War On Want. Politically Partisan And Problematic

The debate regarding anti-Zionism’s anti-Semitic overtones is as ever applicable and is as ever strenuously contested. On a British University campus, I regularly experience screaming denials of bigotry from not just British Islamists and their morally anaemic far-Left supporters, but also from persons considered - or at least self-perceived - to be moderates.

For a while now, I have taken what I consider to be a reasonable and positive perspective: if one ignores the unquestionable suffering and the consequent emotional and rational incentives of the Jewish people to provide themselves with the optimism, prosperity and success of the self-reliance and security of a homeland, then one can reject Zionism - or Jewish nationalism - but only on the absolute condition that one also rejects Palestinian nationalism. To choose one over the other is a consummate hypocrisy that assumes absolutely no rational premise or a desire for peaceful resolution.

One particular NGO, which any rational yet uninformed observer would expect to take an enlightened and progressive position, would be ‘War on Want’ - a registered British charity which received just under half a million pounds from the European Commission and about £160,000 from the British Government in 2009.

The stated aims of War on Want include the promise ‘to relieve global poverty however caused through working in partnership with people throughout the world’. Such wording presupposes a forward-thinking organisation that acts in the interest of progress and prosperity; regrettably, the very opposite is true.

The NGO’s views on Israel are forthright and numerous, and have been criticised by many individuals and organisations, including the British cabinet minister Teresa Villiers MP and NGO Monitor, an organisation which analyses the output of the international NGO community. The latter issued a report which concluded:

War on Want is an extremely politicised NGO which actively promotes the Durban Strategy and uses anti-Semitic themes to attack Israel. Given WoW's extensive political campaigning and lobbying efforts, its one-sided approach to the conflict that ignores Palestinian terrorism, and the recurring investigations by the Charity Commission, funding from the EU and UK to this NGO is highly problematic.

Such partisan campaigning and focus on Israel is a sad but unfortunately an expected trait of much of the NGO community; it is an obsession that is often at the expense of real genocide and ignored injustice elsewhere in the world. However, several weeks ago, War on Want destroyed any remaining shred of its credibility when an article on its website, entitled ‘Palestine: essential reading list’, explained:

One of our volunteers asked us the other day to recommend key books for someone wanting to learn more about Palestine. For anyone seeking a first guide, Ben White’s Israeli Apartheid (Pluto Press, 2009) gives a good overview and set of sources. Here’s a dozen of the works I’ve found most useful...

The usual suggestions follow: Edward Said, The Question of Palestine; Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine and so on. A superficial attempt at balance is made with the appearance of Colin Shindler’s The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream, but like the state of Israel, it is one small piece of history surrounded by much more powerful, ideologically driven enemies.

The book whose inclusion is so absolutely dispiriting is Shlomo Sand’s controversial The Invention of the Jewish People. The utter dishonesty of War on Want’s infatuation with Israel very much pales compared to the recommendation of a book that questions the very definition of the Jews as a people. Whether or not this heavily-disputed book makes a valid point apropos the historiography of the Jewish people, its very inclusion epitomises the most regressive and benighted sentiment towards the Arab-Israeli conflict and the possible hopes for peace and stability in the region. War on Want indubitably seeks to emulate the most rejectionist of views.

This is not the mark of an organisation that wishes to pursue harmony and nonviolence, but it an outlook indicative of a wish for further confrontation - it is terrifying moral bankruptcy from an organisation that professes the selfless heroism of moral clarity.

War on Want goes beyond the usual hypocrisy of NGO’s disproportionate attention towards Israel. The NGO’s charter states that, “War on Want will not invest in or be directly associated with businesses that directly contravene its charitable objects.” However, War on Want openly supported the British Committee for Universities for Palestine’s tour of Bongani Masuku around British Universities. Masuku was found by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to have wilfully incited violence between different student groups on campus.

This duplicity is particularly poisonous considering War on Want’s persistent attempts to equate Israel with Apartheid South Africa, whose very collapse produced the SAHRC and its consequent condemnation of War on Want’s man Masuku.

War on Want’s Director, John Hilary, described the recent investigation by the Charity Commission into the NGO’s finances as “part of an ongoing strategy by an organised pro-Israeli lobby and the Jewish press.” The same John Hilary was more than comfortable working with the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, despite the latter group’s exposed and publicly denounced anti-Semitism, as well as the financial support by their founder Asghar Bukhari for the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving.

The recognition of a hypocrisy is a powerful and effective weapon to understand the dichotomy between the rational advocates of peace and the visceral denigrators of progress. War on Want is depressingly just another Government-funded NGO with Islamist links that deplorably appears against all hopes for peace, freedom and prosperity for all the peoples of the Middle East.

Sam Westrop is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist based in the UK.