In-betweenness and crumbled hopes in Palestine: the global in the local of the occupied territories

Abstract

Critical discussions among some in Palestinian studies describe foreign involvement in NGO development in the Occupied Territories since the 1990s as having been detrimental to Palestinian collective aspirations, and even a tool of imperialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip mobilized their own civilian organizations to build an infrastructure of resistance to the Israeli Occupation that gave birth to the Intifada Uprising in December 1987. Foreign governments and organizations were drawn to their struggle and in the 1990s billions of dollars of foreign aid from more than 40 nations and over two dozen multilateral organizations flowed through hundreds of local and foreign NGOs. But this investment in the “peace process” did not stop a worsening occupation, and a second al Aqsa Intifada began in the fall 2000. Palestinian civil society suffered crippling blows and foreign actors were reduced to disaster relief and harm reduction. This article presents three ethnographic portraits from 1992, 1995 and 2002, that examine these changes in Palestinian civil society and the scholarly criticisms of foreign involvement. This article argues that such involvement could put Palestinian participants in a dangerous in-between social position, but that these positions of contradiction are often preferable to the destruction of militarism.