Does describing the situation in Gaza as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ obscure the lived reality? The New Humanitarian’s Patrick Gathara asked this question in a column last year, and it was on my mind as the feeds on my social media platforms began to fill with sponsored posts appealing for donations from humanitarian organisations during the so-called ‘giving season’ in December.
While these advertisements typically ask for ‘gifts’ of aid for people facing crises of one form or another in often non-specified locations in Africa, last year they overwhelmingly focused on the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza.
I saved 39 of these posts from 13 NGOs and UN organisations. Thirty-four of them focused on Gaza, four others did not name a country, and one focused on South Sudan and Somalia. Many of them repeated time and again in my feeds for weeks.
Collectively, the ads revealed the troubling limitations of the notion of ‘humanitarian crisis’ and exposed the way it functions as a euphemism – refusing to name the cause of Palestinian suffering and directing people away from forms of action that might seek to address those causes.
Erasing the perpetrator
None of the 34 ads focusing on Gaza used the word Israel in the post or description below it – not even the lone Oxfam Canada ad appealing for people to sign a ceasefire petition. The ads erased the history of the conflict, avoided engaging with the dynamics of political power, and provided simplistic solutions to Palestinians hardship in the form of aid.
All but one ad exclusively asked the viewer to donate money, and most presented aid in paternalistic terms, foregrounding the moral subjectivity of the viewer as helper. In common with other humanitarian appeals, the ads focus on suffering, emphasising images of infants in incubators, children surrounded by rubble, families in makeshift shelters, and empty grocery store shelves.
The ads do not mention how Palestinians have been displaced or have had their water cut off, who is acting violently against them, and why any of this is happening.
When Palestinians speak, in most instances, they only testify to their personal hardship. The context is presented in the text, in post descriptions, or is narrated by members of the humanitarian organisation. The organisations define both the problem and its solutions.
One International Rescue Committee (IRC) meme, for example, depicts a woman and child traversing a rubble-strewn street. The viewer is told: “Children in Gaza are trapped, facing violence and displacement without access to clean water, food, or urgently needed health care”. Another ad explained: “95% of the population is cut off from safe water”.
The ads do not mention how Palestinians have been displaced or have had their water cut off, who is acting violently against them, and why any of this is happening.
The same was true of the ads that didn’t focus on Gaza. A UNHCR Canada video, for instance, depicts images of African women standing in a queue or seated outside a tent. The ad avoids identifying where they are or where they are from, explaining simply that they are “fleeing their homes to escape humanitarian crises”. Yet, they haven’t been displaced by ‘humanitarian crises’. As Warsan Shire writes, “no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark”.
Similarly, when a Save the Children ad speaks of children “deprived of their childhoods due to hunger”, we need to understand that they are not facing a ‘humanitarian crisis’ but rather structural violence, including unfair international trade policies, debt, austerity, extractivism, and the exploitation of land and of labour.
Misdirecting action
Kenyan academic Makau Mutua describes the basic human rights narrative as consisting of a Saviour who can intervene to save a Victim from a Savage. But when UNICEF Canada appeals to me to “help us reach more children and their families caught in the Gaza crisis”, there are only two actors: the passive figure of the Palestinian victim and the humanitarian saviour.
If we recognise that the crisis is, as the International Court of Justice ruled in January, plausibly a genocide, this will point to the need to do much more than just provide food, water, medicine, and tents.
The Savage – the causes of the suffering, including the perpetrators and those who benefit or who may be complicit – is gone. Instead, we have the euphemism: ‘humanitarian crisis’. As an IRC ad puts it: “The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has left children in urgent need of food, water, and health care.”
Yet, the people of Gaza are not “caught” in a crisis, but the crosshairs of the Israeli military’s drone targeting systems and sniper’s rifles. It is not a “humanitarian crisis” that has left children in urgent need, but the bombing of their homes and the Israeli military's systematic destruction of the infrastructure needed to sustain life and to even deliver humanitarian assistance.
The idea that people suffer due to ‘humanitarian crisis’ is a moral fable. The crisis is presented as being outside of time or history. And the lesson is that we have a moral duty to help. The motif of ticking clocks and the frequent evocation and repetition of the word ‘emergency’ stirs us into action to provide aid.
However, if we recognise that the crisis is, as the International Court of Justice ruled in January, plausibly a genocide, this will point to the need to do much more than just provide food, water, medicine, and tents. This is all the more so if we also acknowledge the long history of occupation and settler colonialism.
Collapsing the illusion of a political-humanitarian divide
The decision by Canada and other major donors to freeze their contributions to UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees, shows how I, as a Canadian citizen, am implicated in the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza.
The humanitarian fable, however, maintains the illusion that the distant suffering of Palestinians has nothing to do with me – and frames my getting involved as a choice to give charity rather than a moral and political imperative.
The funding freeze followed so-far largely unsubstantiated Israeli claims that 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff in Gaza were involved in the 7 October attack by Hamas into Israel. UNRWA is the largest aid organisation. The funding freeze is threatening to collapse its operations and is abetting a transparent Israeli campaign pushing for UNRWA to be dismantled to serve Israel’s political interests.
The humanitarian fable, however, maintains the illusion that the distant suffering of Palestinians has nothing to do with me – and frames my getting involved as a choice to give charity rather than a moral and political imperative. None of the ads from Canadian organisations even allude to Canada’s historical role in the creation of Israel or its current status as an ally to Israel, including by continuing to sell weapons to Israel.
A shift in Oxfam Canada’s advertising and public messaging may point to a way forward. I was drawn to the organisation's Instagram page because their sponsored ad was the sole one that called on viewers to sign a petition for a ceasefire, rather than donate money.
In the four months preceding the Hamas attack on Israel, Oxfam Canada’s page had focused primarily on women’s rights, commemorations of international days, and promoting a campaign about the wages and working conditions of women garment workers.
After 7 October, however, the feed was almost exclusively devoted to Israel’s invasion of Gaza, though only one ad was used in December. And in January there was a marked shift from calling for a ceasefire and raising awareness about the risk of famine towards a letter-writing campaign calling on the Canadian government to suspend weapons transfers to Israel.
The campaign calls on Canada to end its complicity in the actual causes of a humanitarian crisis. In a pinned post on 12 December proclaiming “Aid is not the answer”, Oxfam Canada admitted: “It is not often we say this”. It also noted that any humanitarian solution in Gaza requires “addressing the root causes of the conflict, including Palestinian’s right to self-determination and an end to Israel’s illegal occupation”.
The provision of food aid and medical services to Gaza is obviously crucial. However, to move beyond humanitarian aid to the necessary political action to resolve the underlying injustice, the euphemism of ‘humanitarian crisis’ should no longer be used to cover up the root causes of suffering.
