When a state bans compassion, the underground grows |
What Israel is doing now is not strength. It is panic dressed up as sovereignty.
When a state begins to ban humanitarian organisations en masse—many of them globally respected, medically neutral, and active in conflict zones across the world—it signals something deeper than “security concerns.” It signals a collapse of moral confidence. It signals fear without proportion, fear without reason—and fear that ultimately devours its own justifications.
The list is staggering: ActionAid, CARE, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières across multiple countries, the Danish and Norwegian Refugee Councils, World Vision, Caritas, Defence for Children International, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and many more. These are not armed factions. These are doctors, aid workers, child-protection advocates, refugee specialists. Their crime is not violence. Their crime is witness.
To ban them is not to fight terror. It is to criminalise compassion. As Ghassan Kanafani warned with devastating clarity: “The Palestinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians alone, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.”
Israel’s current policy seems to rest on a dangerous assumption: that any institution........