Like many young development fanatics, making a difference on the ground in an exciting foreign country was what drove me into this career, so naturally I couldn’t believe my luck when I landed a job with a big development organisation in Palestine almost straight out of university. It felt like my opportunity to contribute to overcoming one of the world’s most infamous, protracted and long-running conflicts. Yet after a few months on the job I can’t help but feel like I could have made more of a difference if I’d just stayed at home.

Many people’s youthful naivety faces a reality check when they start working in a developing country, but Palestine must be more frustrating than most. All the usual barriers to development are here of course; government incompetence, agencies bending to donor whims, corruption and regressive social norms. But while in many other places the most critical obstacle to development is a lack of money, Palestine has the highest per capita foreign development funding of any country on earth. So why has nothing changed? In fact, why is the situation getting worse?

Consider the problem. Here, I’ve come to the conclusion the obstacle isn’t merely a lack of interest in helping the most vulnerable, it’s an orchestrated and sustained system of oppression, marginalisation and economic obstruction deliberately intended to block any development progress at all. In some cases, development organisations build houses in Gaza, only to have them destroyed in an aerial bombardment. This is the third reconstruction in ten years. In the West Bank, some donors spend years petitioning the Israeli military to build even simple water storage for a Palestinian village, to have their plans buried in years of deliberate bureaucratic stalling and eventual rejection. If donors build even simple structures without Israeli permission, often the Israeli military knocks them down. Meanwhile illegal settlements with swimming pools and power lines and subsidised business opportunities are thrown up with a total disregard for international law.



As I sit at my desk writing and researching, making recommendation after recommendation, my overwhelming feeling is that development work is making little difference here. Reports come past my desk time and time again making the same recommendations: end the occupation, lobby the international community for effective action, generate political will. Meanwhile, billions of dollars are being ploughed into projects that just keep the situation ticking over while the occupation becomes more entrenched, the situation for Palestinians deteriorates, and peace becomes a more and more distant dream. Palestinian development is hostage to politics, and no community empowerment project or capacity-building programme is going to change that.

Who does have the power to change this situation? It’s governments like my own, thousands of miles away in the centres of global power. Palestinians find it difficult to even leave their own country due to Israeli restrictions. Yet I’ve abandoned my position with the democratic ear of my government to join them in the place where they’ve been making the same complaints for over 50 years, which have gone virtually ignored by my government and others like it.

It’s my government that sits on the UN security council, that continues to sell weapons to Israel, and condemns Israel’s settlement building while allowing the import of millions of pounds’ worth of settlement products. And Israel knows this is where their occupation lives or dies. I have friends who are in London, campaigning, supporting political action, sending letters and fighting for Palestinian recognition. Others are journalists exposing the hypocrisy of our leaders in continuing to support Israel’s insidious discrimination. Their work is the real work that will lead to the recognition and creation of an independent Palestinian state. Only when foreign powers decide they’ve had enough of occupation and are willing to place genuine pressure on Israel is anything going to change.

This is not a problem that can be solved by development practitioners like me. The greatest tool at my disposal is not my knowledge of programmatic structures or grant proposal writing, but my western citizenship. While I am here in an echo chamber filled with people who all think and know and want the same thing, my government is sat in my home country, saying very little and doing even less. Last month, Theresa May gave a speech where she described Israel as “a beacon of tolerance”. As I conclude another report about discriminatory urban planning, the revocation of residency rights, parallel military and civilian justice systems for children, or punitive demolitions, I can’t help but feel like I’d be better off at home, making my voice heard where it really matters.



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