It's not the structure itself that's the problem – in the US, an entity needs to have some kind of corporate structure in order to receive checks, open a bank account, etc – or, really, the IRS approval of 501(c)(3), which isn't actually all that restrictive except of very traditional politics (legislative lobbying and electioneering). It's the extent to which foundation funding comes with strings attached, and to get more funding there are more strings, all of which can be justified because of the great increase in the work that could be done with the money, until the actions and identity of an organization can seem unrecognizable.

The issue of alternatie/community funding is particularly relevant to the question of the NGOization of Palestine, because, in my opinion, there is all evidence of a deliberate strategy, particularly on the part of the EU, to induce Palestinian dependency out of independence. While not seeking to mythologize or fetishize the pre-Oslo PLO as some sort of model of community accountability when it certainly was not, it was a political structure that, for all of its lack of democracy, illustrated the political struggles within the nation, as well as the attempted intervention of various states through those working on their behalf. Granting to NGOs post-Oslo was labeled instead as a neutral activity, rather than political intervention, to the point where there are almost no projects inside the West Bank without a European flag on them, where life for NGOs, even those conceived as progressive alternatives, is almost inconceivable without large-scale European funding, and entirely replacing their political, liberation-oriented discourse with one about "neutral" "human rights," not in the context of liberating Palestine, but in the context of some kind of imagined liberal system of equality that merely requires corrections in order to achieve.

It's a very very real problem, because those European flags aren;'t coming from popular donations or manifestations of solidarity, they are direct interventions of EU governments to produce a statehood project made up of a million NGOs accountable to their donors to directly replace a liberation movement accountable to its people.

It also devastates the internal culture of activism, to the extent that the idea that organizing is a job that comes with pay is not a privilege or something to achieve, but something to be expected and without which, no work can or should be done. The point isn't that people don't need to be paid – except for the wealthy, people NEED income – but that in the midst of an active liberation movement, the poorest sectors of society *are willing to* give everything, including their time, to achieve victory, but in a professionalized NGO sector, that environment of resistance has been replaced by a hiring system (that already privileges wealth and education) rather than involving people in a political movement.

It's an extraordinarily important question. Yaman, what were your thoughts on the al-Fakhoora conference?

I hope I didn't mischaracterize the book. It doesn't say that NGO kick grassroots activists out of the scene, that is taking their place, but rather, that people who start out as grassroots activists often go down the route of NGO organizing because it's required for many kinds of funding from the government and grants from foundations. In other words it's not a monopoly that's at issue but a subtle transformation. Unfortunately my summary doesn't get this across so well, since the book is a series of narratives of people who found themselves in situations where they were spending more work doing what they needed to qualify for funding, than what they originally intended to do.

The book touches on other class/race issues. There are different ideas vetted regarding alt sources of funding — in some cases some orgs get 70% of their funding from 10% of their donors, which makes them ultimately accountable to those 10% rather than the other 90%. Of course it's not that simple, there are other circumstances, but I think the kind of dependency it creates in the long run is evident.

There's an implicit accusation in the article that NGOs are somehow not fulfilling a promise they've made. On the contrary, I think they simply don't make promises as radical as the ones these activists would like them to make. Human rights work is about promoting a certain legal relationship between a state and its citizens, and tactics like litigation make perfect sense within this framework.

It also seems like an exaggeration to claim that NGOs "control social justice movements". They simply don't seem that powerful to me. If there really is a huge, grass-roots organizing void that NGOs are ignoring, then it is up to grassroots organizers to fill it. After all, since NGOs apparently ignore their constituents, there shouldn't be so much competition for that very grassroots support.