#11 One!
Months after the declaration of Trump's plan for Gaza, the mask worn by international aid — a neutral, apolitical, benevolent mask — has fallen. Its harm has been laid bare: it has contributed to entrenching genocide against the civil institutions of Palestinian society that have served Gaza and its people for decades.
The international mechanism has set about establishing "alternative" projects and facilities to replace the Palestinian institutions in Gaza — municipalities, hospitals, schools, civil defense, and others — excluded from their framework. Those ephemeral, artificial, and fractured projects that claim to offer vital services are directed by the chaotic decision-making of the White House's lunatics and the genocidal Israeli government.
These aid projects are not merely "parallel" to local institutions; they actively undermine, obstruct, and divert resources from civil society. Local institutions lose a large segment of their specialized staff to international frameworks. The latter, in turn, impose unprofessional and unethical decisions on their personnel — political decisions (halting work, relocation, intelligence cooperation, and so on) dictated by exclusive Israeli control over international aid.
Funding and other resources (food, medicine, and all the necessities of life) likewise flow through international institutions and mechanisms, avoiding any chance of being directed according to the lived experience and knowledge of the people of the land. When Israel intensified the genocide in the north of Gaza, aid organizations left the area, exposing their inherent inability to achieve what local grassroots initiatives never stop doing: protecting and caring for their communities.
Colonial dominance — Israeli and American — has insisted on keeping Palestinians outside any framework of a ceasefire agreement and future for Gaza. It has refused to recognize Palestinian sovereignty over our lives and institutions, our present and future. This phase is not characterized by attempts to take control of Palestinian institutions and replace their leadership with figures from other political currents. Rather, it is marked by an insistence on demolishing local institutions and stripping them of any international legitimacy.
Humanitarian aid, and the international organizations contributing to Trump’s plan, effectively constitute a continuation of what Israel began in its genocide through targeting schools, hospitals, and vital civil facilities. It is an attempt to erase Palestinian society through destroying its institutions and pushing them out of service.
Israel failed to crush the social strength and human will of civil society institutions and grassroots organizing in Gaza even after hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives, brutal executions, and the horrors of torture … Trump’s system will fail in this objective as well.
The determination of Palestinian society in Gaza to carry out its fundamental and vital duties requires genuine, principled, and popular solidarity — directly with the people of Gaza, not filtered through international proxies — from our sisters and brothers around the world. █