Reflections from the EDGE: Philanthropy, the Genocide in Palestine, and the Need for Systemic Change 

Written by Michael Kourabas, Director of Partner Support & Grantmaking at UUSC

EDGE board member, Michael Kourabas, recently attended the 2023 EDGE Funders Alliance conference in Berlin. Below are some of his reflections on the conference, the genocide of Palestinians, how it all relates to systemic oppression, and how we can engage in the struggle for a more just world. 

We’re Not OK

I’m writing this because some part of my (white, cis-male, United Statesian) brain thinks, maybe if I just find the right words and put them in just the right order, I’ll be able to make a little more sense of the world around me. How it’s burning, and those in power are incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. Maybe getting all these thoughts and feelings out on paper, or a screen, will help me feel just a little bit more “OK.” 

Because I’m not OK, none of us are. UNICEF reported that Israel murdered 2,360 children in Gaza in 18 days. Palestine is not OK. 

Frontline communities in Burma, Sudan, Ethiopia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, Haiti, Honduras, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and across the Global South are fighting for their lives every day against systems meant to subjugate and destroy them. They’re not OK. 

Those of us in the Global North with dominant identities—whose privilege, comfort, and access depend on the oppression and exploitation of Global South and BIPOC communities around the world—are not OK, either. Because none of us can truly be OK until everyone is OK.Nobody’s free until Palestine is free. 

From the River to the Sea

The human impacts of Israel’s October siege of Gaza have been utterly devastating. As the Associated Press reported on October 29, “the death toll among Palestinians passed 8,000, mostly women and minors, as Israeli tanks and infantry pursued what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a ‘second stage’ in the war.” This “second stage”– a ground invasion of Gaza – began shortly after Israel cut-off all internet and phone communications to the territory, leaving Gaza “unreachable to the outside world.”

Less than two weeks after the campaign began, the Israeli Air Force had already dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the world. On October 24, in the face of a growing Palestinian solidarity movement taking to the streets in cities around the world, Israel murdered more than 700 Palestinians, at that point the highest 24-hour death toll since the latest siege began. Since October 7, 1.4 million people have been displaced in Gaza and nearly half of all housing has been destroyed. 

The October siege of Gaza is but the most recent example of the State of Israel’s atrocity crimes against the Palestinian people. As the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) put it in an emergency briefing paper on October 18, “[s]ince 1947, there have been multiple ‘genocidal moments’ where the Israeli settler-colonial regime has engaged in the mass killing of Palestinians. In the 75 years since Israel’s settler-colonial project began, “successive Israeli governments have pursued deliberate, calculated, and explicit campaigns against Palestinians of forced expulsion, transfer and displacement, killing, fragmentation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and denial of fundamental rights.” 

In addition to regular campaigns of extreme violence against occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has ruled over Gaza using a “complex apartheid system.”

As Grassroots International explained in their statement demanding an end to settler colonialism, occupation, and military siege, “Since 2006, people living in the coastal enclave [of Gaza] have been subjected to a suffocating siege at the hands of a brutal occupying force – illegal under international law – that encloses their territory by naval blockade and by a network of walls, razor wire fences, and surveillance systems…. It is for these reasons that Gaza is often referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison….”

CCR has already made plain that Israel’s “complete siege” of Gaza amounted to genocide, and that the US government – Israel’s largest military backer – was complicit in that crime. Immediately following Israel’s declaration of war against Gaza, President Biden pledged his administration’s “rock solid” and “unwavering” support for Israel, promising to use “all appropriate means” to assist. The next day, the US Secretary of Defense directed the Navy’s “most advanced aircraft carrier and its heavily armed strike group” to the coast of Israel and announced that the US “will be rapidly providing the Israel Defense Forces with additional equipment and resources, including munitions.” This support is on top of the ~$3.8 billion in defense aid the US provides to Israel each year, and the additional $14 billion for which Bidren recently requested Congressional approval. 

This support is more than theoretical. According to the BBC, “[t]he Israeli jets bombing Gaza are American-made, as are most of the precision-guided munitions now being used. Some of the interceptor missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system are also produced in the US. The US was sending re-supplies of those weapons even before Israel requested them.”

There Are No Safe Spaces

As Israel’s violence against Gaza continued to escalate two weeks ago, I traveled to Berlin – home to the largest Palestinian diaspora community in Europe – where more than 200 funders, activists, and movement leaders had gathered for the EDGE Funders Alliance “(un)conference,” to advance the discourse around systemic change philanthropy. We were privileged to share the space with activists from some of the most powerful global social movements, including some who had made the difficult and painful decision to leave Palestine in order to explain firsthand how the world–and, in particular, philanthropy–was failing them and their movement. 

Outside the walls of Oyoun–the EDGE conference venue and one of the few places in Berlin willing to let Palestinians gather–authorities were regularly cracking down with acute ferocity on any and all support for Palestine. Demonstrations against Israel’s siege of Gaza were banned and criminalized and met with an overwhelming presence of riot police and “clear instances of police brutality.” 

Palestinian activists with the Berlin-based “Palestine Speaks” joined us for a workshop and reported that more than 1,000 people had already been arrested for demonstrating; some schools had even inquired into Palestinian children’s views on Hamas. The Palestinian keffiyeh, a traditional scarf symbolizing Palestinian nationalism, had been banned–as had all public demonstrations of solidarity, including the rallying cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (Similar bans would soon follow in other European countries.) Each day, as funders from around the world gathered within the safety of Oyoun’s walls, outside people took to the streets and were met with extreme violence. As one of the Palestinian activists put it to us, “There are no safe spaces for Palestinians in Berlin to be together and grieve.”

The genocide in Palestine rightly became the central theme of the conference. Through tears, the team from Rawa Fund in Palestine shared how philanthropy’s “fragile solidarity” had failed them; how funders insist that Palestinians “fit their pain into funders’ frameworks,” then turn our backs on them when they need us most. Movements across the globe –  including the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, the Movement for Black Lives, the War on Want, and from the shantytowns of South Africa – expressed their solidarity. After being called out in the final moments from the stage, some funders made public commitments to supporting Palestinian liberation.

Colonialism and What’s Next

Throughout our time in Berlin, movement leaders helped us understand that the Palestinian genocide is rooted in the systems of colonialism and imperialism and Palestine’s struggle for freedom is tied to liberation and justice movements around the world. Movements also reminded us of some fundamental truths about the state of the world and why none of us are OK. 

First, the tremendous wealth of the Global North was created through the systematic oppression, subjugation, and extraction of people, wealth, and resources from the Global South (i.e., colonialism). In monetary terms, some estimates put the total wealth “drained” from the Global South at the equivalent of $152 trillion–since 1960 alone. Each year, more than $2 trillion of wealth is stolen from the Global South by the Global North. As others have observed, this insidious “drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.” 

Colonization, in other words, has not been metaphorical, so decolonization must also be literal. If we are not talking about giving back the land, resources, wealth, and culture stolen from the Global South and Indigenous Peoples around the world, then we simply aren’t talking about decolonization.

Second, the dominant institutions of the Global North – namely governments and militaries, international finance mechanisms, and corporations, as well as many philanthropies and NGOs – exist primarily to maintain this colonial relationship of oppression and wealth extraction from the Global South. Examples abound, and those cited in Berlin included Global North control of Global South currencies (e.g., the CFA franc); unfair trade agreements maintained by the World Trade Organization and its dispute resolution system; and the structures and policies of the neoliberal world order, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 

In the context of their genocide and decisions by foreign funders to halt aid, Palestinian community organizations were crystal clear: “Donor pronouncements to halt ‘grants’ and earmarked ‘aid’ to Palestine … prove that the international aid system is yet another tool in the toolbox of colonial hegemony in our region, a bludgeon used to bring the Palestinians to their knees. The discourse of ‘development’ and ‘aid’ is nothing more than political subordination that aims to subjugate us, discourage our struggle, and fragment its social foundation.” 

In light of all of this, Luisa Emilia Reyes Zúñiga of Equidad de Género: Ciudadanía, Trabajo y Familia stated in Berlin that, rather than solidarity, what the Global South most needs is to be “delinked” from the Global North entirely. 

Finally, as should be painfully obvious by now, the “polycrisis” we encounter today is a direct result of this historical and ongoing relationshipof extraction and oppression – colonialism rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy, and maintained by extractive capitalism and militarism.

And, while these Global North-created systems destroy the planet and displace million of people, the governments of the Global North demonize, criminalize, and detain them as they seek safety and refuge.

If we’re ready to be honest about how we got here, what are we – as funders, activists, humans – called to do in response? Here are a few suggestions from movements:

We need to think long-term.

The long-term, intergenerational root causes of oppression require strategies that are likewise long-term and intergenerational. We may not see the end to racialized, extractive capitalism in our lives, but how are we creating the conditions for the end to those systems in 100 or 200 years (or, as abolitionist Mariame Kaba asks, 500 years)? First and foremost, our strategies must be able to answer that question.

We must practice deep solidarity with liberation and resistance movements across the globe.

We cannot pick and choose because nobody’s free until everyone is free. Including Palestine. What does deep solidarity look like? The Movement for Black Lives outlined one version in their recent statement condemning Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people: “As the authoritarian Israeli apartheid regime threatens the occupied civilian population of Gaza and deploys the violence and velocity of settler colonialism to devastating effect, we must all do more than pledge solidarity with Palestine—we must demonstrate it in the streets, in the halls of power, on every platform, in every way. The answer is simple: Divest from Israel’s relentless colonial aggression and maintain solidarity with Palestinian survivors of state violence to ensure peace and dignity for everyone—or allow genocide. We commit, in both principle and practice, to resisting the genocide of Gaza.

We must be committed to ongoing learning and unlearning.

We must educate ourselves and our communities about the history of oppression and injustice, how we are complicit in its perpetuation, and what we can do to change that. We must commit to learning about and understanding the alternatives to extractive, racialized, patriarchal capitalism that frontline communities have been building and practicing for generations, then strategize about how we can strengthen those alternatives and implement them in our own contexts.

We need to support the grassroots organizations & movements that are building the future.

Systemic change is only possible when it is led by grassroots organizations and movements, and they need our flexible, long-term support. We know this already, but it must be repeated until short-term, project funding dies for good. If we insist on imposing restrictions and maintaining control of our resources, then we’re doing more harm than good and should stay away entirely. 

We need to resource communities resisting oppression now.

While the struggle for systemic change will take generations, frontline communities are resisting and practicing alternatives now and they also need our flexible, long-term support. 

Because systemic oppression is connected, so must be the efforts to dismantle and replace those systems.

We must create spaces for movements and funders alike to make connections, learn from each other, strategize, and be in solidarity with one another.

We need to be bold advocates for systemic change.

We need a shared analysis of what laws, policies, and systems are at the root of global oppression and how the struggles against oppression are connected. We must then use our power, privilege, and access to advocate for them to be dismantled and replaced.

And there are surely more. As we confront our reality and consider the way forward, we also need to be able to hold the tension between the urgency of the moment and the reality that this is a struggle that will not resolve in our lifetimes–not if we aim to win.

Here is a list of resources related to actions we can take for Palestine, as curated by the EDGE team.

Urgent support:

Here are organizations and ways to support Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian organizing in the US: 

Here are organizations and ways to support Arab, Muslim and Palestinian organizing in Europe:

  • Palestine Speaks Berlin – donate here and write “donation” 
  • European Legal Support Center for Palestinians  
  • ELSC and Palästina Kampagne : you can donate directly here. 
  • Aufruf zur Solidarität – Gegen Repression und Polizeigewalt : you can donate here. 

Things you can do beyond sending money:

  • Call & Email Congress: Stop the Genocide
  • Support the Ceasefire Now Resolution
    • Representatives Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Andre Carson, Summer Lee, and Delia Ramirez have just introduced a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and for humanitarian assistance to be allowed to enter Gaza.  It is essential that we generate thousands of calls to elected officials asking them to support this life-saving resolution for a ceasefire. TAKE ACTION: Call your members of Congress. It’s extremely important to urge them to support this ceasefire.  Pick up your phone now! Tell Congress to stop fueling Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza
    • Share on social media: this social media toolkit for endorsing groups contains topline messaging, sample tweets, graphics, and a list of all the sponsoring organizations to tag.
  • Join the National March on Washington: Free Palestine on Saturday, November 4.

Talking points to support you making the case for funding this work: sign up for messaging/comms training here.

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