This can be illustrated from a couple of my own encounters as a former NGO worker. During the first Palestinian intifada (1987-93), I found myself becoming suspicious of some European NGO workers in East Jerusalem who refused “to go west” into the Israeli part of the city, and made a conspicuous point of boycotting Israeli goods. In a visit during the second intifada which began in 2000, I listened at a private dinner to a number of United Nations people expressing the hope that the state of Israel “would only last another fifty years at most”. In other parts of the world, NGO workers often long for the end of a particular regime or dictator; but only in the Israel-Palestine conflict have I heard them longing for the end of a state. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/ngos-in-gaza-between-humanitarianism-and-politics