There is a peculiar cruelty in expecting people to stand on their own feet while the ground beneath them remains broken. A family may want work, a home, the ordinary responsibility of providing for itself. Wanting those things does not make them available. And when food assistance is withdrawn before there is a viable way to earn enough to eat, the language of independence becomes very difficult to take seriously.
The Guardian reports that funding cuts have forced the World Food Programme to stop monthly support for more than half a million Palestinians in Gaza. Its report, citing the agency’s director for Palestine, describes a population facing another winter of deepening hunger. Two-thirds face crisis levels of food insecurity, with 200,000 people at risk of famine. Promised reconstruction has yet to begin more than a year after a ceasefire brokered by Donald Trump, the report says, while employment remains scarce and most people still depend on aid for food.
Those are reported circumstances, and the summary cannot tell us everything about the decisions behind the cuts. It does, however, put a serious difficulty in front of anyone who believes that people should have greater ownership of their lives: ownership requires something to work with.
We readily recognise this in our own households. Looking for work takes time and energy. Keeping a job requires some workable arrangement for getting there and managing responsibilities at home. Even a modest plan assumes that enough of tomorrow is predictable for an effort made today to have a chance of succeeding.
Remove those conditions and a person’s choices contract. The capacity to make decisions remains, but more of it must be spent on immediate survival. That is an important distinction when we speak about resilience. People can show extraordinary resourcefulness under pressure without the pressure becoming acceptable, or their resourcefulness becoming a reason to expect them to endure more.
There is a reasonable objection here. Emergency assistance cannot indefinitely substitute for a functioning economy. Food programmes need funding, resources are finite, and the long-term future of any community cannot sensibly be imagined as permanent dependence on outside provision.
But that objection makes the timing of withdrawal more important, rather than less. A reduction in aid is no evidence that the need for it has diminished. If work remains scarce and rebuilding has not started, what exactly is supposed to take its place? An empty space in a budget does not create an opportunity in somebody else’s life.
For those of us reading at a distance, there is also a temptation to let the scale settle the matter. Half a million is so large that it can become strangely difficult to think about. We register catastrophe, feel the appropriate dismay, then move on because there seems to be no useful place to put it.
One place is in the standards we apply to decisions made in our name. When assistance is cut, asking what people can realistically do afterwards is a practical test, not an expression of sentiment. Where support is still needed, maintaining it deserves to be treated as serious work, even when it offers no satisfying announcement of progress.
The ordinary life so many people hope to regain is full of responsibilities: earning, repairing, caring, deciding what can wait until next week. Food assistance cannot restore all of that. Withdrawing it while the means of living remain out of reach can consume the very energy people need to begin again. Before celebrating any reduction in dependence, there needs to be an answer to the household question: how will we eat tomorrow?