What Jews around the world stand to lose from the shuttering of USAID
The agency targeted by the Trump administration has been a living example of tzedakah that saved thousands upon thousands of lives
On a sign for the US Agency for International Development (USAID)office, the name has been painted over. Photo by Getty Images
Benjamin Ivry March 20, 2025
The recent White House shuttering of The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), founded in 1961 to fund programs in global health, disaster relief, socioeconomic development, environmental protection, democratic governance and education, will harm Jews and especially Israelis.
But for the most part, Jewish reaction has understandably alluded to more general impacts. It has been estimated that the USAID shutdown will cost millions of lives worldwide, including those of infants and children. Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, called the USAID cuts a “reckless move that will cause irreparable harm.” Elsewhere, Maxman explained that as a “Jewish woman,” her work reflects “values and beliefs — grounded in [her] Jewish identity.”
Whether humanitarianism has any chance for survival in the current US government remains to be seen. But as the Associated Press reported, HIAS, founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, has been devastated by the demolition of its major funding source. The American Jewish nonprofit was originally dedicated to help Russian Jewish immigrants fleeing Old World pogroms. More recently, HIAS has resettled refugees of all nationalities, religions and ethnic origins.
HIAS has offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, historically aiding more than 4.5 million people in need, including by keeping them safe in their homelands so they wouldn’t feel the need to flee.
Another example of altruistic activism, Early Starters International, founded by Israeli educators, offers stable learning environments for children in Ukraine, Israel and New York. It too is imperiled by the dismantling of USAID.
Though the agency has been controversial at times, as historians John Norris, Janet Ballantyne and Maureen Dugan have noted, it has also saved countless lives and sponsored the U.S.-Israel Cooperative Development Research (CDR) Program.
The concept of tzedakah is an ethical obligation for Jews, promoting justice or righteousness rather than charity. And in its own version of tzedakah, USAID has done much to oblige other countries to cooperate with Israel.
Its CDR initiative paid researchers from developing countries worldwide to collaborate with Israeli scientists, with no nonsense about boycotts. In this way, new knowledge could be produced by relying on Israeli technology and researchers. One section of the program backed Israeli work with selected Islamic republics in Central Asia. The idea was that know-how from the Jewish state on how to grow crops in desert-like conditions, with only salty water for irrigation, was of widespread interest, and would create lasting interactive bonds. Biological pest control, medical technology, and solar energy were among other targeted subjects.
The CDR program twinned Israel with teams from Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and many others, with courses taught in Israel on rural development, labor studies, education and health. Possibly even more ambitious was the Middle East Regional Cooperation Program (MERC), created to promote cooperation between Israeli, Egyptian and American scientists. It expanded to include researchers from Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, the West Bank and Gaza, and was open to supporting projects with partners in the Maghreb and Gulf regions.
Advancing peaceful cooperation and cultural exchange between Arab and Israeli scientists, MERC trained students and young scientists training through cross-border exchanges in agriculture, health, economics, and engineering.
In addition to Israel’s purported ability to make a desert bloom, according to the old slogan coined by former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, such skills as how to treat and reuse domestic wastewater for agriculture were taught.
Among other MERC-bankrolled projects that underlined Israel’s humanitarian efforts was one involving Arab breast cancer survivors in Israel and in the West Bank. Other achievements included a research consortium from Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, and the US with observers from Jordan and Algeria, striving to boost the production of a Mediterranean fish species, the juvenile grey mullet.
USAID gave MERC cash so that researchers from Israel, Egypt, and the US could evaluate seed and fruit infection, while Jordanians and Israelis developed ways to make coral reefs more resilient to environmental change and also grow willow trees in semi-arid regions as a food source.
The overall notion was to prove that Israel was an esteemed and worthy partner for international efforts, which might have been obvious to many, but often directly contradicted political rhetoric from Arab countries.
And so, Egypt’s Plant Pathology Research Institute, Israel’s Hebrew University, Lebanon’s American University of Beirut, Beirut, and Americans from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and National Germplasm Resources Laboratory, among others, together developed detection methods for viruses damaging many essential plants.
USAID’s dedication to Arab-Israeli cooperation was also exemplified in sponsorship of Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel, a network of integrated, bilingual schools. Aiming to inspire support for social inclusion and civic equality, Hand in Hand serves over 2,000 students in 14 schools in Jerusalem, the Galilee, Wadi Ara, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Kfar Saba.
Far from helping only Jews in the Middle East, USAID also bolstered teamwork by the American Sephardi Federation and The Mimouna Association, a Moroccan nonprofit dedicated to preserving Moroccan Jewish heritage and culture. The goal was to rebuild mellahs, historic former Jewish quarters, of Fez, Essaouira and Rabat by teaching skills and organizing grassroots events to educate Moroccan students, as well as training local residents to be tour guides and artisans.
Now, of course, Israeli-based international cooperation initiatives have been thwarted, further isolating it in the Middle East. Reports have it that IsraAID, Israel’s largest humanitarian non-governmental organization, has been forced to shut down a project in Vanuatu, a South Pacific Ocean nation, due to the freezing of funds expected from USAID. Fair Planet, an Israeli agricultural seed project, has for the same reason suspended a much-needed plan for Rwanda. And Gigawatt Global, an Israeli concern providing solar energy in the Global South, had to halt an effort already underway in western Uganda.
As the USAID shutdown is now a legal matter for courts to decide, a very gradual response may be expected, with irreparable damage already done. One lawsuit protesting the shutdown predicted that by delaying essential services, the dissolution of USAID could cost the lives of over half a million patients from HIV/AIDS, malaria, and reproductive health issues, 215,000 of them children.
It is as if in retrospect, USAID’s existence validated the French Jewish philosopher Simone Weil’s observation that “imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Weil also asserted, as if warning American Jews about what to expect over the next few years: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”
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