A few months, the Globe and Mail broke a story about the politicization of the International Development Research Centre after Canadian funding for Mada Al-Carmel, an Arab-Israeli NGO was suddenly cut. Mada Al-Carmel had been targeted by NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel organization which monitors Arab-Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, and their funders.
Now, a group of Arab/Israeli NGOs have released the following letter to the Canadian Ambassador in Israel:
We, the undersigned, a group of Palestinian non-governmental organizations in Israel, write to Your Excellency, as the representative of the Government of Canada in Israel, to draw your attention to and express our disappointment and surprise at the decision of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada to withdraw its funding from two research projects of Mada al-Carmel — Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Israel. We learned that the decision had no relation to the quality or credibility of the work conducted by Mada al-Carmel and came after a meeting of Mr. David Malone, the IDRC President, with Israel’s ambassador to Canada, and after an inquiry from NGO Monitor to IDRC about its support to Mada al-Carmel. We also learned of the possibility that the Canadian Foreign Office was in one way or another involved in this decision.
Mada al-Carmel is one of our community’s leading organizations. From Mr. Malone’s cross examination under oath, we know that your office did conduct its own inquiry about Mada al-Carmel and that you reported back that Mada is a credible research center serving the Palestinian community in Israel. Indeed Mada al-Carmel, with the generous help of granting agencies such as the Ford Foundation, the EU, and the Open Society Institute, has become a leading source of world class research on the Palestinians in Israel.
The Projects that the IDRC first supported enthusiastically and then decided to withdraw the support for are in line with your country’s values of multicultural and equal citizenship and gender equality. It is ironic that your government will support these values in Canada, preach for democracy in the world, and support international development, and at the same time decide to stop its support for the Palestinian community in Israel, an indigenous community that is presently imperiled by the increasingly anti-democratic policies of the current government. The fact that this termination came after the meeting of Mr. Malone with the Israeli ambassador suggests that Canada’s the IDRC granting policies can be influenced by foreign policy considerations and not by Canada’s core values.
Your own office should know very well that the reason the IDRC President seems to have “discovered” (after the Israeli intervention) for terminating the funds, namely that Israel is a developed society, does not apply to the Palestinians in Israel. This, in our eyes, remains a rapidly contrived pretext, not a credible reason for breaching a legal contract and a relationship of many years’ standing.
This issue has just emerged in the local Arabic and Hebrew press and in the international Arabic press. We assume that it will continue to occupy our community. It is raising troubling questions about the politics of foreign funding and agendas of foreign funders, political intervention in academic agendas, Canadian policies in developing communities, and other related questions of North-South relations. The public discourse on these issues has only just begun and is likely to continue for some time.
We hope that this issue will be resolved by reinstating the funds to Mada al-Carmel. We therefore ask Your Excellency to take immediate steps in order to bring to the reversal of the IDRC’s decision. This funding is of paramount importance to the future of one of our leading organizations and to the continuation of our work to support equality and democracy in this country.
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