Civic Education in Post-Oslo Palestine: Discursive Domestication

Abstract

Shortly after the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993, $2.4 billion in international development aid poured into the West Bank and Gaza.¹ This so-called peace dividend was originally intended to help bolster support for the Accords by providing tangible social and economic benefits for Palestinians, but instead has largely resulted in increased dependency on foreign aid and in a transformation of existing civil society institutions. A substantial portion of American development assistance came in the form of democracy, governance, and civil society programs, which contributed to the proliferation of new Palestinian NGOs and the restructuring of older civic organizations, leading to what some have called the NGOization² of civil society. Ostensibly, these programs aimed to increase the vitality of Palestinian civil society and to act as a buffer between the public and the newly constituted Palestinian National Authority (PNA). In reality, many NGOs became increasingly influenced by the practices and discourse of their funding institutions and, consequently, divorced from grassroots support and the nationalist project altogether. To a considerable extent, this was the natural result of the donors’ conceptual framework, which largely precluded genuine grassroots mobilization.