SEMINARS

Governance, Civil Society and
State-Building in Palestine

Dr. Salim Tamari

Much has been said and written about the issue of state-formation in Palestine, but most of it has been obscured by the use of clichés and comparison to situations that do not apply here. In Palestine, we suffer from an excessive ‘assumption of uniqueness’ regarding our colonial experience, which is widely considered as incomparable to similar situations elsewhere.

Of course each particular situation is unique in its way; but social scientists have to examine each one in a wider crucible. The question is how our experience fits into other formations in the post-colonial experience and what differentiates the Arab colonial and post-colonial experience from that of India or Pakistan, for example.

It has been claimed that the dispossession of the Palestinian people took place in such a unique manner that it cannot be compared to the cases of South Africa or Algeria, etc. Nonetheless, the task should be to examine the processes in other countries and understand what is happening here. Instead, the discussion is clouded by polemic and is full of controversies. Questions are constantly being raised about the PA and its status, its sovereignty and validity. Do we have a state or not?

The center of controversy between the defenders of the process of state formation on the one hand and the opponents on the other, revolves around the idea of restricted sovereignty; one which, the defenders say, creates a geographic terrain that allows Palestinians to build up their shackled economy and society so that they can launch the process of the struggle for sovereignty in the forthcoming negotiations. The critics, on their part, say that we have sold ourselves too cheaply and ended up with a non-economically viable entity that suffers from total physical encirclement and economical and political impositions that basically add up to an occupation that despite having no physical presence, is still very much alive. Moreover, the PNA, by performing a police role has just taken over from the Israelis and brings with it the whole bad psychological experience.

While this kind of criticism is legitimate, I want to address issues of state-formation that are related to civil society in particular and different from the issue of sovereignty and the deformed character of the state. I am basing myself on the assumption that an apparatus of government does exist in Palestine, relatively autonomous from Israeli interference and that of other Arab countries.

The process of state-formation that the Palestinian leadership undertook led to the formation of a new hegemonic governing class, consisting of the leading expatriate PLO cadres, expatriate businessmen, who became partners with the public sector, local and regional elites, and co-opted elements of the local parties and leadership from all the resistant groups into its structure. The PNA has created a state apparatus, which although lacking in the juridical aspects of sovereignty, still has the symbolic trappings and international recognition, which would be difficult to undermine or retract, if, say the Israelis attempted to cancel the phases of the Oslo agreement that granted autonomy to the Palestinians. These are important assumptions and can be questioned, but here, they will be a starting point.

Interestingly, the challenges from the traditional opposition parties - the PFLP, DFLP, the Communist Party and others - to this new hegemonic leadership have been easily defused by a combination of co-optation, appointments, appropriations and mild repression and by a process of self-exclusion of these groups. They opted for not getting involved in the process of state-formation; one example is the decision of the PFLP and DFLP not to be part of the election, although elements of these opposition groups wanted to join the process of governance. Eventually, they boycotted one part of the process of state-formation, but joined it at a later stage. Only HAMAS has proven to be too formidable an opponent to be subject to these mechanisms of co-optation, and was therefore subjected to a strategy of attempted dialogue, followed by direct repression when that dialogue did not lead to the desired results.

There is a different set of challenges, which are significant and crucial in shaping the nature of the Authority. These are,

The opposition forces in society - some of them institutions, some in the embryonic stages of crystallization – that took the shape of mass organizations during the Intifada. Many of these became NGOs and were identified, perhaps with some exaggeration, as the essence of civil society in a society lacking a state apparatus, and then became institutional alternatives to the state when the Authority was established.

The conflict between the private sector and monopolies and cartels that undermines the viability and competitiveness of local business. The point here is the manner in which cartels and monopolies are established by the State, whereby it appears that they are partners to the private sector, but in fact that sector is actually a monopoly. Examples are the cement sector, the construction sector and telecommunications: while quasi-public companies exist, they actually function as a private concern. Since they are not subject to any contestation from the private sector they have total control over price-fixing and are fairly unresponsive to public pressure, until they are attacked in the press. Then it is left to the eternal tension between the government bureau in charge of that particular concern and its desire not to be exposed as a monopoly; but this is at the moral level of operation. The tension between the entrepreneurs from the private business sector and the public sector, in which the government is a basic shareholder, is an essential institutional conflict in the body of the PNA.

The determination of the relationship between the party and the state as reflected in the recent attempt of a Fatah activist to insist on the autonomy of the party in the state apparatus. The State of Palestine is supposed to be the state of all the people, based on a pluralistic constitutional arrangement, in which all parties are free to compete. However, because of the historical experience of Palestine and the withdrawal of support for Oslo by many opposition groups, it became the State of Fatah. Fatah suddenly became the party of the state and the appropriations and appointments to office became very much colored by this. This has created a crisis within the party: while it claims to be revolutionary on the one hand, it turns increasingly into a bureaucratic state party on the other. This phenomenon can be witnessed elsewhere, in Egypt, in the Ba’ath Party in Syria, in Mexico: when the party of the revolution becomes the party of the state and along with it subject to all the pressures of corruption, patronage etc, the revolutionary image begins to rub off. This leads to a major contestation between those elements of the party that want to it to remain a popular, mass party, and those that want to benefit from the process of state-formation and the remunerations that come with it. This is a basic tension in the process of state-formation.

The conflict between the State and the Legislative Assembly; there is always an attempt on the part of the parliament to actually try and exert its autonomy vis-à-vis the executive and assert its ability to contest issues of bureaucratic hegemony, whether it be corruption or excessive power or ability to legislate, which is very ambiguous in the terms of the Oslo agreement.

These four areas create a tension between state and society, the results of which – in the case of the Palestinians – have yet to be seen. What is clear, however, is that they represent challenges to democratic intervention and opposition.

Recently, two books have come to my attention, both of which throw some light on this very interesting relationship and are worth mentioning here: one is by Yezid Sayigh, entitled Armed Struggle and the Search for the State (1997), the other is by Jamil Hilal, entitled The Precarious State (forthcoming).

Sayigh’s book suggests that the establishment of Palestinian militias during the post-1967 period and the launching of the armed struggle after the June War, while failing to dent the balance of forces between Israel and the Palestinians, led to one important, unintended consequence; it is very important to understand the way in which actions lead to results, of which the actors are not necessarily aware. Armed struggle, according to Sayigh, consolidated a cohesive, autonomous identity for the Palestinians in the Diaspora and created the prototype for a Palestinian state in exile that was based on a tributary economy and the dispensation of power through patronage. Although ostensibly the objective of the armed struggle and resistance movement was to challenge the military authority of Israel, and although it failed in that - especially after the War of 1973, when conventional warfare proved to be much more effective than fida’i activity - it nonetheless created a cohesive body, which united the Palestinians in the Diaspora, and gave them a new identity and a means to respond to the maltreatment of the Arab regimes, particularly in Lebanon, and to a lesser extent in Jordan and Syria. According to Sayigh, the system of dispensation of power and prestige that was in the hands of the Palestinian leadership was to serve the foundation for the prototype for the Palestinian state. It was an extra-territorial governmental organization that existed in Jordan, Lebanon, and then in Tunis, and its main weakness was that it was established as an extra-territorial entity. When the Palestinians were forced out of Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in 1982, it lost its geographic base, which allowed the institutional structure of the militias to temper the arbitrary rule of the leaders and their patronage system. This arbitrariness was eventually challenged in the historical move from the state of the militias to the territorial state, born out of the Oslo Accords.

Sayigh’s analysis is both controversial and original; he puts known things in one synthetic, very eye-opening essay. The imprint of the PNA can only be understood through the patronage system established by the heads of the militias, particularly by Arafat and the leadership of Fatah, to maintain a system of institutional control over various refugee communities in Lebanon, Jordan and throughout the Arab World after 1982. Patronage was the only means because there was no territorial base. It had a precarious geography in Jordan and even more so in Lebanon, but it was lost and with it its social foundation, turning it into an extra-territorial entity, the PLO. Thus, the move to Palestine was not a move of state-building from the perspective of Palestinians in Palestine, but the juxtaposition of this extra-territorial apparatus on an existing social formation. This is at the heart of the present dynamic and dilemma of state formation, democracy, and tension between civil society that Palestine witnesses.

Hilal’s book (to be published in October 1998 by Muwatin in Ramallah) addresses the nature of the synchronic state-formation that was born out of maneuvering an already formed dynamic social formation, the Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza, and incorporating it into the cadres of the PLO that were repatriated in Palestine in the 1994-1996 period. The first phase experienced the problem of the absence of a stable social base and the hegemony of a patronage system that treated refugee camps and the militias as a surrogate society, as if they were a real society. The society acted in place of the original, deformed Palestinian social formation, and worked, because it worked on the basis or recruitment, mobilization and co-option of cadres of the leadership of the militias, the trade unions etc., of the PLO. It would be very interesting to do an analysis of the PLO leadership in exile and see how much of it came from camps, to examine the social background characteristics of its cadres. Most likely one would find that the fighters came from the camps and the leaders from the exiled intelligentsia. I will make this very crude supposition. This gave rise to "arbitrary power and democratic anarchism" (terms used by Hilal).

In phase two, the PLO had the problem of integrating the extra-territorial apparatus into the social fabric of a relatively stable society and dynamic popular groups that were engaged in a long process of civil resistance to Israeli military authority. The result was a new entity that bore the full heritage of its original patronage system, but was engaged in a constant battle to balance the interests of a bureaucracy, the former militias and the complex civil society it encountered in Palestine.

This is a very interesting question. What kind of governing body is the PNA? I think, contrary to most claims, Arafat was able to forge a hybrid formation in which leading families from the West Bank, the fighting families of Fatah and opposition parties, the social elites of Gaza and the West Bank, and the returnees were all carefully balanced alongside each other. It was all examined to reflect this syncretic formation, and also the concentration of power in the parliament reflects this system of nomination of outside/inside, rural/urban, Khalili/Nabulsi, etc. People will then say that at the end of the day the balance is about 50/50. Returnees, though, only constitute about 5 percent of the population of Palestine and one cannot balance 5 percent with 95 percent! This is the wrong way of looking at it, because we are not talking about 95 percent vs. 5 percent - we are discussing the issue in terms of the highly articulated politicized articulators of power in the Diaspora, with the articulators of power in the West Bank and Gaza. These are the intelligentsia and representatives of political parties and the social elites. The 5 percent of returnees then, are represented by one percent and the 95 percent of Palestinian society that remained here are represented by 2.5 percent. If you look at it this way you see the creation of a new governing elite, not an upper class, that represents a fusion of two disparate sections of Palestinian society. In the end we have a new syncretic, hegemonic power.

Today, the debate about the task of governance and its attributes is concerned with the mechanisms of rule, the social base of power, the ideological disputes, and how the elite governs. Of all the debates the one that interests us here is the question of civil society and the meaning of democracy. This is interesting and boring at the same time; civil society is now a buzz word to mean everything and nothing, and it is used to simplify a very complex phenomenon by putting a label on it. The operational definition of civil society, unfortunately, has come to mean one thing only - NGOs - which reduces the process to a very simplistic analysis and obscures the reality. These words become so cheap with their overuse, and sometimes it is better to drop them. The problem is we cannot equate civil society and NGOs; the term is much broader than that. The nature of the mass organizations that appeared in the Intifada as instruments of resistance, mobilization and protection have been completely transformed in the last four years. We cannot assume they are what they were, and to assume that the future of democracy lies in this contestation only is unfair. Within the state apparatus itself there is a struggle for the rule of law, accountability, meritocracy, transparency, and checking the uncontrolled authority of executive power, whether by parliament or by law itself. The struggle of democracy is much wider and bigger than the power contest between NGOs and the state, which forms only a small part of it. There is also the struggle within the parliament for sources of legislation and for the restriction of the uncontrolled, uncontrollable attributes of the executive. That is to say the forging of civil society is also being contested in the legislative assembly, whether through the personal status codes, legislation pertaining to various aspects of the economy, or the domain of individual human rights. Within the political system there is a struggle for pluralism in the party system against the uni-party system, which implies dictatorship, and for checks and balances, a free press etc. that guarantee against authoritarianism. And finally, in the economic sphere, something which is unseen by the ordinary citizen, there is a very important struggle against monopolies, and for access and accountability.

One way to look at synchrony is as the merger of social formations that have different backgrounds. It exists all the time; one very interesting aspect is religion. There is in Palestine a formal religion and then there is informal religion, which people have believed in for hundreds of years, mainly based around shrines and saint worship, in spite of the negative way it is viewed by official religion. There is belief in the unknown and witchcraft. People go to Qatrawani in search of good health, or a child or whatever. This is popular worship that is not specifically Christian, Muslim or Jewish - it belongs to all religions and revolves around popular culture. This creates a synchronic religion, which also has social attributes that are outside the sphere of religion.

From Sayigh’s book, we see that a synchronic political culture is emerging from the imposition of the state of militias in Gaza and Ramallah. He argues that the Palestinian state can only be understood by examining the history of the evolution of Palestinian rule in Lebanon, i.e., the leadership’s struggle for power within the militias in a guerrilla situation. The dilemma is that this was completely abstracted from its historical origin and brought into a state of stable formation, which is Palestine. They brought a state apparatus, built for running militias in hostile circumstances, into a situation that is more dynamic, more democratic and more supportive. Unless one gives to the other it will not work. This synchronic authority has all the tensions of a bureaucratic apparatus that was formed elsewhere and is being imposed on a different situation. This is the synchronic state of Palestine.

What we are living now is neither complete autonomy nor complete occupation, but yet we have to give it a positive description, and this is what I am trying to do. The problem of the state as such is not inherent weakness; what makes it weak or be perceived as weak is restricted sovereignty. Restricted sovereignty is an interesting notion in constitutional analysis, because most states are by definition restricted in their sovereignty, due to the nature of the global system. Even the US is restricted by NASA, for example, or the UN. The US is somewhat caught in a struggle between belonging to the UN and refusal to comply with its conventions. There is a difference, though, in being restricted in sovereignty by virtue of being part of the global system, which is the case in all countries of the world, and being restricted because Israel does not allow us to bring refugees and goods etc., which is a restriction of a colonial nature. This is the problem.

In many people’s minds the PLO and the PNA are one and the same thing. On the other hand it is essential for the leadership of the PLO to maintain the distinction between the PLO, which is in charge of the situation and future of the Palestinians in the final status negotiations, and the PNA, which is the state of Gaza and the West Bank. This is also part of the tension between Farouq Qaddumi and Yasser Arafat. Qaddumi considers himself as Mr. PLO; he sees that the Oslo agreement put Arafat and the Palestinian leadership in a corner, because they made concessions that touch the heart of the Palestine Question. But one cannot say that the PLO has remained untarnished; it was very much shocked, shaken and undermined by the Oslo agreement, because in reality people confuse the PNA and the PLO. They talk about Arafat as the head of everything. My conclusion is as follows: it is essential to keep this separation because the struggle for the future will be long and protracted. It is essential, for example, to keep the refugee issue alive and separate from the West Bank negotiations.

The current relationship between the PNA and the NGOs is very controversial. One of the major sources of conflict between the government and NGOs is that the NGOs feel that they were the building blocks in providing services in the pre-Oslo period. Post-Oslo, their political status and role as service providers were completely transformed by the public sector. All of a sudden much of the money that used to come to these NGOs was diverted to the PA or had to be shared, and shared extremely inappropriately, with the public sector. Those who are not receiving funds anymore therefore feel slighted, but on the other hand NGOs cannot continue to provide the same services because there is now a huge public sector to do that. In addition, a state of hostility was created in 1994 between the government’s attempts to regulate the NGOs and the NGOs’ vision of themselves as at least a partnership. All of a sudden one partner found that the other partner is not a partner, but was trying to tell him what to do, where to go. Unfortunately, the Ministry of the Interior got off on the wrong foot when drafting a law for NGOs based on the Egyptian law, which is one of the worst models of NGO administration in the world. It is very authoritarian and basically deals with NGOs through the lenses of the Mukhabarat (security services), looking at them as agents of foreign powers. In Palestinian society, NGOs are strong enough to resist this kind of imposition, and it was defeated, at least in its initial version. Now, through practice, there are a number of examples where a positive working relationship between sectors working in the public sphere and the corresponding ministries, which cannot provide equal services, has developed. For example, there are fairly good relations between the Ministry of Health and NGOs working in the health sector. The government cannot appoint salaries for primary health workers, so NGOs filled the gap and this led to a good complementary working relationship.

However, there is another side to it, which is the vision of the ‘cake’, i.e., appropriations. Ultimately, as money and power are the roots of all conflict, the antagonism will continue. But the debate is no longer ideological (e.g., left versus right, Fatah versus the left, the Islamists versus the government) as it used to be. Now, there are visions of growth and development that are competing. The left as an ideological force in society has been defeated for a variety of reasons and today it is basically a memory. It is amazing how a group that was so visionary in fighting occupation, mobilizing people, and suggesting alternative sources of power, completely disappeared within three years. There is an essential component missing, which is a social agenda in the debate about civil society and legislation and the conflict concerning the role of government in the public sector.

Yet, many NGOs were established by the leftist parties and remained, even after the parties disappeared or went into hiding. The NGOs retain historical ties with these parties, but no organic links, and they do not share ideologies or social agendas. On the whole, these NGOs have developed pragmatic, utilitarian ideologies, a sort of neo-liberalism, which has very little to do with the social agenda of socialism or Marxism etc.

Jerusalem is a special and very interesting case, because there is more space for civil society to maneuver. This is bad in a way, because the Palestinian forces are unable to challenge the hegemony of Israeli rule in an effective way, being robbed of all initiative. It is also positive in a sense, because there is a vacuum left by the existence of Israeli official forces on the one hand and the Palestinian social formation on the other, which is free to organize contests and so on. The point, of course, is that all programs for Jerusalem on the level of civil society are slogans, and acts of bravado and there is an absence of a real agenda. What exists are individual attempts by groups to instill initiative in the construction sector – some would say the efforts are not enough and have come far too late - in an area where the private sector is faced with encirclement by the Israelis.

Jerusalem is somehow very helpless, and this is not just because of the Israelis. There is something about Jerusalem that is not like Palestinian society. Jerusalem society is atomized, ghettoized, and has no national character; the only national obsession in Jerusalem is religion. There is no sense of national community here: people belong to their streets and families, not to a wider network. It never was a city like other cities, it never had a central nervous system, or if it had it was completely undermined by the War of 1948. Part of the problem is that there is no continuity in the original habitants; there is no social fabric.