The Gaza aid conference was kind of a charade. Here’s why

 

The big donations announced at lavish donor affairs may not be as generous as they seem.


Palestinian children sit on the window of a partially destroyed building in al-Tufah, east of Gaza City. Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images

CAIRO, Egypt — At the five-star JW Marriott hotel on the sandy outskirts of Cairo, where rooms cost between $210 and $600 per night, the lobby was packed. Young staffers in neutral-toned suits rushed busily past Egyptian security officers, and occasionally a person might find themselves nose to nose with Tony Blair or Ban Ki-moon.

 

 

Some of the most powerful people in the world turned out for the Gaza reconstruction conference over the weekend.
All the attendees deemed the event a great success when, by Sunday evening, Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende announced that the nations of the world had raised $5.4 billion to rebuild the Gaza Strip following Israel’s devastating seven-week offensive in July and August.
The Palestinian government had asked for $4 billion (despite having earlier estimated the total cost of reconstruction to be over $8 billion), so it was with great fanfare that the higher figure was announced. Foreign cabinet secretaries wrung one another’s hands — and of course, that of the host of the event, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi — and profusely thanked each other for their generosity.

“As little as $2.4 billion of the pledged amount is going to rebuild Gaza, and it's unclear how much of that's new.”

But headline figures are deceiving. This conference, like others of its kind, was largely a charade. Take a closer look at the numbers and it’s clear that some creative accounting is giving the impression of a job well done.
For starters, much of the $5.4 billion was not actually earmarked for Gaza reconstruction. Many countries included in their contributions money they had already allotted to Palestine, including the West Bank, since the beginning of the year under normal aid programming.
“You have to read the title [of the conference] very carefully,” said Tor Wennesland, Norway’s ambassador to Egypt. The implication was that the broadness of “The Cairo Conference on Palestine: Reconstructing Gaza” made it perfectly reasonable to announce money already allotted to the rest of the Palestinian territories.
In other words, a good amount of the aid is not new money intended for Gaza. Much of Sunday’s conference represented a re-announcement of money that’s already been given. Of the $5.4 billion announced by Brende, only $2.4 billion-$2.7 billion is going to Gaza reconstruction. It remains unclear how much of that is new and how much is money already spent.
Egyptian Foreign Affairs minister Sameh Shokri shakes hands with US Secretary of State John Kerry. Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images
The United States, for example, announced $414 million in assistance to the Palestinians. But of that, at least $118 million has already been spent since the summer offensive, and only $75 million is new aid for Gaza reconstruction.
This is standard practice for conferences of this kind, where many of the pledges are hashed out in capital cities across the world beforehand.
Even when the checks are signed, actually getting the money promised is an ordeal of its own. It seems to be common practice for states to renege on their commitments.
Six months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, only 2 percent of a promised $5.3 billion in aid had been disbursed.
A similar situation arose following a donors’ conference for Syria in 2013. Four months after pledging $100 million, Qatar had only given $2.7 million, according to an investigation by The Independent on Sunday. In the same time period, Saudi Arabia had given $21.6 million of its $78 million commitment.
As of January this year, only around 70 percent of the total $1.5 billion pledged at the Syria meeting had been delivered.