Promoting Democracy. Manal A. Jamal
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the FMLN or the PLO in the respective cases. In the early 1990s, more readily available Western funding served as an impetus for many of these organizations to professionalize and institutionalize. After the initiation of the peace accords in both contexts, women’s organizations attracted considerable amounts of foreign donor assistance. Women’s socioeconomic status also did not vary extensively in these two societies, and therefore cannot account for the variation in outcomes in the two cases (see table 5.1).
It is important to note, however, that two key factors distinguished the women’s organizations in the two contexts. In the Salvadoran case, women’s participation in the opposition, and especially among the leadership, was not limited to the mass movements but often also extended to the guerrilla organizations. Additionally, each political organization, and by extension its women’s groups, operated in its controlled territory through its vertical chain of command. In contrast, in the Palestinian territories, founders of the women’s organizations for the most part did not have a military background, and the political organizations did not limit their organization to a designated territory of the WBGS but organized throughout the territory. These differences, however, cannot account for the variation in outcomes. In disagreement with the literature that focuses on the gendered outcomes in the women’s sector,85 I argue that the developments in this sector are not unique, but rather are representative of developments in other sectors of civil society. The parallel historical and organizational trajectories between the women’s sector and other sectors, such as labor unions, student groups, and agricultural development committees, make these findings generalizable to other sectors of civil society. In “Beyond the Women’s Sectors” section of chapter 7, I illustrate how these findings extend to other sectors such as labor.
Outline of the Remaining Chapters
Chapters 2 sets the stage for this study. It begins with a brief historical overview of the conflict in the two cases, and a more detailed discussion of the emergence of the political-military organizations and their affiliated mass-based organizations, including the women’s sectors. The chapter draws from interviews with the leaders of the women’s committees and organizations since many were members of the political organizations tasked with establishing the affiliated mass-based women’s groups.
I develop my argument in chapters 3, 4 and 5. Chapter 3 illustrates how the degree of inclusivity of the political settlement affected civil society and electoral institutional design, as well as legislative and local government institutionalization in the two cases. Chapter 4 develops the second part of my argument about how the political settlement determined the amounts and types of foreign donor funding, and specifically Western donor funding, as well as the programs that donors prioritized given the context in which they were operating. It examines the history and changes in donor assistance in the two cases from the start of the conflict-to-peace transitions. Chapter 5 examines the impact of the political settlement and the mediating role of Western donor assistance at the level of civil society. It assesses these changes by examining transformations in the women’s sector in the postsettlement period in each case. It draws heavily from primary interviews with the women who established these organizations, and the women who shaped and lived through these changes. Their reflections about these processes and the broader political changes these societies underwent anchor this chapter. Chapter 6 broadens the temporal aperture of the study. It examines the impact of the evolving political settlement and the mediating role of Western donor assistance in the Palestinian territories, and the Gaza Strip in particular, in the aftermath of Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory. Unlike chapter 5, this chapter does not trace changes in a sector of civil society, but it looks at the more general transformations in the political landscape and in associational life. Chapter 7 returns to the question I started with: Why are democracy promotion efforts more successful in some cases as opposed to others? I also briefly discuss two other cases of conflict-to-peace transitions, namely Iraq and South Africa, to evaluate the defining impact of political settlements and the mediating role of Western donor assistance to illustrate how the findings in this book are by no means limited to the initial two cases.
What historical trajectories in the two cases led to the establishment of the political organizations and their affiliated mass-based organizations? This is the central question that chapter 2 tackles.
2
The Political-Military Organizations and the Emergence of Mass-Based Grassroots Organizations
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but rather under circumstances found, given, and transmitted.
—Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”1
A rich history of civic organizing in El Salvador and the Palestinian territories underpinned the mass mobilization of the 1970s and 1980s. These mobilization efforts and much of the associational life that grew out of them were responses to conflicts with long historical roots: the British Mandate and Zionist colonial settlement in Palestine and, later, Israel’s military occupation in the WBGS, and massive and enduring socioeconomic inequality, characterized by extreme concentration of land ownership in the hands of a very small minority (fourteen families to be exact)2 in El Salvador. This conflict in El Salvador ultimately culminated in a civil war between the FMLN and the right-wing government. In both cases, the establishment of political-military organizations began in the latter part of the 1960s. The Arab-Israeli War in 1967 resulted in Palestinians seeking less Arab tutelage and more Palestinian autonomy and led to the establishment of various guerrilla/political-military organizations. In El Salvador, proponents of armed struggle in the Partido Comunista de El Salvador (Communist Party of El Salvador, PCS) broke away in 1969 and established the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación (Popular Forces of Liberation, FPL), which similarly set in motion the founding of various guerrilla/political-military organizations.
The Political-Military Organizations: Precursors to Mass Mobilization
The Palestinian Nationalist Movement Asserts Its Autonomy
By the early 1960s, and certainly following the 1967 war, the struggle for historic Palestine assumed an increasingly Palestinian character involving diasporic Palestinians themselves. This was a marked departure from the post-1948 defeat period in which the struggle for Palestinian independence assumed an Arab character that increased the involvement of neighboring nation-states.3 Ironically, it was Palestinian students, studying and living in neighboring Arab countries, who questioned the commitments of other Arab leaders and cast into doubt the ability of these states to liberate historic Palestine.
In the late 1950s, these students founded a number of political organizations throughout the Arab world. Among these students were Khalil Wazir, Salah Khalaf, and Yasir Arafat, who took over the PLO in 1969. Two different streams dominated the Palestinian nationalist movement, the Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-ʿArab (Arab Nationalist Movement, ANM) which was more leftist in its political orientation, and Fatah, which is more nationalist in its orientation. Many of the Palestinian guerrilla and political organizations that emerged in the 1960s and thereafter owe their roots to one of these political strands.4 Eventually, Fatah emerged as the largest and strongest of the Palestinian political factions, and is the current-day leadership party of the PA and the PLO.
The defeat of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War severely undermined the legitimacy of these states in the eyes of the Arab