Geneva — Civil society movements are carrying the mantle of humanitarian values that national and global institutions have all too willingly abandoned.
I recently returned from New York, where I attended the opening of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and the annual week of side events that accompany it. This year, the political theatre of UNGA week was even more vacuous, detached, and troubling than usual.
The banality of the spectacle struck me with extra force because I had spent the weeks prior to it with the activists and grassroots humanitarians of the Global Sumud Flotilla, who are very literally risking their lives to try to break Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip amid the utter failure of the international community to act.
As I write this, the flotilla is within several hundred nautical miles of Gaza’s coast. With each moment it draws closer, the possibility of Israeli interception or attack increases. Even before approaching the waters near Gaza, the boats of the flotilla have been brazenly attacked by drones in port in Tunisia and off the coast of Greece.
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Meanwhile, institutional humanitarians – particularly from Western non-governmental organisations – are completely absent from the flotilla. Many look down on it as activism, not humanitarianism. But they were strongly represented at UNGA in New York.
For me, the distinction between activism and humanitarianism, if ever applicable, is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold. The institutions of humanitarianism have coupled their efforts and reputations to a multilateral system that is clearly failing people in crisis, neglecting international law, and increasingly succumbing to populist power politics.
With the international community in retreat, grassroots humanitarians, who have always been the first line of response, are doing everything they can to stand strong and step up, even as they are left with fewer resources and less support. Ultimately, it is their communities that are being affected and the lives of their loved ones and neighbours – as well as their own – that are on the line.
At the same time, activist and civil society movements around the world are carrying the mantle of solidarity and humanitarian values that national and global institutions have shown themselves all too willing to compromise on or abandon altogether.
This is true from Gaza to Sudan, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Haiti, from Yemen to the refugee settlements on the borders of Myanmar, and increasingly within the borders of wealthy Western nations as well. The absence of any hope or solutions that was evident in the halls of the UN’s headquarters – contrasted with the spirit and commitment of the Sumud Flotilla – put this into stark relief.
Government action and inaction
On 30 August, I stood with thousands of people in Barcelona’s harbour to bid farewell to the boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla as it first set sail. Nearly two years into Israel’s genocidal war, it is the largest effort to date attempting to break the siege on Gaza. It comes as Israel’s blockade has caused a famine in the north and as the Israeli military is pushing to ethnically cleanse Gaza City of its inhabitants.
As governments continue to refuse to take meaningful action and traditional humanitarians continue to try to negotiate access with Israel, more than 50 boats are sailing towards Gaza. Their message is clear: “When governments fail, we sail”.
Governments have indeed failed. The UK’s labour government has continued to sell F-35 fighter jet components to Israel while arresting pro-Palestine protesters. The EU has not been able to agree on taking collective action to impose consequences on Israel. Individual governments have made small steps, imposing sanctions on specific members of the Israeli government and recognising the existence of a Palestinian state. But as Nour ElAssy, one of our contributors, wrote: “The problem was never that Palestine lacked recognition. The problem is that Palestine lacks freedom and action”.
The failure of Europe, as outrageous as it is, is overshadowed by the unlimited support, weapons, and political cover both the Biden and Trump administrations in the US have provided to the Israeli genocide. This was underscored yet again when the US vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council on 18 September – its sixth such veto in the past two years.
The flotilla
As both the actions and inaction of governments have caused alienation and disillusionment, the flotilla has inspired massive support in the streets. Thousands saw it off in Barcelona. Many more protested in solidarity in Catania, Sicily a week later when I boarded the legal observer boat the Shireen – named after Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian journalist assassinated in Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2022 – as it set sail for Tunis to join the flotilla.
I shared the 18-metre sailboat with 11 other people. There was a member of the EU parliament from Ireland who chairs the delegation for relations with Palestine and strongly critiqued the failure of EU institutions. Two Irish lawyers – both experts in international law – provided a calming presence. A Palestinian-Swedish physics students sang resistance songs. An English physician who has worked in Gaza multiple times (and written about it for The New Humanitarian) was also on board. And there was a Mexican student who dived under the boat before setting sail to make sure it had not been sabotaged, which has happened in previous flotillas.
The crew piloting the boat consisted of a Croatian lawyer-come-sailor as captain and two other members who have worked together on civil society search and rescue missions that aim to save the lives of asylum seekers and migrants and raise awareness of the humanitarian consequences of EU policies clamping down on migration in the Mediterranean.
Having spent the past two and a half decades in the humanitarian sector, this group was not typical of the associates I have become used to. Yet, their political consciousness, undivided commitment, and sense of purpose – without financial or other incentives, besides a sense of what is right and morally necessary – was the closest thing to a true humanitarian imperative I have encountered in a while.
That sense of commitment and moral purpose has inspired others as well. As the flotilla sails closer to Gaza, dock workers across Italy threatened to close down shipping with Israel if it continues to be attacked, and protests against the genocide have continued to draw hundreds of thousands of people across the world.
Yet you wouldn’t know that this solidarity existed if you were only speaking to people within the UN or the formal humanitarian sector. No humanitarian agencies have joined the flotilla, with the exception of the Italian NGO Emergency. I argued months ago that they should throw their full weight behind such an effort. And none have even acknowledged it as a desperately needed last-ditch effort to break the brick wall Israel has built to prevent a meaningful humanitarian response.
Instead, some humanitarians continue to argue that the flotilla is doomed to fail from the start – that it won’t be able to reach Gaza. That is a defeatist argument that only serves to justify the impotence of the humanitarian system in the face of a genocide supported by the system’s major donors.
Moving to UNGA
I left the Shireen in Tunis to attend UNGA. When I arrived in New York, it felt like a different planet. I went from the warmth of the activists who were following their convictions and risking their lives to the cold, hard corridors of power at the UN building in New York.
Different kinds of humanitarians tread those halls – ones in suits, who take business class flights, are compensated with astronomical salaries, and have nothing to fear other than losing their jobs if donors are not happy.
There is an important caveat here: I am not talking about the humanitarian workers for traditional agencies who are on the ground delivering aid; I am talking about the leaders of their organisations who increasingly resemble bankers and bookkeepers rather than the people who work for them.
Among other things (listen to this podcast for my takeaways), UNGA this year was a testament to the utter collapse of political and humanitarian multilateralism. Other than the largely symbolic move by some holdout countries to recognise Palestine, other crises that demand urgent attention – from Sudan to DRC to Myanmar – were barely mentioned.
The plan to revamp the UN after budget cuts from the US and other countries was barely mentioned. The president of the Palestinian Authority (moribund and unrepresentative as it is) was denied a visa to attend, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges – spoke from the podium, albeit to a largely deserted room.
US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, singled out migrants and green energy as two of the most significant threats facing Western countries and encouraged others to follow his lead in implementing policies that will surely only cause more crises and an erosion of the international norms and laws intended to protect people from harm.
In the middle of what felt like a cheap movie, humanitarians in suits whizzed around from one meeting to the other, angling or hoping to achieve what exactly wasn’t entirely clear. They fit the landscape perfectly.
A grassroots humanitarianism
Institutional humanitarianism might want to disown political activism as outside of its remit, unserious, and doomed to fail. Yet, much of humanitarianism started as political activism. Arguably, humanitarians lost much relevance when they stopped seeing themselves as part of the political landscape.
Humanitarians putting all of their faith in the formal multilateral system, relying on Western donors, and refusing to re-examine their positions is going to backfire. If humanitarianism continues to fail the people it serves in the name of staying within the system, it will allow itself to become yet another blunt object of power in the arsenal of powerful states. The people who incubated the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and founded the American logistics company Fogbow are already showing us what that future will look like.
As money and power travel in that direction, other forms of activist and radical humanitarianism will emerge. In fact, they already are. These will start to sway people who feel increasingly alienated by governments and institutions that are proving all too ready to abandon the norms, legal frameworks, and values the multilateral system claimed – often with much hypocrisy – to uphold.
Hopefully, this grassroots mobilisation will put pressure on governments, who are going to run out of excuses for inaction. The past few days have seen the EU move towards activating punitive measures against Israel and three nations: Italy, Spain, and Greece mobilise naval assets to protect the flotilla.
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Gaza did not break international geopolitics, which have been broken for a long time. Gaza revealed the depth of rot for all to see, even if many in the formerly colonised states and conflict-affected regions have known that it existed for a long time.
The role of traditional humanitarians
While this grassroots humanitarianism emerges in shapes and forms that may not resemble the current humanitarian system, I also believe that traditional humanitarian organisations still have a role to play to redeem themselves and fulfill their mandate. So do governments and nations.
The Hague group, with nine countries including South Africa, Colombia, and Malaysia, is mobilising outside the Security Council and in the General Assembly to push for a Uniting for Peace resolution, which would sidestep the US veto in the Security Council and potentially create a protective military force for Gaza.
Additionally, attempting to deliver aid through the blockade is futile if only pursued through negotiations with the Israeli authorities. As I’ve said before, humanitarians must do more: Join the flotilla, support it, send supplies. The silence in humanitarian communications – as if such an effort isn’t happening – is wrong.
Finally, pressure governments, particularly in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the EU to move beyond mere performative gestures: A two-way arms embargo on Israel – blocking the sale of weapons to and purchases from Israel – must be put in place immediately in addition to sanctions and a robust boycott.
To be clear, all of these measures will still be necessary, regardless of what becomes of the so-called peace plan announced by Trump. While an end to Israel’s annihilatory attack on Gaza is urgently needed, the road map it lays out does not provide a path to ending Israel’s illegal occupation, repression, and dispossession of Palestinians – far from it. Without freedom, justice, and accountability, the causes of humanitarian crisis in Palestine will remain intact.
Rather than allowing themselves to be carried along as the sanitising face for a twisted mirage of a future for Palestinians designed by the two countries most responsible for their suffering, humanitarian organisations should commit themselves to advocating for and participating in the actions I have outlined above.
Humanitarians have a voice, and the trust of many in the societies where they are based. As governments fail to take action to stop a genocide, rather than scoff at political activism, humanitarians would be well-served to embrace its spirit.