International organisations put make-up on a painful reality

By: Omar Shaban

Some international organisations often use the term “resilience” in describing the capacity of the Gaza Strip's residents to live under the blockade. This pretty term is meant to say that the blockade of the Gaza Strip has not yet killed the people. It is a term that tickles some people's feelings, but it hides grave negative meanings behind it. It means that the situation, despite its harshness, is still bearable — that people are living their lives as usual. These institutions rely on formal, quantitative indicators without diving into the blockade's repercussions for the quality of life, present and future. I remember a UN institution organised a regional conference about the Gaza Strip whose title was “resilience”.

It is a term that fabricates an imaginary, inhuman heroism for the residents of the Gaza Strip. This term serves the institutions that live off managing the crisis and its persistence, and exempts them from making a genuine effort to end it. I used to say to every foreign delegation that described the situation in Gaza this way: “If the situation is as good as you see it, why don't you live here with us?”

It is a racist and condescending term par excellence when spoken by someone who enjoys freedom of movement, travel, and work, drinks clean water, enjoys refined health services, and is assured of his children's future — to someone deprived of all these basics.

The truth of the matter is that everyone in the Gaza Strip — the people, the institutions, the inanimate things, the plants, and the animals — is utterly exhausted and dies a thousand times daily. The people of the Gaza Strip, as in any region of the world, have the right to enjoy a normal life.

I have written often that the Palestinian division and the Israeli blockade have been like the hen that lays golden eggs for some international organisations that suffer from neither. Some of these institutions live off the weakness and fission of the Palestinian political system. The United Nations organisation — which turned into a contractor in the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, and remains one — is a confirmed example of how international institutions profit from the absence of the official and civil role in the reconstruction process. I had written several times about the danger of the United Nations taking over supervision of the Gaza Strip's reconstruction.

The term “resilience” is like putting poison in honey: its appearance is attractive, its core is lethal.