Charity faces chasm of need on West Bank
NABLUS, West Bank -- Stooped and bald, with a ready smile and sharp eye, Abdul Rahim Hanbali presides over the poor in this city like a character out of Dickens.
In the one-room office atop his nonprofit dairy, requests pour in from a steady parade of citizens of this economically blockaded city: money for school books, for kidney dialysis, for food.
Hanbali directs an Islamic charity that dispenses millions of dollars a year, one of the last solvent, and credible, institutions in a bellwether Palestinian city where local government and most local business are weakened or in a state of collapse. The charity is funded by private donations as well as by income-generating businesses such as the state-of-the-art dairy plant, which supports about 1,300 families.
The charity increasingly fills a void brought about by the collapse of the Palestinian Authority since the victory of the Islamist group Hamas in January 2006 parliamentary elections. The Hamas victory led to a virtual shutdown of aid to Palestinians since Israel, the United States, and Europe have no dealings with a group they consider terrorist, driving the local economy into a tailspin.
Even though Hanbali, who is close to many Hamas activists, has less money to give away than ever (in large part because Palestinian-Americans won't send him money any more for fear of violating US antiterrorism laws), his authority has grown.
The Al Safa Dairy Plant -- the centerpiece of Hanbali's Islamic charity -- tells the story of the West Bank in this decade: how homegrown religious fundamentalists, adept at building fortunes through competitive capitalist enterprise, and with a proven track record of fighting corruption and helping the needy, have in many places eclipsed traditional power players, like the Hamas militia and the old guard secular PLO.
"The government, Hamas, Fatah, they exist somewhere over the horizon, beyond the sun," Hanbali said with a laugh in his office, after turning down an urgent request from a young woman to buy schoolbooks for a refugee camp. "But we are here living on the ground."
Hanbali is chairman of the local "Zakat," or Islamic Alms Committee. Believers are expected to tithe at least 2.5 percent of their total wealth to charity -- one of the Five Pillars of Islam. While most of the leaders of the Nablus Zakat, like Hanbali and the mayor of Nablus, are not members of any political party, they are known as religious men who support the same Islamist political philosophy espoused by Hamas. Israel considers the distinction semantic, often identifying Islamist "independents" as Hamas activists. Just over a week ago, the Israeli military arrested 33 alleged Hamas members in the West Bank, including the mayor of Nablus.
In the past decade, Yasser Arafat's secular Fatah movement was discredited, first by the failure of the Oslo peace process and then by the revelations of endemic corruption. Hamas won elections in January 2006 on a platform of " change and reform," but has failed to parlay an initial wave of support into an effective reform plan , spending most of its first year in control locked in a power struggle with Fatah.
Zakats such as Hanbali's, which exist in every major city in the West Bank and Gaza, have meanwhile quietly gone about their business. In 2007, Hanbali said he has an alms budget of about $1.2 million to give away. The year before, he had $2 million, but in tight times a little money goes a long way.
Hundreds of families, for instance, receive monthly grants of 10 Jordanian Dinars (worth about $14) -- not much, but enough to buy basic food staples such as flour and sugar.
Yusra Ridha Sawafta, 37, is a typical Zakat beneficiary. She lives with eight relatives in an almost completely unfurnished apartment in downtown Nablus, owned by her brother. The Zakat's monthly grant pays for flour and rice. She and her nephews pick wild greens from the hill above their neighborhood to boil with their starch.
"If the Zakat stops giving us money, we would only have God left to ask for help," she said.
According to Mayor Adly Yaish of Nablus, about 70 percent of the city's residents live below the poverty line, but the Palestinian Authority and local government have virtually no funds to give the poor. Nablus's few remaining major employers, hobbled by Palestinians' decreasing purchasing power and by Israeli security closures that have isolated Nablus and its merchants from the rest of the West Bank. Hundreds of employees have been fired this year alone.
The heavily indebted municipality focuses on the most Spartan level of services, keeping electricity and water flowing to the city even though the local government is more than a million dollars in arrears to Israeli utilities, and keeping the potholed roads passable.
Yaish has struggled since taking office in December 2005 -- as an independent backed by powerful figures in both Hamas and Fatah -- to reverse the municipality's financial plummet, and at the same time to rout corruption.
The mayor made his money as Nablus's Mercedes dealer. He is a firm believer in private enterprise, hustle (he appeals to foreign aid donors through a polished English-language website, nablus.org ), and Islamic alms.
On a recent workday at the municipality weeks before his arrest, he heard dozens of citizens' petitions in half an hour. A woman seeking help with a power bill she couldn't afford tried pressing a 20-dinar note into the mayor's hand, and seemed surprised when he rebuffed the attempted bribe.
"Is that for my pocket? Take it to the finance department!" he bellowed.
But most of the visitors to his office were asking for jobs, or help with utility bills; Yaish had to apologize to most of them, saying the city government couldn't afford to help them.
His friend Hanbali also finds himself rejecting most supplicants for lack of funds.
Donations to the Zakat, which was founded in the 1970s, dropped off markedly after 9/11, when Palestinians in the United States became hesitant to send money to an organization in the West Bank that the US government might consider suspicious because of the Islamists at its helm -- even though neither Hanbali nor the Nablus Zakat organization appears on any public US government terrorist blacklist.
On a recent afternoon, most of the machinery at the Safa dairy plant was quiet. A year ago, Hanbali was shipping 60 tons of milk a day, ultra-pasteurized so as not to require refrigeration. Now, with the Palestinian demand crumbling, he is producing 14 tons of milk a day.
A woman accosted him in a factory hallway, asking in an urgent whisper whether Hanbali would consider $14 subsidies for Nablus students below the poverty line. With 6,000 such students, the price would come to $84,000 -- far more than the Zakat can currently afford.
Hanbali's approach to alms-giving has a decidedly capitalist bent, employing many of the same principles as the micro-credit schemes that have helped small entrepreneurs in the developing world. He says Islamic alms should encourage people to work, and should generate revenue instead of relying on tithe money.
Hence the Al Safa Dairy Plant, a gleaming $5 million facility with brand-new machines to pasteurize milk, make yogurt, and package everything in sanitary plastic. Hanbali built the factory with donations from locals, the Palestinian Diaspora, and large gifts from wealthy Gulf Arabs.
The idea, Hanbali said, was to create as many jobs as possible along the entire supply chain. The Zakat Committee gives cows to poor families (6,500 cows in the past six years); in turn, the dairy plant buys the milk. Another 76 people are employed at the plant, and Hanbali said the business indirectly brings income to hundreds of others.
Much of the milk produced is donated to West Bank schools. Whatever money the business earns goes to the Alms Committee, or is reinvested in the dairy.
If he were running Al Safa Dairy Plant as a private business, Hanbali said, he would fire all but a third of the employees, since the factory is operating so far below capacity. But he keeps everyone on the payroll, even if some end up doing make-work, such as mopping already clean floors or standing guard by the loading dock.
Hanbali's view of religion appears less extreme than the most leaders of Hamas and other Islamist factions, but he maintains that Godlessness, not religious fundamentalism, is the biggest cause of Palestinian violence. He also proudly claims descent from Ahmad bin Hanbal, the 9th- century Islamist scholar and founder of the Hanbali school, the most strict and conservative school of Islamic jurisprudence.
The Zakat has taken over functions that Hanbali believes normally should fall to the Palestinian Authority, but he doesn't mind that the poor of Nablus get help from a group inextricably linked to Islam and the Koran, and not from a secular government.
"This is preventive medicine for terrorism," Hanbali said. "Poverty creates unbelief. The empty stomach doesn't accept guidance and morals." 