内容摘要：The similarity is not accidental. The “aid distribution centres” of Gaza are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to process, manage, and contain unwanted populations rather than help them survive.

The similarity is not accidental. The “aid distribution centres” of Gaza are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to process, manage, and contain unwanted populations rather than help them survive.

But the bastardisation of “aid” and transformation of “humanitarianism” into a mechanism of control did not begin on October 7, either.Palestinians have been living this lie of “aid” for 76 years, since the Nakba transformed them from a people who fed themselves into a people who begged for crumbs. Before 1948, Palestine exported citrus to Europe, manufactured soap traded across the region, and produced glass that reflected the Mediterranean sun. Palestinians were not rich, but they were whole. They grew their own food, built their own homes, educated their own children.

The Nakba did not merely displace 750,000 Palestinians – it engineered a transformation from self-sufficiency to dependency. By 1950, former farmers were lining up for UNRWA rations, their olive groves now feeding someone else’s children. This was not an unfortunate side effect of war but a deliberate strategy: To break Palestinian capacity for independence and replace it with a permanent need for charity. Charity, unlike rights, can be withdrawn. Charity, unlike justice, comes with conditions.The United States, UNRWA’s largest donor, simultaneously provides most of the weapons destroying Gaza. This is not a contradiction – it is the logic of colonial humanitarianism. Fund the violence that creates the need, then fund the aid that manages the consequences. Keep people alive, but never allow them to live. Provide charity, but never justice. Deliver aid, but never freedom.The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – and the tragic spectacle it created on Tuesday – was the perfection of this system of colonial humanitarianism. Aid delivered by private contractors, coordinated with occupying forces, distributed in militarised zones designed to bypass every institution Palestinians have built to serve themselves. It was humanitarianism as counterinsurgency, charity as colonial control – and when its obscene operation predictably collapsed, Palestinians were blamed for their desperation.

Palestinians have long known that no Israeli or US-backed aid initiative would truly help them. They know that a dignified life cannot be sustained with food packages distributed in concentration camp-like facilities. Karamah – the Arabic word for dignity that encompasses honour, respect, and agency – cannot be air-dropped or handed out at checkpoints where people wait in metal lanes like cattle.Of course, Palestinians already possess Karamah – it lives in their steadfast refusal to disappear, in their insistence on remaining human despite every effort to reduce them to mere recipients of charity meant to keep them barely alive.

What they need is true humanitarian aid – aid that provides not just calories, but a chance at a future.

True humanitarian aid would dismantle the siege, not manage its consequences. It would prosecute war criminals, not feed their victims with just enough to die slowly. It would restore Palestinian land, not try to compensate for its theft with boxes of processed food handed out in cages.Those friendships, built over decades through sometimes happy, sometimes sad experiences and shared confidences, have evaporated in an instant.

I understood that this rupture could happen. I did not fear it. I accepted it.Yet, when it did happen, it pricked.

It was abrupt. Phone calls went to voice mail. Emails went unanswered. Inevitably, the absence and quiet grew until they became an unmistakable verdict.So, I did not ask for explanations. That would, I reasoned, be futile. A door had been slammed shut and bolted.