South-South Solidarities and Intertwined Responses to Displacement in Gaza

South-South Solidarities and Intertwined Responses to Displacement in Gaza

Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh – Principal Investigator of the Southern Responses to Displacement project

Introduction

As the Southern Responses to Displacement (SOURCED) project has been exploring since 2017, states, organisations and civil society networks from across the so-called ‘Global South’, as well as locally based communities and people with displacement backgrounds themselves, have long played a key role in responses to displacement and conflict. Our multi-year project has been exploring why, how and with what effect ‘Southern’ states – including Brazil and Malaysia -, civil society networks, members of ‘host communities’ and different groups of refugees have responded to support the more than 6.7 million refugees from Syria who have been living in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey since 2011. In a new Special Issue of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs edited by Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (PI of the SOURCED project) and Dr. Estella Carpi (former-SOURCED Research Associate), we broaden the conversations developed throughout the project by examining a wider range of historical and geographical cases and contexts.

In this blog, which is an adapted extract from my and Carpi’s Introduction to the Special Issue, I trace a range of contemporary and historical Southern-led responses to occupation, genocidal violence and mass displacement in Gaza. In so doing, I archive some of the roles played by a plurality of actors across the globe in support of Palestinians’ rights in Gaza. This is an archival project which adds to the extensive work that Palestinians in Gaza and in the diaspora themselves have been undertaking both in documenting the crimes to which they are being subjected, as well as their extensive work as first responders across critical domains.

As Estella and I argue in our Introduction to the new Special Issue of this title, focusing on “South-South solidarities and Southern-led responses” in the case of Gaza highlights some of the many articulations and practices of ‘Southern-led responses to displacement’ whilst recognizing, precisely, the extent to which such actors do not exist or work in isolation from one another, and that Southern-responses are not necessarily enacted in an antagonistic manner, contra Northern-led initiatives. Instead, as we argue in the Introduction to the Special Issue, “tracing the extent to which these are histories and systems that are intertwined, not merely existing in parallel, is arguably essential to create the more radical paradigm shift that is required for a more just and equitable forms of responding to displacement writ large.” You can read the full Introduction by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Carpi here, and the entire Special Issue here.

South-South Solidarities and Responses to War Crimes and Displacement

At the same time as countries from across the global North have been cutting foreign and humanitarian aid, as well as attacking and seeking to dismantle both national and UN humanitarian and development agencies, Southern^[1] and postcolonial states have responded to the ongoing genocide in Gaza by seeking to hold hegemonic states and institutions accountable for committing and/or being complicit in the most serious of crimes under international law. In effect, around the world, politicians, academics, directors of international, national and local human rights organisations, as well as civil society networks, have highlighted the underlying hypocrisy and violence of a ‘rules-based’ order founded and led by Western states which perpetuates colonial systems of oppression and exploitation and systematically fails to uphold the rights of peoples affected by occupation, conflict, mass displacement and dispossession. In this context, states from across the global South have been highly visible and audible on a global stage in leading international responses to uphold the rights of displaced Palestinians.

In December 2023, the South African government – a country that fought for and won its own freedom from apartheid and colonial occupation – brought a ground-breaking genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), seeking and being granted provisional measures to uphold ‘the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.’

From the end of 2023 onwards, states from across the global South have been recognized as diplomatic leaders at the UN and elsewhere, with South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti referring the situation of Palestine to the ICC in November 2023, and numerous states subsequently seeking a permanent ceasefire and compliance with the ICJ’s Interim Orders throughout 2024. For instance, resolutions were drafted (inter alia) by Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Republic of Korea and Sierra Leone in March 2024; Namibia submitted interventions in relation to the South African case brought before the ICJ; and resolutions were passed by the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League.

By the end of January 2025, such momentum has led to the inauguration of The Hague Group, founded by the governments of Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa, with these states coming together “in the solemn commitment to an international order based on the rule of law and international law” alongside “the principles of justice,” to uphold UN resolutions and the rulings of the ICJ and the arrest warrants issued by the ICC.  

While the very concept and contours of the ‘South’ remain contested (as we have been exploring in the Southern Responses to Displacement project), such acts and actors have often been explicitly positioned as embodying powerful processes of anti-colonial, South-South solidarity, and have rightly been identified as enacting an explicit challenge to the hegemonic ‘world order’ and to the ‘West’/ ‘global North’. Nonetheless, it is essential to view these processes, and this moment, not as an exception or a paradigm shift per se, but rather as part of a long history of ‘Southern responses’ to ‘humanitarian crises’ and crises of protection.

Indeed, such efforts must be viewed in historical context, not least because formerly colonised states played a key role in shaping human rights frameworks from the very birth of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see Slaughter 2018). Indeed, in another context, Achille Mbembe maintains that the Western archive is ‘neither monolithic, nor the exclusive property of the West,’ since, he argues, ‘Africa and its diaspora decisively contributed to its making and should legitimately make foundational claims on it.’ By extension, rather than positioning formerly colonised states as acting from the periphery or in an antagonistic manner, ‘the South’ has a foundational role, and thus has foundational claims, upon international rights and legal frameworks (also see Billaud and De Lauri, 2024 on ‘the Third World’ and international law in the context of Gaza).

It is now increasingly recognised that a plurality of ‘systems,’ and a plurality of ‘international communities of response,’ exist and have long existed (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2019). Alongside academics, policymakers, and practitioners interrogating, critiquing, and resisting who is identified with, included in, or excluded from the hegemonic ‘world system’, researchers have also been probing why, and with what effect, ‘non-hegemonic’ responders to conflict, humanitarian and disaster have systematically been erased from the normative history of humanitarianism (i.e. see Pacitto and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2013; Davey and Scriven, 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015 and 2019). Such studies note that there is a plurality of ‘orders’ in our multipolar world, and that ‘“the” (normative, Northern-led) “international humanitarian community” is only one of a plurality of “international communities of response”, some of which work with, and others explicitly against, “the” hegemonic Northern-led humanitarian system’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2019). It is in this regard that the new Special Issue of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs–takes as its starting point the plurality of ‘communities of response’ to conflict and displacement.

A long history of international cooperation in Gaza

This is a plurality that is clearly demonstrated in the names of the hospitals systematically attacked and destroyed – as part of its attacks on Gaza’s broader civilian infrastructure – by the Israeli forces across the Gaza Strip since October 2023. With 31 out of 36 hospitals across Gaza having been destroyed or damaged by May 2024, the names of some of these medical institutions remind us of the long history of international cooperation led by countries and communities from across the global South in support of occupied, displaced and dispossessed Palestinians in Gaza:

• Al-Helal Emirati Maternity Hospital, Rafah (funded by UAE);
• Indonesian Hospital Gaza City (funded by Indonesia’s Medical Emergency Rescue Committee which was established by medical students from the University of Indonesia in 2011 – see here);
• theTurkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, Gaza City (built and equipped by the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency);
• two Jordanian military field hospitals (one inaugurated in 2009 and the second established in Khan Younis in late-November 2023) [see here];
• and the Dar Essalaam Hospital (funded inter alia by Qatar Red Crescent, Muslim Care-Malaysia Society, Al-Taawon, Partners International Medical Aid-South Africa, Palestine International Medical Aid (PIMA), Patient Helping Fund association–Kuwait, Human Appeal International-UAE, Zakat Committee for Islamic Advocacy for the Palestinian People, and The Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development).

It is important to start by acknowledging, of course, that these countries and organisations have diverse official and unofficial motivations; do not fall ‘straightforwardly’ into the category of ‘global South’; or indeed wish to be labelled as ‘Southern’ per se. It is equally the case that these state and non-state actors have not been working in isolation from actors from across the global North.

Building on a long-standing official tradition of support and solidarity between states that identify themselves or are identified by others as members of the global South, BRICS, and/or the Non-Aligned Movement (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, 2018; Rao, 2024), South Africa has been supported in its legal case against Israel before the ICJ not only by Southern and postcolonial countries including Nicaragua, Colombia, Turkey, Libya, Egypt, Maldives, Mexico, Chile and Cuba, but also by Slovenia (the first European country to formally join the case in January 2024), Ireland, Belgium and Spain (see UNRIC, 2024).

Equally, the funders of the above-mentioned Dar Essalaam Hospital also included UNDP and ICRC as well as European organisations and initiatives such as Wilde Ganzen, Vrriheid Voorr Palestina-Holland and Stichting Palestina Fonds–Nederland, indicating the wide range of actors from the South and North alike who have often worked together to provide displaced and dispossessed people with access to key rights. Even in cases where one state is the figurehead whose name is borne following the establishment of a hospital, this has often taken place in partnership with major international organisations, with an intertwining of funding, institutional and programmatic approaches such as that witnessed in the case of the Jordanian military field hospitals, constructed and led by the Jordanian Royal Medical Services whilst being supported through donations from IOM and Direct Relief to provide medical infrastructure and care to Palestinians in Gaza (for critiques of field hospitals in Gaza see Smith et al 2024).

In turn, the medical professionals working at such hospitals include an equally diverse community of medics. First and foremost, the vast majority of clinicians therein are multiply-displaced Gazan Palestinian professionals themselves: Palestinian refugees and internally displaced people who have been caring for other displaced Palestinians. Many of these doctors have been educated within Gaza and the broader region, such as Dr. Abdelrahman Abu Shawish (who graduated from Gaza’s Azhar University) and Dr. Alaa Kassab (who was educated in Cairo) (see here); they also include Palestinians such as Dr. Fayez Abed who graduated from Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine in 2020, as part of Cuba’s historic medical scholarship programme for students from across the global South, including circa 1,500 Palestinians (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015), and Dr. Musa Abdul Khaliq who graduated from medical school in Ukraine in 2023, as part of a longer history of Palestinian doctors educated in the countries of the former-USSR^[2] (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015, p. 82).

Palestinian doctors in Gaza have, in turn, been working alongside international medical humanitarian volunteers from around the world affiliated with the abovementioned institutions and organisations: these include three Indonesian MER-C medical humanitarian volunteers working at the Indonesian Hospital who were ‘trapped’ inside Gaza as it was hermetically sealed in October 2023 and who decided not to evacuate when ‘the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs [helped to] evacuate Indonesian citizens from Gaza’ but instead decided to remain, to ‘stay inside Gaza because we need them to take care of the humanitarian work’ before new medical teams could gain access.

‘Local responders’ – Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike – who were already based in Gaza, have been joined by rotating medical teams as and when they have been permitted to cross the border, including members of the Palestinian diaspora, such as the British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta, as well as volunteer doctors from countries including (in alphabetical order) Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, and Pakistan. At risk of bombardment and at times desperately awaiting their own evacuation as hospitals have come under attack – too often to become the sites of mass graves -, these doctors have typically been embedded within emergency medical teams which also demonstrate the intertwining of ‘Southern’ and ‘Northern’ institutions, such as Malaysian doctors working with Mercy Malaysia Emergency Medical Team ^[3] under the auspices of the WHO, and Jordanian doctors not only working for the Jordanian field hospitals but also travelling, for instance, as part of medical teams established by International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestinians (Rédaction Africanews, 2024; Elayyan, 2024).

Such teams have, of course, also included medics who hold European and North American nationalities and who have high profile personas in the public sphere, having often volunteered in Gaza, the West Bank and the Palestinian refugee camps across the region over the course of several decades (see Haj-Hassan et al., 2014; Algendy, 2024; Kossaify, 2024). Dozens of doctors travelling from countries of the global North to work in Gaza themselves have personal and familial histories which position them as members of historically minoritised communities in the North – such as Dr. Fozia Alvi, Dr. Yipeng Ge, Dr. Alia Kattan, Dr. Yasser Khan, Dr. Zaher Sahloul, Dr. Abdo Algendy, Dr. Mohamed Tahir and Dr. Omar El-Taji – , echoing academic arguments that, while the term ‘South’ is itself contested, there are arguably multiple Souths in the world, including ‘Souths’ (and Southern voices) within powerful metropoles in the North, as well as multiple Souths within multiple peripheries.

In turn, where possible, ‘Northern’ organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have established clinics within still-operational hospitals born as embodiments of South-South solidarity; for instance, an MSF clinic was established within the Indonesia Hospital in Rafah in mid-December 2023, illustrating the ways that Northern and Southern institutions have sought to work together to not only provide life-saving support but also actively challenge the status quo.

Given the scale of destruction, some states have sought to find ways to provide new clinical infrastructure, although such initiatives have continued to be blocked by the Israeli state – for instance, in late-2023/early-2024, Indonesia sent a hospital ship with aid for Gaza in the hope that it would not only be able to deliver much needed medical supplies upon its arrival at the Egyptian port of Al-Arish via the Egyptian Red Crescent but also eventually be granted permission for the ship itself to operate as a field hospital off Gaza’s coastline itself.

As such initiatives continue to be blocked, it is clear that the humanitarian aid that has been prevented by the Israel forces from entering the Gaza Strip for months on end – in ongoing violation of the ICJ’s Interim Orders – include medical and food supplies provided by not only the UN, EU and Northern-led INGOs, but also by states such as Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Rwanda, Turkey, Tunisia and the UAE, as well as by NGOs, faith-based groups, local and transnational civil society networks and diaspora organisations established, funded and led by citizens, migrants and refugees from around the world.

Indeed, where Gazan Palestinian doctors have been working in situ with the support of volunteer Palestinian doctors from the diaspora, it is equally the case that Palestinian refugees from camps such as Baddawi camp in North Lebanon have collected funds and supported aid drives in yet another iteration of what can variously be denominated ‘diaspora humanitarianism’ or what I have elsewhere referred to as ‘refugee-refugee humanitarianism’.

As suggested above, these differently positioned actors have been working to challenge hegemonic systems, and at times they have worked together across in different ways and in different capacities, including as donors, funders, subcontractors, institutional partners and colleagues. As we have seen in Gaza but also elsewhere around the world, beyond, or perhaps precisely in light of, this multiplicity of ‘responders’, there are also a plurality of (unofficial and official) motivations and principles underpinning responses to mass displacement, some of which overtly challenge the status quo while others seek to solidify existing systems (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2019a).

These include the principles of solidarity and a common political struggle for self-determination and decolonisation (as articulated by post-Apartheid South Africa) on the one hand, and, on the other, demands (as articulated by many international agencies, organisations, European states and lawyers) for the ‘international humanitarian principles’ of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence to be equally and consistently applied in Gaza to protect and uphold ‘the system’ in the face of the above-mentioned accusations of racialised double standards and hypocrisy.

Notably, European and North American representatives of the very UN agencies and NGOs that have been extensively critiqued over the past decades for their complicity with White saviorism, neocolonial, and neoliberal humanitarianisms have also been at the forefront of vocally opposing the genocidal violence in Gaza, demanding an immediate ceasefire and seeking sustainable political solutions rather than funding for palliative humanitarian band-aids.

This is not to romanticize either the roles of the UN or NGOs which have demanded the consistent application of ‘international humanitarian principles’, or ‘Southern’ states or civil society networks drawing on discourses and principles of solidarity, mutual aid and decolonization while, of course, also having other ideological, political and diplomatic motivations of their own.

Indeed, just as we must acknowledge the roles played by different actors from the so-called global North in these processes, it is equally the case that not all ‘Southern’ states, let alone all citizens of southern ‘solidarity states’, have been active in solidarity movements or committed to such principles, as Kribsoo Diallo (2024) reminds us with regards to the complex positions and motivations of different African states and as Srila Roy and Joel Quirk (2024) discuss with regards to the limits of South African civil society and university students’ ‘solidarity’, in spite of the South African state’s global leadership in this area.

Nonetheless, in archiving some of the roles played by a plurality of actors across the globe in support of Palestinians’ rights in Gaza – which we do as a means to adding to the extensive work that Palestinians in Gaza and in the diaspora themselves have been undertaking in documenting the crimes to which they are being subjected, as well as their extensive work as first responders across critical domains -, the aim above has been to highlight some of the many articulations and practices of ‘Southern-led responses to displacement’ whilst recognizing, precisely, the extent to which such actors do not exist or work in isolation from one another, and that Southern-responses are not necessarily enacted in an antagonistic manner, contra Northern-led initiatives. As Estella Carpi and I argue in our introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs on ‘Southern Responses to Displacement’, “[t]racing the extent to which these are histories and systems that are intertwined, not merely existing in parallel, is arguably essential to create the more radical paradigm shift that is required for a more just and equitable forms of responding to displacement writ large.”

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A note on the new Special Issue of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs on ‘Southern Responses to Displacement’

While the Southern Responses to Displacement project has including through drawing into conversation processes which Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh has elsewhere conceptualised as forms of ‘refugees-hosting-refugees,’ ‘refugee-refugee humanitarianism’, internationalist and solidarity-based responses, ‘faith-based humanitarianism’ and ‘South-South humanitarianism’, the Special Issue brings together four academic papers and two critical reflections which were initially presented in a 2023 roundtable and a related closed symposium whose participants represented multiple historical, geographical and epistemological perspectives to, collectively, explore the future of humanitarian practice and research, including how to go beyond the institutionalised fetishization of ‘decolonising’ humanitarianism and refugee-related research.

Reflecting a multi-scalar approach – including international and national, regional and transregional responses, as well as ‘local’ responses by people labelled as ‘refugees,’ ‘citizens’ and ‘hosts’ on municipal, neighbourhood and camp-based levels  –, the papers, together, explore forms of response which are often posited as ‘alternatives’ to Northern-led ‘humanitarianism.’

Providing critical insights into the mobilisation and contestation of key concepts used in the broader academic and policy literature – including ‘the South’, ‘empowerment,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘volunteer,’ ‘refugee’ and ‘host’ -, together, the contributions centralise the perspectives and conceptualisations of people who have personal and/or family experiences of processes of displacement and dispossession, both in their capacities as ‘responders’, ‘recipients’, or ‘non-recipients’ of such initiatives, and as people who are engaging critically with the meaning and practices of ‘humanitarianism,’ including as researchers and scholars. You can read the complete Special Issue, free of charge, here. 

Table of Contents

Editors ’ Introduction: South-South Solidarity and Responses to Displacement – Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (UCL) and Estella Carpi (UCL)

Syrian Refugee Resettlement in Brazil: A Viable Alternative Strategy to Aid? – Estella Carpi (UCL) and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (UCL)

Refugees as ‘Projects’: Humanitarian Responses to Displacement and Refugee-Led Organisations in Southern Turkey – Şule Can (Binghamton University)

Refugee Volunteering and Responses to Displacement in Uganda: Navigating Service-Delivery, Work and Precarity – Matt Baillie Smith (Northumbria University), Bianca Fadel (Northumbria University), Frank Ahimbisibwe (Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda and University of Antwerp, Belgium) and Robert Turyamureeba (Bishop Stuart University, Uganda)

Humanitarian Fiction: Examining the ‘Host’ in Refugee-Receiving Contexts – Rawan Arar (University of Washington)

Reimagining Humanitarianism and Refugee Research: Decolonisation or Symbolic Gesture? – Jessica Oddy-Atuona (Design for Social Impact) and Marwan Adinsa (University of Juba)

Refugees as Archiving Subjects: Between the Researched and the Researcher – Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (University of Oxford)

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ENDNOTES:

[1] The Southern Responses to Displacement project has been critically examining the multiple meanings and relationalities of ‘the South’, rather than reifying the terms ‘global North’ and ‘global South.’ A range of emic and etic classifications related to ‘the South’ have variously been developed and applied on the basis (inter alia) of particular readings of a state’s geographical location, of its relative position as a (formerly) colonized territory or colonizing power,  and/or to encompass ‘countries that have been marginalised in the international political and economic system’  (Medie and Kang, 2018: 37–38); other scholars argue that rather than being ‘either static or purely defined through reference to physical territories and demarcations’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley, 2018: 3), ‘the South’ should be conceptualised as ‘a metaphor’ that ‘represents the embeddedness of knowledge in relations of power’ (Patel, 2018: 32). Conceptualisations of countries as ‘Northern’ or ‘Southern’ are engaged with further in Carpi and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh in their contribution to the Special Issue (here), but for more detailed discussion and analysis of the application of the notion of ‘the South,’ and of diverse modes of definition and typologies vis-à-vis the ‘global South,’ see the blog series on ‘Thinking Through the Global South’ published on this website [here].

[2]  Ukraine and Gaza, two places subjected to occupation with dramatically opposing responses from European and North American states, intersect in different ways in Gaza. Notably, the largest community of non-Palestinian residents in Gaza originate from Ukraine (circa 1,500 Ukrainians are estimated to have been living in Gaza in 2023), largely as a result of the marriage of Palestinian students from Gaza whilst completing their medical studies in Ukraine; these Gazans subsequently returned with their Ukrainian spouses and their Palestinian-Ukrainian/Ukrainian-Palestinian children to live and work in Gaza (see Allam and Galouchka, 2024). While some Palestinians from Gaza have remained in Ukraine following their graduation (ie. see the case of Alaa Shabaan Abu Ghali as reported by Kullab, 2024), the majority have returned to work in Gaza (as has also been the case amongst Cuban-educated Palestinians – see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015).

[3] Malaysia has a long history of supporting Palestinians in Gaza (as well as in Lebanon), including through scholarships provided by the Malaysian government for Palestinians to study in Malaysia; child sponsorship programmes established in 2010 (Malaysian NGO MSRI received start-up funds from the Gaza Emergency Fund established by Malaysia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in early-2009); and the construction and maintenance of educational and other infrastructure in Jabalia, Gaza (funds raised by the Malaysian Education Ministry in 2012 were distributed by Malaysian organisation Viva Palestina Malaysia in Gaza – see New Straits Times, 2012). Also in Gaza, Malaysian NGO Aman Palestin (established in 2004) has led projects to build orphanages; secured financial support for education; supplied food and medicine; and established a mini clinic and mini supermarket – the latter co-organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Malaysia (Idris, 2012). On this longer history of Malaysian support for Palestinians, see Pacitto and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015: 22-23) and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2023: 73)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Links are provided throughout the text; for full references to all works cited, please see the Introduction to the Special Issue here