Occupied Jerusalem- Palestinian civil society organizations operating in Jerusalem not only suffer from Israeli restrictions targeting all their activities and projects, and arbitrary measures aimed at closing them and obstructing their work in the Holy City, but these organizations also suffer from “conditional funding” imposed on them by foreign financiers.
Because the institutions in Jerusalem that rely mainly on donors have found themselves in recent years between two options, the most bitter: either accepting the conditions included in the agreements with the funding agencies, and thus abandoning basic national principles, or refraining from signing these agreements and losing the funding that is considered the main employer of these institutions. .
The Community Action Center is one of the Jerusalemite human rights institutions that relies primarily on funding. At the beginning of his talk to Tel Aviv Tribune Net, its director, Munir Nusseibeh, says that the harshest thing Palestinian civil society organizations face is “politically” conditional funding, as the donor includes a clause in the agreement that considers Palestinian organizations and political parties “terrorist,” and the organization must accept this and sign if it wishes to obtain funding.
The center affiliated with Al-Quds University refuses to sign an agreement that includes this clause, which has resulted in challenges in the institution’s ability to apply for funding from several parties over time, according to Nusseibeh.
Identification with the occupation
Among the obstacles facing the work of the center – which provides legal services – was an attempt by one of the donor agencies to force it to provide its legal services to beneficiaries based on political criteria, which its management rejected “because that is unacceptable in the world of human rights.”
Nusseibeh continued, “One of the donors told us that we should not legally represent the families of the Palestinian martyrs if they are subjected to sanctions, because according to the Israeli classification they are relatives of a terrorist, which we consider to be collective punishment and is not consistent with our vision of this person whom the occupation and its financiers classify as a terrorist.”
Despite the challenges faced by institutions, especially those operating in Jerusalem, Nusseibeh asserts that Palestinian civil society is strong, has not been subject to blackmail in general, and does not accept “politically” conditional funding, but it is under the microscope of all Israeli parties, perhaps the most prominent of which is the “Observer of Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGO). MONITOR).
Upon a visit to the website of that entity, Tel Aviv Tribune Net found that it lists the names of 58 Palestinian civil society organizations, and allocates a detailed file for each of them, considering that these organizations are “terrorist” or related to “terrorist” Palestinian organizations or personalities.
On the page dedicated to each institution, the organization presents an introductory overview of it, its sources of funding, its activities, and its relationship with specific Palestinian factions or figures, in addition to the discourse used by this institution and its activities in the field of boycotting Israel and within the framework of the International Criminal Court and the United Nations.
According to Nusseibeh, this organization, through its monitoring of all the movements of Palestinian civil society institutions, accused many of them of supporting terrorism, simply because they work for the sake of Palestine and the Palestinians.
He continued that this institution did not stop at this point, but rather hunted down stories and approached the financiers to show them that this or that institution encourages what it calls violence and terrorism, and resistance to the occupation, according to its claim.
Financial blackmail
The former director of a cultural institution in Jerusalem (DN) said that the Americans, through all their funding channels, set political conditions many years ago, but the European Union – which includes 27 countries – took this step in 2019, by adding a one-line clause that stated: Whoever receives support must adhere to the “list of measures” stipulated by the European Union.
After researching these measures, this cultural institution found that it must adhere to the “terrorism” list approved by the European Union and includes a number of Palestinian parties and their military arms.
The provisions of the list indicate that the institution is prohibited from dealing with parties or people related to them, and it must also ensure that no person participates in its activities and projects or benefits from its activities if he has an affiliation with these parties.
Commenting on these conditions, the director of the cultural institution said that her institution fought the battle of rejection despite other institutions accepting to sign this clause, and that many said that the institutions that refused would be forced to close their doors if they insisted on their position.
She says, “We worked on alternative plans, so we were forced to terminate the services of employees, employ others in temporary projects, cut back on administrative expenses, and worked with the minimum amount of human resources. At the same time, we searched for alternative bodies that would support us without conditions, such as Arab funds,” according to the director of Al-Maqdisi.
As for Arab funds, their funding is focused on the restoration or activities sectors, which has forced institutions to provide income in any way, such as renting their facilities or selling tickets to their events and festivals, according to (DN).
The war on Gaza has exacerbated the financial crisis of cultural institutions in particular, because their activities have completely stopped, and some funders have blackmailed the institutions – especially human rights organizations – by adding a new clause to the agreements, namely condemning the October 7 attack carried out by Hamas.
Palestinian civil society organizations expect that the Europeans and Americans will tighten the “terrorism” list by adding new names to it because of the war.
Compulsive response
In turn, the director of the Palestinian National Theater (Al-Hakawati), Amer Khalil, believes that “all funding is conditional. The contractual conditions are difficult and humiliating for institutions, and sometimes political conditions are added to them.”
He added – in his speech to Tel Aviv Tribune Net – that when political conditions surface on the surface of the project, negotiations begin, and in most cases some names are circumvented in order to sign, noting that “financing in general is the worst thing that happened to institutions because it pulled the rug from under them and they became hostage to it.” .
With pain, Khalil said that many projects have stalled and many institutions are at risk of closing their doors due to the scarcity of funding, which is the specter that limited the institutions’ activity and production “because everyone was working before her in the spirit of giving, volunteering, sacrifice and commitment, and after her arrival all of that turned into numbers and requests for funding.”
Khalil concluded his speech by saying that he hesitates a lot when accepting or rejecting any grant, but sometimes he is forced to accept it according to its contractual and political terms. He believes that institutions must boycott all types of funding, bear the difficult situation for a short period, and find internal solutions to get out of the impasse of conditions.