtually unfettered discretion to define “the situation on the ground” and has been dedicated to creating facts altering this “situation”. Consider, for example, the statements made by Teddy Kolleck, former mayor of Jerusalem, in describing his time in office. Kolleck, a mayor who professed commitment to fairness and multiculturalism, makes clear that Arabs and Jews would be treated differently for a political purpose: We said things without meaning them, and we didn’t carry them out, we said over and over that we would equalize the rights of the Arabs to the rights of the Jews in the city-empty talk. . . . Never have we given them a feeling of being equal before the law. [As mayor of Jerusalem, I] nurtured nothing and built nothing [for the Arabs]. For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past 25 years. For [ Arab] East Jerusalem? Nothing! What did I do? Nothing! Sidewalks? Nothing. Cultural Institutions? Not one. Yes, we installed a sewage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed [a] sewage and a water system against cholera.[23] Ardi Imseis chronicles how Israel pursued a policy of creating “facts on the ground” to ensure that negotiations over the status of Jerusalem favoured Israel. Facts on the ground would “be presented in the future negotiations as a geographic fact”23 to define the baselines for negotiation and effectively render certain topics unnegotiable because the facts would declare them a fait accompli. In similar fashion, the Israeli government set upon a path of appropriating Palestinian land located within the 1967 borders, also known as “the Green Line”, through a series of measures including, inter alia, building the wall, moving settlers into Palestinian lands, funding settlements, and creating an elaborate network of roads and rail systems that connect settlements and settlers to Israel while simultaneously excluding and dividing Palestinians.[24] [25] As of 2017, a total of more than 620,000 Israeli citizens reside in the West Bank[26] in settlements that constitute some 10% of the West Bank area.[27] The current situation features a prolonged Israeli occupation, together with Israeli plans to annex more territory, further divide Palestinians from each other, and “legalize” the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to Israel. Palestinians do not have much left with which to negotiate, and their circumstances are hindered even further by the Trump administration throwing its full political support behind Israel. Steps undertaken recently by this administration include supporting Israeli plans of annexation and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel while ignoring Palestinian claims to that city. On December 6, 2017, President Trump announced: today we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. . . . This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done.[28] Trump’s announcement relied explicitly on the “situation on the ground” as justification for the controversial move. Trying to counter Israel’s imperialism and its ability to create the “situation on the ground”, Palestinians have appealed to international law through bodies such as the International Criminal Court, the General Assembly, the Security Council, and various United Nations agencies and bodies to recognize Palestinian statehood and help limit Israeli and, more recently, American violations against Palestinian collective and individual rights.[29] For Palestinians, the appeal to international law and international institutions is not an alternative to foreign aid. On the contrary, foreign aid and appeals to the international community to recognize Palestinian rights represent complementary, equitable, and necessary strategies. On this view, Palestinians require liberation, and liberation is not a status to be negotiated with Israel, the very country that benefits most from Palestine’s continued economic, political, and military subjugation. Aid, for its part, represents a fiduciary duty or, alternatively, a necessary evil, extended to Palestinians by the international community while Palestinians continue to endure an occupation that has been tolerated and sometimes supported by northern States. Israel’s conduct, including its violent military campaigns, have forced Palestinians to seek protection from international institutions. A 2016 report by the State of Palestine outlined the Palestinian view on aid, international institutions, and negotiations towards a two-state solution. It stressed that Palestinians are forced by Israel’s creation of facts on the ground to go outside of the negotiation framework and seek international recognition of Palestinian sovereignty. The report also stressed that Palestinians need aid only because they are forced to live under occupation, colonialism, and limits on their right to self-determination, a situation that the international community has tolerated: At a certain point, the threshold for a viable two-state solution will be breached, potentially giving way to an apartheid solution where millions of Palestinians live without basic human and democratic rights. To avert such a catastrophe, we need to replace Israel’s “facts on the ground” with the Palestinian State as a “fact on the international stage”. This is the path forward that would transform vicious into virtuous circles. If sufficient international pressure were applied, the consequent of the Israeli occupation would not only unleash rapid economic growth and a jobs boom throughout Palestine but bring a swift end to aid dependency. These multiple challenges cannot be met by Palestine alone. If the two-state solution is to remain viable, concerted international action is required to reverse colonial Israel’s annexation agenda and, together with the Palestinian Government, restore fiscal stability.[30] When negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis broke down in 2009, Palestinians stepped up their appeals to international institutions. The United Nations commissioned reports in 2009 and 2014 to investigate violations of international law in the Gaza Strip by Israel and Hamas. In 2012, the General Assembly raised Palestine’s status to “Non-member Observer State”, which led to Palestine’s recognition of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and vice versa.32 In 2016, the Palestinian Authority (PA) advised donors that “Palestine’s drive to enlist international support and increase pressure on Israel will intensify”.33 For their part, northern states such as the United States and Canada met Palestine’s international campaign with disapproval. In 2009, for example, American officials placed direct diplomatic and financial pressure on United Nations officials to refrain from criticizing Israel or advancing Palestinian self-determination.34 Then, the United States stopped paying its share to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and, eventually, halted all funding to Palestinian government and civil society organizations. When UNESCO admitted Palestine as a full member state in 2011, the Obama administration responded by withholding its financial contributions to the agency, thereby depriving it of 22% of its total budget.35 The US administration has also
vetoed relevant Security Council resolutions with the exception of SC Resolution 2334, which passed on December 23, 2016, and threatened other international bodies with reprisals should they follow UNESCO in recognizing Palestinian sovereignty. A handful of other states - mostly northern - voted against similar General Assembly resolutions and some boycotted the 2014 meeting of High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention.[31] At the same time that they have disapproved of Palestinian appeals to international law and bodies, northern donors have backed Israel’s insistence that Palestinian sovereignty is to be achieved through negotiations, not by seeking international recognition. In other words, Palestinians must negotiate their rights and freedoms with Israel, the very country that is responsible for their violation, rather than seek recognition of it through traditional legal and international mechanisms.[32] Palestinian liberation, self-determination, security, and equality are thus conditioned on “convincing” the Israeli government of its value through a negotiation process that has not only given Israel the opportunity to further Palestinian’s colonial condition but that, in reality, has ceased to exist. These attempts have failed to end Palestinian appeals to international law and bodies.[33] After all, the Palestinian pursuit of self-determination dates back at least to World War I. It is not easy to quell a century-long struggle, particularly when the Palestinian people generally enjoy political and diplomatic support from states of the Global South which, given their history, understand colonialism all too well, can empathize with the collective quest for statehood, and recognize the social, political, economic, and personal costs of living under occupation.[34] Attempting to cut Palestinians off from the international community legally and institutionally while offering aid constructs and declares a particular discursive landscape which fundamentally recasts the relationship between northern donor states and Palestine. When viewed through the lens of international law, northern states owe Palestinians significant duties. These duties are rooted in various sources, including international humanitarian law, and their precise range is the subject of significant scholarly analysis. Then, the International Court of Justice clarified the nature and extent of the duties owed to Palestinians by states to the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. On July 9,2004, the court determined by majority vote that the wall built by Israel cut deep into Palestinian territory in violation of international law and outlined the basic obligation of all states in response to Israel’s violations.[35] The court indicated that all states must not “recognize the illegal situation created by the wall”, refrain from rendering “aid or assistance in maintaining the situation” created by the construction of the wall, ensure that impediments to Palestinians’ self-determination created by the wall is brought to an end, and ensure that Israel respects its full range of obligations under the Geneva Convention. However, northern states do not consider their obligations as High Contracting Parties when they deliver their aid programming to Palestine. Instead, they have reconfigured themselves and their relationship to Palestine through the lens of development aid. Through this recasting, northern states allow themselves the illusion that they are charitable actors who extended generosity to Palestine rather than High Contracting Parties that owe duties to a nation under occupation. As a corollary, the charity paradigm perpetuates an image of Palestine and Palestinians as a backwards people in need of technical assistance rather than liberation. Mitt Romney’s famous declaration that culture and providence explain the difference between Israeli GDP and Palestinian GDP reflects the enduring negative stereotypes of Palestinians and recalls the importance of imagination in the colonial projects of the Global North.[36] This image has become - or, more accurately, continues to be - a myth that assumes away occupation and its well-documented, devastating impacts on Palestinians, including their economy. Occupation’s erasure explains Palestinian economic and other limitations as essential, fatal, and inherent flaws and also further the narrative of the master’s generosity to an economically and culturally backwards people. This generosity narrative constitutes part of a larger story about development aid from the Global North to the Global South which has helped justify and hide the exploitation that marks the relationship between richer and poorer nations in this world. As anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it: In the mainstream narrative of international development peddled by institutions from the World Bank to the UK’s Department of International Development, the history of colonialism is routinely erased. According to the official story, developing countries are poor because of their own internal problems, while western countries are rich because they worked hard, and upheld the right values and policies. And because the west happens to be further ahead, its countries generously reach out across the chasm to give “aid” to the rest - just a little something to help them along.[37] This “little something to help them along” plays a powerful role in perpetuating hierarchies and shaping understandings of who owes what to whom as between North and South and shaping northern perceptions of the other’s ontological significance. Imagination thus intertwines with denial and structural inequality to turn oppression into debt and generate expectations of gratitude by the generous party from the gift recipient. David Graeber’s profound analysis demonstrates that a gift given in the context of hierarchal relationships can create its own dynamic of moral and social superiority.[38] Recent reparations movements have challenged the northern generosity narrative by bringing colonialism back into analysis of North-South aid relationships.[39] [40] Against this context, an expanding circle of advocates and commentators have begun talking about the need for colonial powers to give reparations, not aid.4* The turn from aid to reparations relies on overcoming historic amnesia and emphasizing colonialism’s impact on both North and South. In Palestine, however, the reverse trend has taken hold. Aid policies, institutions, and mechanisms function as an instrument of erasure, positioning Palestine as a nation in need of development reform while increasingly eliminating from view Palestine as the site of occupation and a space from which people can make moral and legal claims against Israel and the “international community”. Aid serves as a site of normative struggle where assertions of mastery and expectations of gratitude exert themselves at various points through the aid relationship. As the next section of this chapter sets out, mastery becomes institutionalized through the aid relationship at the macro level through donor coordination mechanisms and at die micro level through project administration requirements. Mastery through donor coordination In its first connotation, “mastery” refers to having become expert or someone who excels at something, as in a master painter, a master furniture maker, or a master chef. In its second connotation, mastery relates to a hierarchical relationship, one marked by inequality and arbitrariness in which one party is presumed to have the authority to demand something, including gratitude, and to act upon the other from another by virtue of that hierarchy. Both connotations of mastery turn on control. One who has mastered a subject controls that subject. One who masters others controls them. The master painter controls the brush, the master furniture maker controls the tools and the master controls a subordinate. Slavoj Zizek’s succinctly locates the source of “mastery”. The complexity of reasons for and against gives rise to “the Master” who, imbued with discretion, transforms complexity “into a simple, decisive Yes or No”.[41] Mastery can be manufactured by excluding others, suppressing those things that need to be understood in order for a situation to be folly appreciated, and by cultivating the discretion to announce a result without having to take other positions or views into account. Masters, then, are those who assume the authority to make the “decisive gesture which can never be fully grounded in reasons”.[42] Mastery in both its connotations relates to development aid; one meaning declares the basis for the aid relationship while the other develops from the aid relationship. Mastery as expertise forms the core of aid and aid programming. Northern states grant Palestine technical assistance and access to experts because they lay claims to superior knowledge, expertise, and experience that is mostly missing by Palestinians. This form of mastery is explicitly invoked to justify the aid relationship.[43] By its other connotation, mastery means cultivating control over the other. This form of mastery is integral to aid practices but is not declared. Hidden from view, mastery as hierarchical relationship is made possible through the banishment of international law, institutions, and obligations and the creation of new institutions that are packaged as politically neutral and practically necessary to the aid enterprise. In fact, these purportedly neutral, necessary, and non-normative structures pack a powerful political punch because they define priorities for Palestinians, remove them from decision-making, insert Israeli narratives and priorities, and render decisions according to arbitrary frameworks that move discretion into the hands of aid givers and aid workers. Mastery is cultivated at both the macro and micro levels within the aid relationship. As northern aid to Palestinians began to flow more steadily, donors created mechanisms to coordinate that aid. The reasons, in theory, prove innocuous enough. Individual donors needed to know about each other’s plans to help ensure aid effectiveness Which country was going to cover which “sectors”? How much funding was needed? Where and who would provide it? Ostensibly 4 politically neutral, donor coordination in fact became deeply normative. Through their coordination efforts, donors have set Palestinian priorities, defined aspirations, shaped the political system, reformulated the relationship between the public and private spheres, and defined lifestyles for aid recipients, all without concern for popular legitimacy. Donor coordination has also further concealed occupation from policy view. Given the central role of aid in the Palestinian economy, the reach and significance of donor coordination cannot be underestimated. Two bodies play a particularly important coordinating role. Established in 1993, the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee “serves as the principal policy-level coordination mechanism for development assistance to the Palestinian people” and “seeks to promote dialogue between donors, the PA and the Government of Israel”. Chaired by Norway and co-sponsored by the EU and the United States, the Committee brings together “a high level political group of key donors”.[44] Its membership consists of Palestine, Israel, Canada, Egypt, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Japan, Jordan, the United Nations, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia. The World Bank acts as secretariat. Having met 22 times between 2005 and 2018, the Committee has become neither ad hoc nor simply a coordinating mechanism. In 2005, the United States created the office of the US Security Coordinator (USSC), headquartered in Tel Aviv, commanded by US Department of Defense officials and comprising a “multinational team that consists of military and civilian personnel from Canada, the United Kingdom, Turkey and the Netherlands; as well as other international partners from Germany, Finland, Denmark, and Greece who provide technical training experts and advisors”. The USSC is tasked with encouraging “coordination on security matters between Israel and the Palestinian Authority” and building “the security capacity of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank”.[45] Donor coordination in Palestine reveals the overarching regulation of internal and external political relations and national priorities without regard to their popular legitimacy. Instead, new regulatory frameworks stemming from power relations that are external and largely unknown or inaccessible to the Palestinian people substitute for popular legitimacy and local knowledge. Neither the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee nor the USSC shows any particular concern for popular legitimacy or Palestinian priorities in its decision-making. Palestinians stress the importance of ending the occupation as a prerequisite to building justice both within an imagined Palestinian state and between Israelis and Palestinians, consistently maintaining that self-determination and justice go hand in hand. A 2015 survey of youth aged 15 to 29 found that 79.4% consider “ending the occupation and the building of Palestine” as a top priority for the Palestinian people, followed by improving the standard of living, which garnered 7.3% of respondents. The overwhelming emphasis on ending the occupation was consistent across the West Bank and Gaza and across genders.[46] However, both the Liaison Committee and the USSC systematically exclude popular priorities or participation. They also dilute the priorities presented by the PA, which reiterates the popular refrain, advanced from within and outside Palestine, that occupation must end before Palestinians can have a fair chance at development.[47] Both coordinating bodies lack mechanisms to include Palestinian civil society in their decisions. These coordination mechanisms also lack platforms to encourage reporting back, let alone accountability, to the Palestinian people. Sahar Taghdisi Rad argues that donors generally fail to understand the dynamics of conflict on political economies partially because of their unwillingness “to take effective account of the conflict stemming from their political, strategic and ideological interests and alliances in the conflict”.[48] Rather than incorporate Palestinian experiences and insights into the decision-making process, donor coordination renders them even less intelligible. The structures are designed so that the needs and aspirations of Palestinians disappear, and those who are already disenfranchised in the current Palestinian political structures, such as youth, become even more distanced from and invisible within the structures that produce national priorities. Palestinian civil society organizations have attempted to influence priorities communicated by the PA to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee. A civil society consortium met over several months under the auspices of Karamah and prepared a vision document for the justice sector.[49] The latest report by the State of Palestine to the Committee emphasizes that it has attempted to enhance consultations.[50] Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether or how such initiatives and consultations have influenced the Committee and its decisions. Disconnects between popular Palestinian aspirations and donor coordination mechanisms can be glimpsed through the reports prepared for the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee and the procedures adopted by the Committee. The PA’s report references occupation 13 times, emphasizing its negative impact on human rights, justice, and economic growth in no uncertain terms.[51] [52] IMF and World Bank (2016) reports submitted in anticipation of a September 19, 2016, Committee meeting, for example, disregard the occupation altogether while the Quartet report mentions occupation only once.38 Norway chairs the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee meetings, which are held outside Palestine and information about the Committee’s protocols, rules of procedure, minutes, decisions, or reports prove difficult to find. Some Committee reports are made publicly available online, usually in English, and major meetings are sometimes followed by press conferences. However, the Committee meetings remain closed. Moreover, Palestinian development priorities must be negotiated through the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee with Israel’s full participation. In the end, activities aimed at ending the occupation or holding the Israeli government to account tor policies such as settlements expansion - policies that have been disavowed by the American government in international fora - do not figure in coordination efforts. Instead, markets and security take top priority. The Office of the Quartet, tor example, proposes that Palestinian private sector should be the main driver of economic development: Though the Palestinian private sector has the potential to be a powerful engine, today the Palestinian economy suffers from underinvestment in Palestinian industry. Investment in plant and machinery in the West Bank and Gaza as a proportion of GDP has fallen from 12.9% in 2000 to 4.8% in 2014. The current annual level of underinvestment in plant and machinery amounts to about $1.4 billion a year.[53] Leaving aside distributive justice concerns, the report ignores the complications, to put it mildly, of investing in an environment where goods must pass Israeli checkpoints or otherwise be subjected to Israel regulations. The insecurities and contingencies have proven too much for even the most resourced and dedicated investors. Market strategies in this context do not produce national growth for Palestinians but a substratum of cheap labour for foreign enterprises and Palestinian economic elites. The USSC, for its part, is even more removed from Palestinian priorities. It is not that Palestinians do not value security. They do. However, “security” in the Palestinian context has meant extended state power, including the power of the Israeli state, over Palestinian lives, with the result that Israeli security matters while Palestinian security does not. It has become axiomatic that security coordination does not entail equal security. The Palestinian security forces do not have jurisdiction over Israelis, regardless of where they are, while the Israeli army continues to have jurisdiction over Palestinians, either directly or by proxy, regardless of where they are.[54] Efforts purportedly aimed at appeasing Israeli anxiety or building trust between Israeli and Palestinian forces has translated into Palestinian forces policing their own people and putting down popular protests, or coordinating with Israel against political opponents. A resident of the Jenin refugee camp expressed a popular Palestinian sentiment in response to the situation where Palestinians are subject to both forces while Israelis are subject to none: I don’t have a problem with the security collaboration if it is reciprocal. However, there is domination only. When the PA can ask Israel to arrest a settler to protect the Palestinian people’s security, that will be a different story.[55] Ultimately, donor coordination through the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee and the USSC have produced spending priorities within Palestine that benefit the Israeli economy, donors, and the colonial condition. Israel no longer has to spend from its own coffers on matters such as security or re-building Palestinian infrastructure, including infrastructure destroyed by Israeli military offences.[56] Moreover, one economist has calculated that “at least 72% of international aid ends up in the Israeli economy”.[57] By these figures, aid has become yet another site for the colonial plunder of Palestinian resources.[58] Focusing on Canada, Jeffrey Monaghan has demonstrated that donors are the main beneficiaries of security aid that is purportedly given to benefit Palestinians. In the case of Canada, Monaghan details that enhancing Canada’s international reputation and relationship with other donors, particularly the United States, proved a significant motivator for giving aid to Palestinians and that the proponents of security aid considered themselves directly accountable to other donors, not Palestinians.[59] Mastery in project implementation Once approved through donor coordination mechanisms, development priorities have to be turned into projects which require implementation. Donor agencies generally contract out specific implementation projects, often but not always to corporations from their own jurisdiction. We entered the Palestinian development fray in 2005, as two universities - Windsor and Birzeit - having received a financial contribution from CIDA, as it was then, to develop a judicial education program with human dignity as its focus. Our initiative was called Karamah. At that time, donors gravitated towards judicial education in part because, consistent with liberal and neoliberal aspirations, they imagined the judiciary as an institution that can protect investors, check executive excesses, dispense justice to disputing parties, and transform conflict into peaceful dispute resolution. At this point in our analysis, we directly draw on our experiences with Karamah to explain how control of Palestinian decision-making, coupled with the benevolence narrative, also shape Palestinian-donor relations at the point of project implementation through aid delivery contracts. We turn an analytical lens on the management tools used by foreign development agencies to manage and evaluate development projects. The aid agency and the policies that guide the implementation of the aid agenda merit greater scrutiny. The agency’s very raison d’etre requires the imagination of Palestine as a nation asking for technical assistance rather than liberation, thus replicating and concretizing the benevolence narrative. Agency management tools, particularly the logic model and risk matrix, serve the interests of agency control, feed a variant of the benevolence narrative, and ultimately render working towards justice through international development a risky endeavour. In the aid bureaucracy’s “meticulous, often minute techniques” and the “multiplicity of often minor processes”, we find “the blueprint for a more general method”.[60] Agencies use logic models to define desired results and help ensure that their interventions lead to sustainable change. Accordingly, agencies determine which projects get funded on the basis of the efficacy of the logic model proposed and funded projects are evaluated against the logic model in the short, medium, and long terms. Logic models purport to create transparency by helping agencies 3 structure communication about investments and their intended and actual results. If the results identified at the end of the logic chain arc not achieved, the donor investment is considered a poor one. If the results are achieved but not according to the plan set out in the logic model, the change is considered “unexpected” or, alternatively, inconsequential to the donor investment. Again, the donor investment might be considered a poor one because the results could have been achieved without it. Adherence to the logic model is thus the sine qua non of international development project management. While different donors adopt slightly different schemas to represent their logic models, all share a common framework that moves proponents from activities to an increasingly higher order of sought-after results: effort is expended at the activity level, activities have to be defined in advance and often repeated to get results, the arrows (or some other metaphor) represent a causal force, and the higher- level boxes are effects that are the product of effort expended plus causal forces. США, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Bank agree that properly conceptualized and implemented activities should, by some causal force, produce the effects defined in higher-level boxes.[61] The causal force that purportedly propels a project from one level of result to another is actually a theory of change. Some donors, like USAID, explicitly recognize that a theory of change is acting behind the scenes while others do not. Global Affairs Canada - previously CIDA - remains committed to the notion that activities produce results in a clear, concise, and predictable manner through causal connection between the various levels of the logic model chain: “A result is a describable or measurable change that is derived from a cause-and-effect relationship”.[62] When read from bottom to top, the logic model purports to explain how work should be structured to produce results. In the judicial education context, activities such as preparing educational materials are defined and expected to produce short-term results, such as improved understanding of human rights principles on the part of judicial participants. The short-term results are to be repeated so that eventually, compounded over time, they produce longer-term results such as better judicial decision-making in light of human rights principles; and, those results themselves propel change at the ultimate level such as improved rule of law, access to justice or justice (depending on the prevailing terminology). When read from top to bottom, the model purports to explain why activities are undertaken: a desired goal such as supporting justice, access to justice or the rule of law is defined; this goal in turn relies on improved decision-making, which in turn relies on enhanced knowledge, which in turn requires the development of educational materials. Beyond the activity level, each box represents a desired result. The budget must correspond to the logic model with a set percentage of the total budget allocated to each box. Regardless of the content of each box, the relationship between the boxes must be defined in terms of cause and effect. The plan had to be clear, largely knowable in advance, and sequential. Most importantly, it has to make sense to the desk officer who might have little to no knowledge of law, legal education, or social change but who approves narrative and financial reports before disbursing funds. Driven by the need for clarity, the logic model distils complex issues into simple statements and transforms wicked questions into tame ones.[63] Judicial education is imagined as a set of pre-planned activities rather than a dynamic process of engagement between actors across jurisdictions and sectors. In Karamah’s case, the demand for simplistic cause-and-effect planning moulded into the logic model structure imported invalid assumptions into the change process no matter how many times we tried to revise or perfect our version of the logic model. For example, our logic model presumed that change arises out of activities that transfer knowledge from expert knower to judicial target. On this view, the more information or knowledge transferred, the better. Consistent with colonial projects that presume a need for change only in the colonial subject and harness education towards such benevolent results, the logic model does not admit or value the possibility that all actors in the relationship may benefit and change. Moreover, enhanced capacity in and of itself does not in itself change individuals. People do not examine or alter their behaviour because they have picked up a new fact or theory. Individuals change their behaviour because they have built relationships and professional identities that explain their relationship with their larger world differently. 2 Second, the logic model imposed the assumption that changed decisionmaking by judges would produce larger changes in society, even though we knew that there is no direct line or simple causal relation between judicial decisionmaking and social change, and that law on the books often diverges from law in action. Judicial impact studies have demonstrated this to be the case across jurisdictions.[64] It is not that judges do not matter. They do. However, legal reforms, including judicial decision-making, must work in concert with social, economic, or political forces to affect behaviour. The activities that must be undertaken, the changing context, the interaction between actors, the nature of changes required, and the types of relationships that must be fostered cannot adequately be captured through logic models which emphasize streamlined and focused decisionmaking by individual elites that transit change through repetition of activities rather than strategic relations. Logic models cannot capture the complexity of activity, relationships, or decision-making that is required to produce promised results. Of course, change processes can be understood differently. Tactical mapping, for example, eschews properly sequenced activities in favour of fostering productive networks and relationships.[65] Tactical mapping strategies contemplate that law has an important but not exclusive role to play in social change, including social change that defines itself as building the rule of law. Legal, social, economic, and political abuses are sustained by a complex system of relationships that mutually reinforce the role of abuse and violations of power. Some of these relationships are hierarchical or otherwise structural; others are informal. Each of these relationships is a potential site of intervention and might respond to a different tactic.[66] Tactical maps also recognize that “the status quo generally does not yield to a single tactic. Multiple strategies are needed”.[67] Viewed through a logic model lens, implementation resources are best spent on logistics, preparing and planning for events. Viewed through a tactical planning model, implementation resources are best spent on relationship-building that leads to the events and activities that in turn produce results. Karamah promised to deliver a new model of judicial education, one that supported the independence of the judiciary itself while also creating a platform for members of the judiciary to reflect upon the meaning and significance of human dignity in judicial decision-making. We achieved this by thinking of our work more through a tactical mapping than a logic model frame. The key is that relationships drive strategies or tactics and events rather than the other way around. Ironically, although the necessity of a new model of judicial education was recognized and funded by США, США officers insisted on reading our work and its results through the logic model. There was no option. Not surprisingly, they found it extremely difficult to understand our methods or the successes that our approach engendered.[68] If logic models and risk registers force false cause-and-effect relationships, why do aid agencies remain committed to these management tools? Why, in other words, remain faithful to a model that time and time again has stacked the deck against the possibility of success? It is not because agencies do not, or at least cannot, know better. Aid agencies have policy branches that are mandated to examine the efficacy of tools and processes adopted by the agency. And as we have already noted, a plethora of easily available literature questions the assumptions inherent within the logic model, raises questions about the risk register, and can point to alternatives. Nonetheless, the logic model remains the bureaucratic instrument of choice because it packs a powerfi.il bureaucratic and political punch. It creates spaces of bureaucratic discretion by placing implemented in an impossible predicament, always vulnerable to bureaucratic criticisms of insufficiency and failure: follow the logic model and diminish the possibility of results, or deviate from the model and risk charges of contract breach. Logic models and risk registers permit desk officers to equate accountability with inflexibility and control with understanding. In their insightful paper, “The Colonial Foundations of the State of Exception: Juxtaposing the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories with Colonial Bureaucratic History”, Shcnhav and Berda identify intentional and systemic unpredictability as the basis of colonial bureaucratic rule. Weber’s classic account of rule-based bureaucracy does not account for the ways in which the exception is built into colonial systems of control. Systematized unpredictability makes a moving target of accountability.[69] The targets, modes, consequences, and context of colonial bureaucratic rule differ drastically from the modern development bureaucracy. But embedded uncertainty plays the same role. Zizek’s[41] master who, imbued with discretion, transforms complexity “into a simple, decisive Yes or No” appears again. The logic model permits development officers the illusion of mastery, but mastery of what? Mastery of boxes and arrows that purport to capture the aspirations of people and nations through a series of three or four layers of discrete columns of boxes and arrows. Certainly not mastery of the complicated, conflicting, and changing decision-making terrain. The rationale for “Yes or No” can thus be made knowable to the bureaucrat sitting thousands of miles away. If a “No” is given, funding stops and activities cease. The “No” is always available because the logic model lays down an unachievable path even if the ultimate results are achievable by other routes. Of course, as we detailed in the first section of this chapter, governments can say either “Yes” or “No” as purely political acts.[71] Such responses, however, risk public scrutiny and discussion.[72] The “Yes” given in the shadow of the always present, structurally sustained possible “No” gives the agency control over rule of law programming, whatever their rhetoric about “aid effectiveness”, valuing “the local” or participatory decision-making. It is precisely the arbitrariness of the logic model which breeds uncertainty and instability for initiatives by holding them to illogical methodologies and modalities that enables agency control; the possibility of demonstrating merit or results is rendered subjective and placed in agency hands. The logic model reproduces power relations by charting a path to failure while funnelling discussions about results through a prism that deflects, marginalizes, and warps the considerations that need to be highlighted and the discussions that need to be exchanged for change to take root. Just as it is erased at the point of donor coordination, occupation barely matters at the bureaucratic project implementation level. It factors in project management through the risk register merely as a logistical concern. Companion to the logic model, the risk register requires regular updating by project managers whose job it is to identify, grade, and minimize risks. Examples of occupation related risks include restrictions on travel because of checkpoints. Occupation barely matters beyond the risk register. For example, the evaluation of CIDA programming in the West Bank and Gaza finalized in July 2015 reviews 25 CIDA projects but does not mention the word “occupation” once, preferring instead the terms “history of conflict” and “ongoing political instability”.[73] As Jeremy Wildeman’s review of donor aid effectiveness to Palestinians demonstrates, context denial and historic amnesia are typical of most donors: Strong analysis of the context of an intervention is crucial to a donor not doing harm in a fragile and conflicted state. This analysis does not seem always to be present with donors active in the OPT, especially the powerful North American based ones. This can be observed in how they perceive and account for the fundamental factors driving conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, such as occupation, settlements, settlers and colonisation. Here some donors rarely, if ever, identify those factors, even though they are the main causes for Palestinian poverty, the failure of the Oslo Process, continuous violence and instability.[74] Wildeman concludes that Canada stands out among donor countries as one of the worst deniers. Eliminating occupation as a factor that drives Palestinian poverty and institutional weaknesses reinforces the illusion at all bureaucratic levels that Palestinians are a people who need technical training rather than liberation. This inversion turns the agency into a benefactor, renders gratitude a decisive factor in development programming, and reinforces the narrative of debt as the narrative for North-South engagements. We close this chapter by relaying a personal encounter with aid bureaucracies that was reflective of several others. We do so mindful of Obiora Okafor’s reflections on practicing Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) through close engagement with institutions and the importance of institutional insider perspectives to “enact our dramas of close engagement”.[75] Throughout our seven years of engagement with CIDA and its bureaucracy, we encountered kind and caring individuals who worked hard to understand our work and its context. Too often, however, officials acted as though they are not subject to laws, including the overriding judicial review principles that circumscribe their decision-making.[76] Rather, they imagine themselves as unfettered decision makers who confer a unilateral benefit onto others and who had granted us a personal favour by contributing to our project through a contribution agreement. As one senior bureaucrat put it to us in asserting his power over our knowledge, “I am in the Queen”. Alluding to our contract with the Queen in Right of Canada, he was insisting that his interpretation of our contract would prevail without having to provide reasons. With these words, he highlighted, perhaps unwittingly, his expectation of mastery over subjects who are expected to know their place and show appropriate gratitude for the generosity that has been bestowed upon them. Conclusion Aid has reframed the space in which Palestine engages with the “international community”. Led by the United States, northern countries have worked to deflect decision-making away from international bodies that have conventionally been involved in the human rights of the Palestinian people. To that end, United Nations decisions and reports that highlight violations of Palestinian human rights including, inter alia, Special Rapporteurs whose mandates include the human rights of the Palestinian people, and two United Nations investigations into violations of international law in Gaza in 2009 and 2014 have been the subject of campaigns to discredit them. Palestinian appeals to the General Assembly, the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court have similarly faced resistance from the United States and its allies that have sought to work against declarations of Palestinian rights by these bodies and thwart any possibility of remedies for rights violations by them. Engagement between the Global North and Palestine is increasingly directed away from law towards aid and aid agencies whose work results in the erasure, denial, or minimization of the occupation as the primary mischief to be remedied in the pursuit of peace and justice in Palestine-Israel. Aid and international law need not be alternative frameworks, but they have been posited and treated as such by the Global North with reference to Palestine, advancing the narrative that Palestinians are a people in need of technical assistance, not liberation. 5 Rethinking international legal education in Latin America[77]
|
|||||
| << | CONTENTS | >> |
|---|
|
Related topics |
