Tag: Support

Gaza, war and the cost of inaction

July 23rd, 2025

1 Shahed drone: between 20 – 50,000 USD

1 Patriot air defence missile system: 4 million USD

Estimated cost of reconstruction in Gaza: 50 billion+

Estimated reconstruction costs in Ukraine: 524 billion

Climate change adaptation costs : USD 140 billion to 300 billion per annum by 2030

What do these figures illustrate? That war itself is very costly, cleaning up the aftermath may well be even costlier, and to put it all in perspective: there are ample costs as it is. The cost of climate change adaptation, for example. They are costs that require cooperation, not conflict. And this is only in terms of money and financial cost. Add to that the costs of displacement: again, financial, but also the psychological burden. Factor in the disruption to lives and livelihoods, intergenerational trauma, human rights violations, grief and loss: the costs are phenomenal. Meanwhile, valuable time and resources for combating climate change are being diverted towards conflicts. Even thoughts and intellectual effort are directed towards military ends, rather than towards solving shared problems.

Many of the places currently facing conflict or war, were already in a precarious situation, with poverty, environmental constraints and climate change. Take Sudan, for example:

BBC: Sudan War – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjel2nn22z9o

“Its 46 million people were living on an average annual income of $750 (£600) a head in 2022. The conflict has made things much worse. Last year, Sudan’s finance minister said state revenues had shrunk by 80%.”

Or Gaza:

BBC: Gaza War – https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckglpk9xjewo

“The UN says water shortages in Gaza are worsening due to the lack of fuel and spare parts for desalination, pumping and sanitation facilities, as well as insecurity and inaccessibility due to Israeli military operations against Hamas and evacuation orders. As a result, many people are receiving less than the emergency standard of 15 litres per day, amounting to what the UN calls ‘a human-made drought crisis’. ”

The current situation in Gaza is abundantly clear: starvation and famine. Food is not getting through. When it does, desperate civilians are being killed trying to get to it. In the face of all this, what do we do? Trying to ensure food trucks get into Gaza is proving difficult enough. Is it still worth donating money in the hope this somehow translates into aid on the ground reaching those that need it? Does pressuring governments make any difference, when the views and statements of those governments seem like little more than dust in the wind?

The Gaza conflict is approaching the two-year mark. What started with horror at the actions of Hamas, turned to horror at the actions of the Israeli Defence Force. To provide context, the figures are around 1200 people killed by Hamas in the October 7^th attack, with 251 taken hostage, and 58,895 people killed by Israel at the time this article was published. Israel’s right to defend, fails to hold up when compared to the numbers of civilians killed in Gaza.

There has been a certain level of intellectual ambivalence with regards to this particular conflict. We can look at how the war started, and see that this was a clear attack on Israel. Even today, Israeli hostages remain in Gaza, at least twenty of whom are believed to be alive. Israel has vowed they won’t stop until they have rid Gaza of Hamas. As an individual it feels hard to hold a complete view on the situation. The political realities are complex, and they span long lengths of time well before the events of 7^th October 2023. There are alliances of traditional allies that have influenced the timing and nature of political responses, and indeed the reluctance of some states to condemn Israel’s actions. Not only is it hard to grasp the politics just by reading about it, but there are also questions over motivations and views, and whether the views presented by politicians, academics or professionals in Western media are representative of significant parts of their respective populations, or not.

Finally, there is the familiar back and forth that has come to characterise other situations of conflict around the world. One state, being accused of something, quickly denies or disputes it, saying it’s not the truth. With restrictions on media reporting, such as is currently the case in Gaza, this becomes impossible to verify or fact check for the average person. Further complicating matters is the fact that most reported figures from Gaza are courtesy of ‘The Hamas-run Health Ministry’. How much trust one can place in those figures, and any concerns about bias, have to be balanced by the fact that when it is the only form of reporting of civilian casualties, it would be unwise to dismiss them out of hand. How much trust can be placed in any of Gaza’s institutions feels like a similar balancing act. But while Hamas might run Gaza, how much support do they really command?

Potential resolutions or ways forward that have been discussed include the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza as a starting point, an arms embargo on Israel, the use of sanctions, and recognition of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution. These are mostly high-level responses involving long-term efforts and negotiations. The immediate issue that won’t wait for any of that to happen, or not happen, is the starving civilians in Gaza. Standing in a crushing crowd with a tin basin in hand to collect food, keeping the sun away with it as one continues to wait, is not something anyone should have to endure. Children carrying jerry cans of water, if they’re able to find any, or doubled up under crippling loads, are not something the world should tolerate as images of childhood. People starving to death in the 21^st Century is not something the world must accept. The solutions to immediate humanitarian necessities such as these must be considered an immediate priority, separate to discussions around what the long-term future might look like. It is an indictment on our joint humanity if there isn’t an end to this – and soon.

Image Credit: AI
A Question of Personality

March 29th, 2025

This morning I was asked to describe my personality – in five words. The words I chose were: independent, diligent, caring, honest and empathetic. I picked these words on the spot, as it were, because someone had asked me to do so, and these were five adjectives that came to mind at that moment. When the call had ended, I turned these words over in my mind. Why had I picked them? Were they the right words? No, that was the wrong question. There wasn’t a “right” when it came to picking five words to describe my personality. But there was such a thing as better or worse choices, and more or less honest choices. So, why these five words? And was I even the right person to judge whether I lived up to any of these words?

The more I thought about it, the more I struggled to justify my choices, and this lack of clarity bothered me. I considered each word in turn. All have a degree of truth, but they aren’t the whole of it, somehow. What the hell is my personality anyway, even if I were to commit five paragraphs or pages to the topic? And should I distinguish between simple descriptions or traits, like the adjectives I’d listed, and a deeper, more abiding sense of self, character, or even that of ego? Now I felt like I was looking into an abyss. Five spindly trees clung to the precipitous cliffs: independent, diligent, honest, caring, empathetic trees.

If I was brutally honest, I wasn’t always particularly diligent. I might like to think I was, but there were times when diligence gave way to expediency, or even downright laziness. I could take issue with honesty too. I try to be honest, but I wasn’t sure that a certain amount of self-deception and censorship wasn’t at play, even here. For example, I wouldn’t always disclose that I suffered a traumatic and mind-shattering episode of something at the age of 22, if I thought it might jeopardise my chances of employment in the here and now. It wasn’t something I talked about much in general, come to that. Too complicated, maybe. Caring – I could be that, yet I could also be grumpy, bad-tempered, harsh and overly critical.

Actually, now I thought about it, hadn’t my personality as good as gone? It was like I had believed in a personality once, but now, looking back, personality seemed a strange, irrelevant and unwieldy concept. If we are truly changeable, then my personality probably wasn’t the same as it was ten years ago, or even yesterday. “We never step into the same river twice”. Who said it? I can’t remember now, but I suspect it must have been some philosopher of old. The saying captures a sense of constant flux and flow. Like that river, my personality might have moved on, grown, and then become less central or altogether irrelevant. I doubt that’s the same thing as ego dissolution, or what Buddhism might describe as the disappearance of an ‘I’ on the path towards enlightenment. I think that’s something else again.

Coming back to the words I chose, I tried to think of alternative choices. They actually weren’t too bad, I supposed, although one might wonder why I only chose the more positive descriptors and omitted to include any negatives. I was reminded of a headstone I came across in a cemetery recently.

Stumbling across that headstone and seeing the words at first glance, I had a strange feeling of something being wrong. These words were…no, these were not the words for a headstone! I stood still and read the inscription again. “Irascible, volatile, irritating, irritable”, tempered by “endlessly optimistic and kind”. And of Mr. Dunn: “Stubborn, contumacious” – whatever that was – I’d have to look it up, “limitlessly tolerant and patient”. These words were honest. And they were kind. “A perfect partnership”.

I wondered if the Dunn’s would have answered the personality question the same in life as they, or their family, clearly had in death.
Bringing Welfare to a War Zone

January 31st, 2023

We all need something. But what exactly is it that we need? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one way of setting out the simple things that an individual human (or bear) requires – at a most basic level these are the elements needed for survival: food, water, shelter. As we climb the pyramid our other more high-level needs appear – our hunger for love and affection, for self-fulfilment and purpose, for knowledge perhaps. And so too on a societal level there are the basics, the less immediate needs and the nice-to-haves. Beyond societies we can look at the world, and see areas of huge and immediate need: a war-zone perhaps, or a country undergoing major food shortages or struggling in the wake of a natural disaster. There are scales of suffering and levels of need.

When we look beyond our own needs in this moment, we can see that all needs are relative. To put it another way, we can always find people worse off than ourselves. We may feel we have little income, but there are people out there who have no money at all. We might feel that we don’t have much to eat, but there are people who are starving. Our opportunities might seem limited, but there are some for whom the idea of opportunity beyond immediate survival is unthinkable. Whatever our situation, we can usefully remind ourselves that we are at least living and breathing in the here and now. That in itself is a major advantage and indeed an opportunity not to be missed!

Linked to this idea of our needs being hierarchical, and so too the needs of a country or society as a whole, how can we best divide and share what resources might be available? For instance, in the case of humanitarian aid work, where might we best invest and place our money so as to help the largest number of people? Should we focus on the highest need individuals who may have very specific needs, or simply try and reach as many people as possible, even if it’s only in a little way? As individuals, are we better off strapping on our boots and helmets and entering the war zone warts and all, or is it more effective to work from afar? Where should the money go – directly to those who need it, or into the pool of a large organisation or outfit for them to distribute? Who should have the final say as to how or where that money is spent? Does it matter who leads the effort to rebuild a country?

These questions largely did not enter my thinking until I visited Ukraine towards the end of last year. Prior to that, foreign aid was just something which I knew happened and the logistics of it did not really cross my mind at all. In Ukraine I met some people who were taking huge – and at least as far as I could tell – largely unpredictable risks, in order to drive aid into the “hot” zones close to the frontlines. The modus operandi amongst the international aid distributors is largely van, truck or even car-based delivery of goods. This requires purchasing or gathering the supplies, and then driving them off to areas of high need. I admire the courage required to repeatedly dash into these places in a small van loaded with groceries or other items, and then dish them out to the no doubt grateful recipients of towns and villages under siege, before dashing back to re-load.

Ukraine is a large country, populated by many proud Ukrainians. Even surveying a small corner of the devastation makes one realise that the level of need multiplied across the country, particularly in the worst-affected areas, must be immense. I wondered about the delivery van idea in the face of all this. It had its benefits in being small, flexible and potentially quick to respond. Its smallness was also an obvious downside, given the scale of the need. Along with the fact that for many of us foreigners, there were the additional hurdles of largely not speaking the language, not knowing the lay of the land, the existing logistics networks or the exact nature of a war zone.

There were also wider questions in my mind around who should do what. Just seeing a foreign volunteer is a bright ray of hope and sunshine for some people in the worst-affected areas. Simply the thought that there are people out there who care about their plight, not just politicians or celebrities but ordinary folks dashing around in cars and vans, can be a valuable form of moral support. At the same time, I wondered if this idea of foreigners taking up roles as volunteer van-drivers could undermine the potential for locals to do the same for themselves, and so help their country on their own terms. It could be more difficult for a Ukrainian to do the same, for the simple reason that the access to funds might not be there. But looking at it in terms of empowerment, of doing the stuff that needs doing rather than being a passive recipient of foreign aid, I wondered if that was perhaps a role better suited to locals than foreigners.

By the end of my time in Ukraine, I wondered if the real value of foreign visitors to a country at war lies largely in a moral support and liaison capacity, rather than actually doing the more hands-on stuff on the ground. And so, as someone wanting to help, I might just be more useful in a distantly remote fundraising role so that the money is there for the locals to do for themselves what needs doing. As with anything, it will be important to have mechanisms in place to ensure that funds are well-spent, reach those who need it most, and are distributed equitably. Long may the locals prevail at relief and rebuilding, wherever that might be! The best I can hope to do is support.

Tag: Support

Gaza, war and the cost of inaction

A Question of Personality

Bringing Welfare to a War Zone