Promoting Democracy. Manal A. Jamal
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These organizations were also volunteer based, and in line with the PLO’s sumoud policy (policy of steadfastness), they stressed self-help, a continuation of national resistance, and more hands-on participatory development.5
In sync with the developments that were taking place in the broader national movement, women members of the various political organizations also established women’s committees that would aid and facilitate mass mobilization. In 1978, women cadres from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) founded the first women’s committee, the Women’s Working Committee (WWC). The goal of the committee was to lend support to the national movement by involving women in resistance activities against the Israeli occupation and to empower and involve them in improving their daily living conditions. Though the founders were politically affiliated, the organization was not supposed to be partisan and was open to all women, regardless of their political affiliations. By 1981, the women’s group began to splinter along factional lines, and each of the political organizations established its own women’s committees.6 Women leaders from other political factions worried that the leaders of the WWC would later recruit some of the members to the DFLP and hence embarked on establishing their own committees (see table 5.2, which indicates the year in which each of the political organizations established its respective women’s committee).
During the 1980s, activities of the women’s sector were an integral and essential component of Palestinian political and social life. Most towns and villages had an array of women’s committees or groups that hosted weekly seminars, occasional courses, annual bazaars, and International Women’s Day events. The women’s committees were successful in assisting their members in their day-to-day lives, as well as in encouraging collective action among them. Projects addressed women’s practical needs such as health, sustenance, and small-scale vocational training, childcare, and literacy.7 Recruitment and the preservation of voluntary membership were contingent on genuine incorporation and inclusion. The potential to build on these local forms of sociopolitical organization were immense, especially in the emergence of a robust civil society. That potential, however, failed to materialize.
By the late 1990s, after the Madrid Peace Conference and the Oslo Accords, the extent of demobilization and weakening of these once thriving movements was evident to everyone. Membership in the labor unions, women’s mass-based organizations, student groups, and professional syndicates had decreased dramatically. These once thriving movements no longer had the capability to organize and coordinate any mass action. Despite mounting dissatisfaction with the Oslo Accords and the newly established PA, civic protest was limited to individual disputes, with little in the way of collective organizing. In contrast, however, Fatah, the PLO’s leadership party behind the Oslo Accords, still had the power to convene larger gatherings to lend support to the PA.
The absence of more organizing and protest was even more glaring considering the improvement in the security situation in the PA controlled areas. The redeployment of the Israeli military from the main town centers made reprisals against Palestinian protesters less likely. Moreover, the Palestinian territories were among the highest per capita recipients of Western donor funding in the world, with substantial allocations to democracy and civil society promotion.8 This amount translated to $1,820 per capita (per Palestinian living in the WBGS) each year in the first decade after the peace accords. Theoretically, the level of mass organization, which had become an essential feature of Palestinian political life, facilitated by improvements in the security situation and a massive influx of Western democracy promotion assistance, should have laid the groundwork for a strong civil society. On the contrary, Palestinian civil society became increasingly elitist, characterized predominately by professionalized NGOs, often run by a single individual, with limited societal reach.
After the start of the Madrid Peace Process in 1991, numerous mass-based organizations became recipients of Western donor assistance and professionalized their operations. The organization of civil society became distinguished by its vertical linkages between the professionalized NGOs and the grassroots. In this new structure, the previously active grassroots constituencies, at best, were merely recipients of services from the professionalized NGOs and not active, engaged members. Moreover, civil society development did not lead to the establishment of regular, constructive patterns of interaction with state institutions. Local government remained restricted in representing constituent interests. Electoral political competition also remained limited, and perhaps more accurately, was stunted in its infancy. In the 1996 Palestinian legislative elections, the overwhelming majority of candidates were Fatah members, and in the 2006 legislative elections, Hamas’s legislative victory led to a vicious backlash from Fatah and the international community, and the cessation of Western donor funding to the Hamas-led government. Despite massive discontent in the WBGS with the handling of the electoral outcome and Hamas’s reaction, Palestinian civil society groups did little to voice their grievances.
NGO Professionalization: An Inadequate Explanation
Many analysts—academics, policy makers, and activists alike—attributed this demobilization within these once-thriving movements to NGO professionalization triggered by the influx of Western donor assistance in the post-Oslo period.9 In agreement with an established and growing body of literature on the negative impacts of NGO professionalization, they argued that Palestinian social movements and the longer-term prospects for civil society and democratic development were undermined by this massive influx of Western donor funding. Western donors often required recipient institutions to institutionalize and professionalize their operations so that they are better able to keep detailed financial records and submit regular evaluation reports to their funders.10 This process includes a host of organizational changes, such as increased specialization, hierarchies of pay, more formal channels of communication and decision-making, and often a greater need for better-educated, English-speaking employees. Among the most obvious outcomes of NGO professionalization are a loss of autonomy,11 a focus on short-term goals as opposed to longer-term developmental goals, questionable sustainability, and greater accountability to donors rather than to the constituencies they are supposed to serve.12
This process of professionalization, which is not unique to the Palestinian territories, often results in the emergence of a new NGO elite.13 The creation of this new elite class affects local forms of political organizing in three fundamental ways. First, it contributes to the atomization of civil society, since the people who move to the NGO sector are usually former leaders of grassroots movements. Second, privileging the leaders of these groups, or those “more qualified” to participate in these NGOs, exacerbates social schisms between those who do and do not have a Western education, proficiency in English, and familiarity with Western standards and modes of operation of NGO activity.14 The NGOs serve as a lucrative alternative for the urban elite,15 as Western-funded NGOs provide salaries that are often three to six times higher than the local standard. The discrepancy in salaries attracts the most talented and skilled workers to the Western-funded NGO sector, away from the public sector, civil service, local political parties, or local grassroots organizations. Third, professionalization and NGO reliance on Western funding entails depoliticization and an embrace of less politically controversial endeavors as a way for the organization to survive.16 Professionalization-centered explanations, however, do not explain why the introduction of Western donor assistance and the outcomes of NGO professionalization vary in different contexts. Moreover, these explanations fail to take into account the primacy of political contexts. In particular, they neglect to consider how political contexts also determine variation in amounts and types of funding and inequitable access to resources and institutions, and how this variation shapes broader political developments. The continuation of Israel’s military occupation and disillusionment also do not fully explain this trajectory. If these were sufficient explanations, the Palestinian population of the WBGS would not have succeeded in organizing previously, under even more repressive security conditions.
Very importantly, political developments in the Palestinian territories contrasted sharply with other cases, such as El Salvador, which shared a number of important organizational and temporal similarities, but ultimately exhibited far more positive outcomes in terms of civil society and democratic development. In 1992, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and the government of El Salvador signed the Chapultepec Accords in Mexico. Similar to the Palestinian case, Western donors provided extensive postsettlement