Non-State Actors in the Middle East

Factors for Peace and Democracy

Galia Golan, Walid Salem, Galia Golan, Walid Salem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415517058
• eBook ISBN: 9781317931188
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the recent revolutions in the Middle East have demonstrated, civil society in this part of the world is on the move. The increasingly important role of non-state actors – a phenomenon of globalization- has characterized developments throughout the region, affecting the struggle for democracy and for peace.

This volume brings together scholars primarily form the region to analyse the varied activities and contributions of NGOs, the private sector and the new media, from Morocco to Iran, along with the involvement of diaspora groups. The chapter on facebook in the recent Egyptian revolution captures the role of this new media while the study on similar technology in Iran outlines the barriers raised by the authorities in the current struggles there. Even the fledgling process of democratization in Saudi Arabia is driven by non-state actors while the veteran women's movements in the Maghreb serve as an example for the post-Arab spring era in those countries.

Providing one of the first assessments of the role of non-state actors in the Middle East, this book will be essential reading for students of Political Science, Sociology and Civil Society, amongst others.

Part I
Civil society – NGOs

1
Civil society in transition

The case of Palestine

Walid Salem

Introduction

The concept of “civil society” became part of the Palestinian political and research discourses in the beginning of the 1990s, during the period of preparation for the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (referred to here as the Authority or PA), which took place in May 1994.

At that time, the Palestinians went on a thorough exploration process on several questions concerned with state building, including: What should be the structure of the Palestinian National Authority? Can it be democratic? What type of democratic systems should be adopted? What is the relationship between the national tasks for freedom and getting rid of occupation and the democracy building tasks? How should the relationship between the state and the society organizations be empowered? And what type of economy should be established?

Within this context, the Palestinian researchers started to write about the civil society and its relevance and importance to Palestine. Some early studies were written by Mohammed Muslih, Ziad Abu Amre, Azmi Bishara, Said Zeedani, George Giacaman, Walid Salem, Musa Al-Budeiri, and several others who were all a combination of liberal-democratic, left-wing academics and writers, who all were concerned about the possibility of establishing a Palestinian despotic authority. Therefore, they were seeking to find a “shelter” in the so-called Palestinian civil society to balance the power of the state and to find a tool to distribute power resources to different components of the Palestinian society.

The Palestinian academic George Giacaman defined civil society to be “that societal sphere, in which the individual plays the role of a social actor through the society organizations and in relative separation from the state” (Giacaman 1995: 108). Those researchers rediscovered all the classical literature about civil society starting with John Locke and continuing through the 18th century with the likes of Alexis De Tocqueville, Mountsique, Adam Virgson, and Thomas Penn. Then there is the 19th century’s Hegel and Marx, along with the 20th century’s Antonio Gramsci.

While it is out of the scope of this chapter to review those thinkers’ ideas about civil society, we will focus on the development of the Palestinian civil society, starting with an explanatory notes about the meaning of discussing a Palestinian civil society, followed by a historical review of its development in stages, then by the different challenges that the Palestinian civil society has been facing since 2007, when the political division between the West Bank and Gaza occurred. Finally, the paper looks at the role of the Palestinian nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and some conclusion of future perspectives.

The Meaning of Civil Society in Palestine

For this text, the civil society includes the political parties; the grassroots organizations; the community-based organization (CBOs); the unions of labor, women, youth, students; and the voluntary organizations and societies, all of which are characterized by a membership that is open for all citizens regardless of their geographical, familial, clannish, tribal, religious, sectarian, or cliental affinities.

In other words, the civil society includes both the national-based organizations and the CBOs. The latter includes reform committees (Islah Committees), local youth clubs, and all forms of local organizations that act in the sphere extending in the space between the family and the state.

In this sense, the familial associations (called in Palestine as the families’ “Dawawin”), are not civil society organizations. State structures and bodies, including the parliament, are political society and have nothing to do with civil society components.

This text adopts a definition of the civil society inclusive of those organizations that are built on a “citizenship bond” and that act in the sphere that is outside of both the family and the state. That sphere, called the public sphere, is not exclusive to the civil society organizations. It also includes the economy and the political society as other actors in it, but the significance of the civil society is that it is the representative of the society in that public sphere, acting for its need and interests, as well as for its future through the visions that the civil society develops and lobbies for on its behalf with the state.

Finally, in the concept of civil society, this paper is interested in the recently added dimension to both the Hebarmasian public sphere and the civil society characterized by the role played by the new virtual public sphere and virtual civil society gatherings, and their impact on widening the “real” public sphere and the “real” civil society. This virtual dimension was expressed in the Arab 2011–2012 public revolutions and in Palestine by new youth movements in 2011, which this text will reference.

With this theoretical background that puts the civil society as an independent actor from the state, can one speak about the Palestinian civil society in the absence of the state? This question was one of the hot issues of the discourses among the Palestinian researchers in the 1990s, and their answers were presented. One had followed the classical literature about civil society and said that the Palestinian civil society had to wait until a Palestinian independent state emerged before it could be formed. Others said that the civil society already emerged in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, in the absence of the state. A third group spoke about a civil society that is under formation.

The first group was represented by the radical left and also a variety of independent thinkers who did not all present the same reasons for rejecting the idea of having a civil society in the absence of the state. Radical left intellectuals like Adel Samara focused on two sets of factors that prevent civil society from emerging. The first set concerns the political aspects of Palestinian life: the prevailing Israeli occupation, the fragmentation of the Palestinians to those who still live inside Israel, those who live in 1967 occupied territories, and the refugees outside. Based on that fragmentation, the question became: If we speak about civil society in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, what then about the Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinian refugees; should we exclude them from the presence of civil society?

The second set of issues this group of intellectuals presented was that its members considered the call for civil society development as a call for the “NGOization” of the Palestinian society, leading to the adoption of a Western agenda that would divert the Palestinians’ attention from focusing on the task of the national liberation from occupation, to focus instead on societal, communal, and professional agendas within the framework of the Israeli occupation, while also acting within the limits the occupation imposed. In this sense, the NGOs are perceived by this group as the transmitters of the Western culture aiming to penetrate the Palestinian society, and also they help by focusing on professionalism versus liberation on sustaining the Israeli occupation. Adel Samara wrote:

The Developmental Institutions in the Palestinian Occupied territories were established and still serve the following: spread and concentrate the market mechanism, making the face of the Western imperialism better via the NGO’s that it created in order to hide behind during the period of the cold war, while imperialism became able to act directly nowadays. (Samara 1994: 122).

Other independent thinkers who shared the doubts about the presence of the Palestinian civil society, this time also for societal reasons, crystallized in the following questions: How can a society that is structured along patrimonial, familial, clannish, tribal, contradictory, geographical affinities, and cleavages be “civil” therefore create a civil society based on citizenship bond between the citizens, regardless of their familial, geographical, sectarian, and cliental affinities that all express pre-civil structures of fragmentation versus diversity, being the latter a characteristic of the “civil” societies leading to a peaceful rotation of conflict and power, opposites to fragmentation that lead to violence from the groups living parallel to each other without integration, as is the case in the societies that have a level of civility.

According to this group, a society first needs a level of civility as a prerequisite for the establishment of civil society. The absence of this full civility from the Arab World as a whole, and not only Palestine, led an Arab thinker like Burhan Ghalion to talk about the absence of civil society in the Arab World. Alternatively, this world has what Ghalion called the “Domestic Society” or “Al Mujtama’a Al-Ahli” (Ghalion 1990). This means that its organizations build on lines of the patrimonial and neo-patrimonial structures. Moreover, Musa Al-Budeiri wrote that the idea of the creation of the civil society in Palestine is not “possible without a national consensus, and a joint vision of the political and economic system to be established” (Budeiri 1994: 88). Budeiri, in this sense, was not seeing that such a consensus was possible. Later, in the next year, he wrote in another paper about civil society in Palestine, referring to the writings of Israelis Edward Kaufman and Moshe Moaz, that the Israeli occupation itself “embraced the civil society, and sponsored a Palestinian pluralistic democracy, and that the military rule in the occupied territories encouraged the democratic fidgets of the people that was ruled undemocratically” (Budeiri 1995: 69).

This opinion has two possible implications. The first is that the civil society emergence in Palestine has to wait until the national liberation is achieved, and that any talk about it during the national liberation period will help the Western and the Israeli agenda against the Palestinians. The other possible implication is that in order to create a civil society in Palestine, it is not necessary to wait for the state to be established, but a minimum consensus about the political and economic systems for Palestine still is needed.

Opposite to the opinion above, another one presented is the idea that the Palestinian civil society does exist in West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Others went even further to talk about the historical presence of such a civil society starting from the late period of the Ottomans in Palestine until 1917. In this regard, Ziad Abu Amre wrote in 1995,

The Civil society in West Bank and Gaza is considered to be the only Palestinian civil society. The Palestinians in the Diaspora do not form one civil society and they did not form special civil societies for them, despite the state of organization that the Palestinian collectives abroad had represented by the formation or joining political parties or factions, the formation of labour trade unions, professional societies, or other organizations that are included originally in the framework of civil society. (Abu Amre 1995: 27)

He added later that the Palestinian collectives in the Diaspora are “part of the civil societies of the countries that they live in, based on the fact that the Diaspora Palestinians do not have a special political or geographical sphere for them.” This is “despite the relative differences of their integration in the host societies” (Ibid: 17).

Beyond this area that excludes the Palestinian civil society to the Palestinian territories that were occupied in 1967, there are others who spoke about the existence of the Palestinian civil society and did not constrain it to only those territories. They spoke about the concept of a civil society in the absence of the state. Opposite to the classical literature that links the civil society to the presence of the state, those Palestinian thinkers and activists spoke about the Palestinian civil society as being the holder of the burdens of the Palestinian state in its absence. In this regard, they carried health, agricultural, educational, and other tasks that the state is supposed to carry on and they managed these tasks successfully.

Mustafa Al-Barghouthi, a leader of NGOs in Palestine, considered in this regard that “the existences of Democracy basis, pluralism, and the role of the civil society organizations, are not just a luxury or accessories that the Palestinian people can live without in the coming period, but it is a vital condition for the Palestinian people survival and continuation as a people that are eager to achieve their self determination and national independence” (Al-Barghouthi and Giacaman 1995: 15).

The PLO was looked at as the “National Entity” of the Palestinians as if it were the symbol of the state and its political regime. When PLO leadership was still outside the 1967 occupied territories, those occupied territories’ NGOs understood and expressed their roles to be as complimentary to the PLO, helping it reach its people in the occupied territories and provide them with services. In this sense, the agricultural, health, educational, and other activities of that period were understood not only as services, but also as political tasks aiming to create trust between the people and leadership by presenting that leadership as being capable of providing the people with their needs through services. In this regard, it should be mentioned that most of those new NGOs established in the 1980s were connected to the Palestinian factions, mainly the PLO left-wing factions. Therefore, on one hand, their activities were in line with the political agenda, but on the other hand, because they were leftist organizations, they focused on the link between the political agenda for liberation and the social-economic agenda for development and for the communities’ democratic participation. They were very critical of the PLO leadership for its inability to work on a developmental agenda that they felt was necessary to sustain people’s presence (Sumud) and to empower them to meet the liberation’s requirements and sacrifices.

Opposite to the previous opinion that saw the NGOs’ emergence as a deviation from politics, these new NGOs of the 1980s envisioned their role as being both political and developmental. Seeing the link between both, and in order to achieve political gains, the people must first be empowered to make them capable of sacrifice. This cannot be done without developmental projects.

Since 1994, when the PNA was established, a new period started when the NGOs found themselves facing new tasks. They found that they could no longer continue carrying the full burden of the state in some fields, namely: health, agriculture, and education because the PA had started building the whole national structure of those sectors. Much discussion about the strategies of working with the PA took place in which parts of the NGOs decided to work fully separate from the PA. Others considered their role to be both independent and complimentary, which required coordination with the PA. A third group selected the path of being just complimentary to the PA. The latter represents those organizations that were established by Fateh, during the PA period. A full analysis of those positions between the NGOs and PA can be found in a book published by the author in 1999 (Salem 1999).

Ezzat Abdel Hadi, another NGO leader of that period, defended the right of the NGO’s for independency in the framework of the role of law and social contract. He wrote:

In order for the NGO’s to contribute to the ongoing developmental processes aiming to build the civil society, they should enjoy real independence, including in the designation of their aims and programs that they consider appropriate and fit with the interest and the needs of the groups that they represent, and also in their institutional organizations that enable them to achieve their required visions. Also they should be free to create regional and international relations, all in accordance with the rule of law and the social contract that is agreed upon between the different social groups. (Abdel Hadi 1995: 3)

This is the idea of those who analyzed that civil society existed in Palestine, carrying the burden of the state, and working with, as well as independently of, the PA after its establishment. Yet still there are others, such as Muhammed Muslih (1993), who went back to history since the beginning of the 20th century to show that the Palestinian civil society has existed since then. According to Ibrahim Abu Loghoud and others, historical civil society was characterized three main characteristics, pluralism, participation, and elections (Abu Loghoud et al. 1993).

The coming part of this text will shed light on the historical develo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Civil society – NGOs
• Part II New media
• Part III Diaspora
• Part IV Private Companies
• Index