Australian NGOs and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.(Foreign Affairs)

IT IS A COMMON view that when Australian non-government organisations (NGOs) intervene in overseas areas of conflict, disaster, or great deprivation, their motives are purely humanitarian. Cases do exist, however, where humanitarian programs and projects are also driven by distinct, even overriding, political preference. One example is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Australian NGOs are ever ready to cloak themselves in the human rights language of a flawed United Nations. The UN not only uses NGOs to propagate its human rights rhetoric, but also to implement its message. According to the UN:

 
   A non-governmental organisation is any non-profit, 
   voluntary citizens' group which is organised on a 
   local or international level. Task-oriented and 
   driven by people with a common interest, NGOs 
   perform a variety of service and humanitarian 
   functions, bring citizen concerns to government, 
   advocate and monitor policies and encourage 
   political participation through provision of 
   information. Some are organised around specific 
   issues, such as human rights, environment or 
   health. They provide analysis and expertise, serve 
   as early warning mechanisms and help monitor 
   and implement international agreements. 

For the UN, it is perfectly acceptable for NGOs to be used as shock troops in a partisan political strategy of its own choosing, albeit dressed in humanitarian guise.

In fact, the self-proclaimed role of Australian NGOs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is less humanitarian than political. Essentially it has one ultimate political goal--the establishment of a Palestinian state with no concern whatever for Israel. Given that Israel is unlikely to agree to commit national suicide, any Australian financial support for NGOs in Palestine which favours an absolute Palestinian fight of return is an ideological partisanship fraught with political myopia.

Evidence for this can be found in various NGO presentations to the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade which, in 2000, undertook to examine Australia-Middle East relations.

The political role played by Australian NGOs in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle can be examined on a number of inter-related levels. The first and most determining factor is the ideological, which affects how each NGO interprets the struggle, and influences its decisions such as to whom, when, in what form, and to what extent, help should be offered. A second aspect is that of the need to gain permission to work with or on behalf of Palestinians in situ. No NGO, whatever its intentions, can simply enter Palestinian precincts and start operating. Permission to do so is hedged with the expectation that whatever is offered is designed to advance the Palestinian cause. Third, there is the issue of NGOs lobbying the Australian government for a share of the nation's foreign-aid dollar to help fund their programs and projects. And finally, we have general problems such as NGOs' advocacy, their private fund-raising, and of course, recruitment.

A common theme of the NGO submissions to the Joint Standing Committee is their pro-Palestinian advocacy. Undoubtedly this ideological mindset has been emotionally bolstered by friendships with Palestinians forged in the field. A charitable interpretation of this partisanship might be that as NGOs feel that Israel is capable of protecting its own citizens' human rights from attack by Palestinian terror, they need only concern themselves about the other side. However, such a reading is undermined by these NGOs' demands that Palestinians, wherever they currently may be, be allowed to return, if they so wish, to any part of the yet-to-be-defined Palestine, including pre-1967 Israel. Nowhere does there appear even a scintilla of concern for the consequences for Israel, Israelis, or for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

FROM THE TIME of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 until the present, Australia's official attitude to the …