MASHAV

Israel has a great sense of humanitarian awareness and responsibility. Through MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, and non-governmental organisations, the State has a long-standing tradition of sharing expertise and coordinating relief to alleviate disease, hunger, and poverty in the wake of natural disasters and terrorist attacks beyond its borders.

A history of humanitarian aid

In 1958, only 10 years after its independence, Israel’s official overseas development cooperation was established as a division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It aimed to share with the rest of the developing world the know-how and technologies which provided the basis for Israel’s own rapid development.

MASHAV has since trained almost 200,000 course participants, from approximately 140 countries, in Israel and abroad, and has developed dozens of demonstration projects worldwide in fields of Israeli expertise. These include poverty alleviation, provision of food security, empowerment of women, and upgrade of basic health and education services.

By tragic circumstance, Israel is a world leader in handling mass casualties and can dispatch search and rescue teams and field hospitals fast and effectively. After the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, the Israeli Flying Aid group sent a mission to give supplies and shelter for thousands of families. In 2009, Israel medical teams provided relief to storm victims in the Philippines, and food aid a year earlier to the Congo.

Israeli efforts have also included relief to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and first response aid in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, with 60 tons of international aid to Indonesia, and 82 tons of relief to Sri Lanka alone.

Israel in action

Israel’s commitment to the Millennium Development Goals is absolute. MASHAV has joined forces with the Joint Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI) to improve lives in Ghana. In the city of Kumasi, Israel has constructed and equipped two Mother and Baby Units to improve neonatal care and reduce infant mortality.

Israel’s own tested solutions for problems such as water, capital and land shortages have helped countries in the developing world transform their agriculture from traditional subsistence to sophisticated market-oriented production. Many countries have sought partnership with Israel in addressing their own agricultural challenges. MASHAV is training participants in water treatment and safety, in a mission to reduce the number of avoidable deaths in developing countries from a lack of clean drinking water.

Since 1959, Israeli doctors have been offering eye camps to treat ocular diseases to people throughout the developing world.

Israeli doctors, acting through Save a Child’s Heart, have been giving children from around the world, including from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Iraq, Jordan and other Arab nations free life-saving heart operations. Since the organisation first started in 1995, 2,300 children have been treated, and almost half are from the PA, Jordan and Iraq.

Israel is at the forefront of the fight against AIDS, a member of the official UN team, to eradicate the threat the virus poses to developing countries. The Jerusalem AIDS project can be found across Africa and South America, providing sex education and training professionals to combat the problem in their countries.

Israel’s inclusion, in 2010, in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the 31-member economic forum, further demonstrates Israel’s commitment to upholding the highest levels of humanitarian commitment.[1]

Case Study: Israel in Haiti

When a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, Israel sent an enormous humanitarian mission to the country to help the victims of the disaster. Immediately dispatching evacuation and recovery experts, Israel was pulling people out from under the rubble ten days after the earthquake. On landing, it at once set up a field hospital on a Port au Prince football pitch; Israeli doctors treated over five hundred people there, delivering over a dozen babies and saving thousands of lives.[2] After the Haitian telecommunications system collapsed, the international press relied on the Israeli networks during the entire recovery effort to beam images across the world.