I’ve been reading your comments with great interest. Thank you! Do you maybe want to write a top-level post on the topic? Since it’s December (but also generally), I’d be quite interested in whether you can think of donation opportunities that are sufficiently leveraged to plausibly be competitive with (say) GiveWell top charities. Perhaps there are highly competent peace-building organizations in Israel. (I imagine few EAs will have the right expertise for direct work on this, and the ones who do will not benefit much from the post – but money is flexible.)
From what I’ve seen, peace building initiatives are more a matter of taste than proven effectiveness.
And I would wait until after the war to understand which orgs are able to effectively deliver aid to Gazans who have been affected, things will be clearer then. Now everything is complicated by the political / military situation.
I, very sadly, cannot recommend any org operating in this area. I’m a big fan of Standing Together, so maybe them, but I’m very pessimistic about the chances of the peace process. [Edit: I’d rather say I’m not optimistic enough. One of the major determiners of the future here will be foreign (and in particular, American) pressure—so maybe lobbying the US government to push for a peace accord would be good?]
If I were a non-Israeli person wanting to donate, I’d focus on aid for Gaza, but there too I cannot point to any organisation able to reliably move goods or funds into the hands of the citizens who need them.
The situation is dire and very hard to deal with, in both the short and long term. I’d be happy to have better recommendations.
Thanks! Yeah, I could imagine that particular aid programs beat GiveDirectly, but they’ll be even harder to find, be confident in, and make legible to others. But if someone has the right connections, then that’d be amazing too! (I’m mostly thinking of donors here whose bar is GiveDirectly and not (say) Rethink Priorities.)
I quite often listened to interviews with Noam Chomsky on the topic, and yeah, my takeaway was typically that the situation is too complex and intricate for me to try to understand it by just listening to a few hours of interviews… If I were a history and policy buff, that’d be different. :-/
I’ve been reading your comments with great interest. Thank you! Do you maybe want to write a top-level post on the topic? Since it’s December (but also generally), I’d be quite interested in whether you can think of donation opportunities that are sufficiently leveraged to plausibly be competitive with (say) GiveWell top charities. Perhaps there are highly competent peace-building organizations in Israel. (I imagine few EAs will have the right expertise for direct work on this, and the ones who do will not benefit much from the post – but money is flexible.)
From what I’ve seen, peace building initiatives are more a matter of taste than proven effectiveness.
And I would wait until after the war to understand which orgs are able to effectively deliver aid to Gazans who have been affected, things will be clearer then. Now everything is complicated by the political / military situation.
I, very sadly, cannot recommend any org operating in this area. I’m a big fan of Standing Together, so maybe them, but I’m very pessimistic about the chances of the peace process. [Edit: I’d rather say I’m not optimistic enough. One of the major determiners of the future here will be foreign (and in particular, American) pressure—so maybe lobbying the US government to push for a peace accord would be good?]
If I were a non-Israeli person wanting to donate, I’d focus on aid for Gaza, but there too I cannot point to any organisation able to reliably move goods or funds into the hands of the citizens who need them.
The situation is dire and very hard to deal with, in both the short and long term. I’d be happy to have better recommendations.
Thanks! Yeah, I could imagine that particular aid programs beat GiveDirectly, but they’ll be even harder to find, be confident in, and make legible to others. But if someone has the right connections, then that’d be amazing too! (I’m mostly thinking of donors here whose bar is GiveDirectly and not (say) Rethink Priorities.)
I quite often listened to interviews with Noam Chomsky on the topic, and yeah, my takeaway was typically that the situation is too complex and intricate for me to try to understand it by just listening to a few hours of interviews… If I were a history and policy buff, that’d be different. :-/