For decades, the international community, Israeli occupation, and Palestinian elites have engineered the humanitarianization of the Palestinian Territories—reframing the question of Palestine as a humanitarian concern rather than a political one. Today, the West Bank and Gaza Strip have become the world’s humanitarian laboratory, and Palestinians are among the largest recipients per capita of humanitarian aid. This aid provides Palestinians with essential tools for survival and resilience, yet it has also entrenched Israeli colonial control.

In his new book “In a Land of Aid,” Sa’ed Atshan traces how humanitarianism has become the dominant lens through which Palestinian life is now governed. Drawing on over a decade of research, Atshan introduces readers to foreign aid workers, policymakers, scholars, and Palestinians as they navigate political constraints on the ground. Together, these encounters reveal an aid apparatus riddled with contradiction: simultaneously sustaining life, narrowing political imagination, and generating new forms of inequality and contestation. Atshan concludes that most powerful response to the paradoxically dehumanizing effects of aid lies in our affirmation of shared humanity.

Dr. Sa’ed Atshan is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology at Swarthmore College and currently a Visiting Scholar at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. He is the author of “Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique” (Stanford, 2020), coauthor of “The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians” (Duke, 2020), coeditor of “Reel Gender: Palestinian and Israeli Cinema” (Bloomsbury, 2022), and author of “In a Land of Aid: Essays on the Palestinian Condition” (Stanford, 2026).