To avoid restrictive institutional funding policies, Palestinian organisations are turning to online crowdfunding. However, this source of funds also has limitations and places power in the hands of corporations and individual donors.

During the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, Western support for humanitarian and development organisations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories burgeoned. International political actors from European countries and the United States pledged large sums to the newly established Palestinian National Authority to buttress the Palestinians’ acceptance of the Oslo agreements and strengthen the pseudo-State to create a viable partner in the peace process. Simultaneously, more funding became available to new and existing Palestinian civil society organisations (CSOs), who were expected to help implement this agenda.[1] To be eligible for funding, organisations had to ensure their projects fitted in the Western-led peace process framework and maintained bureaucratic standards allowing for rigorous assessment procedures and audits.[2] Since the start of the War on Terror in 2001, even more conditions have been placed on Palestinian organisations due to donors’ fears that funding will end up in the hands of groups deemed to be terrorist organisations. These processes have resulted in a restrictive funding culture for Palestinian CSOs, who have to meet stringent conditions to receive funds for their activities.

Some of the Western institutional donors’ demands go well beyond standard accountability and transparency procedures in funding agreements and have been criticised for being discriminatory, and for infringing on Palestinians’ right to freedom of expression and association.[3] For example, the European Union famously added anti-terrorism clauses to their funding contracts that can criminalise Palestinian activism and peaceful resistance. Under EU regulation, engaging in moderate activism, supporting communities in Area C (part of the Palestinian territory in the West Bank which de facto remains under Israeli control),[4] or having staff or beneficiaries that have been imprisoned by Israel is enough to be excluded from funding.[5] Similarly, Sweden announced that it would require Palestinian organisations to unconditionally condemn Palestinian armed resistance groups if they were to receive funding for humanitarian or development projects. In addition, funding for projects that advocate for the Right of Return or mention occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid is withheld, while projects that do receive funding are routinely reduced in scope to humanitarian aid only. For many Palestinian organisations, these are conditions that they cannot meet or refuse to meet. As a result, many Palestinian CSOs have limited or no access to funding from these key Western institutional donors.

Seeking alternative funding sources

In the context of restrictive institutional funding policies and a growing discontent with international organisations’ solutions to issues faced by Palestinians, Palestinian CSOs have been seeking alternative funding sources that allow them to uphold their principles. Some have turned to online crowdfunding platforms, such as GoFundMe, LaunchGood, and JustGiving, to supplement or replace conditional sources of funding. These online platforms are attractive, as they allow organisations to raise funds for their activities without having to conduct monitoring and evaluation procedures or create reports for donors to demonstrate how money was spent. In addition, as long as they comply with the rules of the platform, the organisations can fundraise for any cause or project. Though the amounts raised are usually smaller than a traditional grant, online crowdfunding provides organisations with funds that are more flexible and less labour-intensive.

The authors of this article have both worked for a grassroots, community-based organisation in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank,[6] which has turned to online crowdfunding. This organisation organises humanitarian aid and development projects, such as educational support, sports, art classes and psychosocial counselling for children and youth from the refugee camp. In addition, the organisation has been a hub for activism and international solidarity, the political climate permitting.

Funding deficits and the rejection of some institutional donors’ conditions led to the organisation setting up online crowdfunding campaigns. Its first crowdfunding campaign, launched in 2019, provided the organisation with roughly 60% of its total budget. In 2024, the vast majority of the organisation’s funds come from online crowdfunding, predominantly from individual donors in the United States. The unconditional funds have allowed the organisation to support their community, as well as some neighbouring communities in Area C, according to their own principles and priorities.

At first sight, online crowdfunding appears to be an attractive solution for Palestinian organisations who struggle to access more traditional funding sources. By appealing directly to individual donors through their online networks and the platforms’ interfaces, CSOs can access funds for their humanitarian, development and activism activities. The crowdfunding platforms enable the CSOs to reach geographically dispersed individuals who share a commitment to the cause, or the specific activities fundraised for, thus circumventing the need for State-led institutional donors. This is especially important in the current context, in which awareness of the Palestinian cause is growing worldwide, while Western States continue to withhold or limit funding to organisations advocating for, or serving, Palestinians. In short, online crowdfunding could be seen as a grassroots funding revolution providing unconditional funding to Palestinian CSOs.

The need to appeal to individual donors

However, online crowdfunding is not a panacea for Palestinian organisations’ funding issues, nor can it be heralded as a grassroots funding revolution. This funding strategy comes with its own restrictions and power dynamics that still limit Palestinian CSOs’ agency and independence.

Rather than appealing to specialised staff at donor institutions, the Palestinian CSOs setting up online crowdfunding campaigns have to entice individual donors worldwide to contribute to their projects. This requires a new set of marketing skills and limits the types of projects that Palestinian organisations can fundraise for. Some areas of action are more popular than others: health-related initiatives are easier to fundraise for online than arts projects, for example. In addition, since donors to online crowdfunding campaigns are generally not specialists in the development and humanitarian field, the project needs to be explained in simple and compelling terms.[7] This means that more complex initiatives, that require a deeper understanding of the social, political and economic context, are difficult to translate into a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Recently, the organisation the authors worked for simultaneously fundraised for in-kind emergency aid in the refugee camp and for a long-term project to teach tech skills to young refugees. The aid campaign overwhelmingly outperformed the tech fundraiser. Moreover, when a solidarity group from the United Kingdom was asked to help fundraise online to establish the tech skills programme, they replied that they would prefer to fund the aid appeal, even though it was clear that sufficient funds were collected for the latter. This illustrates a general trend, in which donors prefer emergency appeals over long-term development projects, regardless of what the refugee-led, grassroots organisation identifies as a greater need.

The limitations imposed by crowdfunding platforms

In addition to the donors, there is another actor that controls the flow of funds to Palestinian organisations: the crowdfunding platform. Getting a campaign accepted and receiving funds from the platform after collection has ended is not always straightforward. The for-profit platforms have laws to adhere to in the countries where they are based, as well as their own business objectives and political views. Not only do these businesses have a legal obligation to adhere to anti-terrorism laws, but they are also risk-averse and know they are vulnerable to threats and litigation from groups who oppose fundraising for Palestinian CSOs.[8] Therefore, restrictions and lengthy due diligence processes often complicate the release of collected funds. The platforms ask numerous questions about the destination and use of funds, and will reject the campaign over something as small as terminology, like mentioning the terms apartheid, Right of Return, or occupation. If the CSO’s documents, transfer methods, campaign text and proposed activities do not pass the platform’s checks, all collected funds will be returned to the donors.

Though the grassroots organisation the authors worked at is a registered NGO in the Palestinian Territories with a proven track record, obtaining collected funds from various platforms has proven difficult. For example, in 2019 the organisation was engaged in a drawn-out due diligence process with GoFundMe. GoFundMe would not release funds to a Palestinian bank account and required documentation that Palestinian CSOs do not routinely have. Only with the help of a European volunteer were the funds released and transferred to the NGO.

Since this incident, the organisation predominantly uses the crowdfunding platform LaunchGood, which caters to Muslim organisations and donors. However, this platform requires Palestinian CSOs to register with a US or Canadian non-profit as a partner, which LaunchGood explained is in order to adhere to US terrorism laws.[9] This means the organisation had to find a US or Canadian charity willing to collect and transfer funds on their behalf, which in turn influences the kind of projects they are able to fundraise for. The US partner asked the Palestinian organisation to remove any ‘political’ language that commented on the Israeli occupation, and instead use exclusively humanitarian terms and objectives for the online fundraiser. These anecdotes show that, in practice, using crowdfunding platforms is not a straightforward process for Palestinian CSOs, and the platforms’ policies restrict who can raise funds, and for what cause.

Beyond crowdfunding

While online crowdfunding allows Palestinian organisations to access more flexible funds in the context of restrictive Western institutional funding policies, this fundraising method cannot be celebrated as a solution for unconditional funding. The well-documented problematic hierarchies and restrictions inherent to funding from Western institutional donors are not solved by online crowdfunding. Rather, power has been placed in the hands of individual donors, who must be enticed to donate to the proposed project or cause. Thousands of internationally dispersed individuals need to be convinced to donate to match the amount a single institutional donor could provide through a grant.

In addition, crowdfunding platforms are for-profits that must adhere to laws and protect their own business interests. This precludes Palestinian CSOs from successfully fundraising for certain projects. While emergency aid and health-related projects are relatively simple to raise funds for, more specialised development programmes that invest in the long-term well-being of Palestinians and political activism initiatives may not be able to secure funding. This means that, especially for projects with a more political nature, Palestinian CSOs still experience a funding gap that is not remedied by online crowdfunding.

For Palestinian CSOs to respond to the needs of their community and exercise their right to freedom of expression and association, unrestrictive funding sources are required. This funding should be sustainable, supportive of Palestinian collective goals, and not conditional on Western States’ policies vis-à-vis Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Piloting alternative funding sources and mechanisms should be a priority for those who support a thriving Palestinian civil society.

 

Frederike Onland
Doctoral Student, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Mohammad Abu Srour
Volunteer Palestine, Occupied Palestinian Territories
abusrour.md@gmail.com

 

[1] Benoit Challand, Palestinian Civil Society: foreign donors and the power to promote and exclude, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 68-81

[2] Andrea Smith, ‘The NGOization of the Palestine Liberation Movement: Interviews with Hatem Bazian, Noura Erekat, Atef Said, and Zeina Zaatari’, in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, ed. INCITE! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 165-182

[3] Amnesty International, “European governments donors’ discriminatory funding restrictions to Palestinian civil society risk deepening human rights crisis”, Amnesty International, 28 November 2023 bit.ly/funding-restrictions-palestinian

[4] The 1995 Oslo II Accord established the administrative division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C as a transitional arrangement. Around 60% of the West Bank is designated as area C, and these lands are under Israeli military and civil control.

[5] Tariq Dana, ‘Criminalizing Palestinian Resistance: The EU’s Additional Condition on Aid to Palestine’, Al-Shabaka, (February 2020) bit.ly/criminalizing-palestinian-resistance

[6] Since 7 October 2023, there has been a further crackdown on Palestinian organisations engaging in advocacy and refugee support. Therefore, for security reasons, the organisation cannot be named.

[7] Joanna Adamska-Mieruszewska et al, ‘Keep It Simple: The Impact of Language on Crowdfunding Success’, Economics & Sociology volume 14, no. 1 (2021): 130-144 bit.ly/impact-language-crowdfunding

[8] Besan Abu-Joudeh, Joyce Ajlouny and Diala Shamas, ‘Mobilizing for Gaza through Crowdfunding and Mutual Aid’, 29 February 2024, webinar bit.ly/mutual-aid-gaza

[9] See LaunchGood requirements support.launchgood.com/support/solutions/articles/35000217969-requirements-when-creating-a-campaign

 

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