Uneasy allies: the Authority, women's movement and donors
While the Palestinian Authority’s support for the women’s movement is influenced by its aim to contain Hamas, the Authority also hesitates to alienate conservative religious sentiments for fear of strengthening the Islamist opposition.
At the same time, Hamas’ opposition to the women’s movement is aimed at striking a blow at the Authority. The Authority is thus an uneasy ally of the women’s movement at important times in debates on legal reform (such as the model parliament described in Chapter 9 ), and the women’s movement has generally been effective in using whatever political space that opens up with the Authority to lobby for such reform, although perhaps more persistently for women’s political representation.Advocacy and lobbying, whether for representation or reform, address a system of Palestinian governance where ‘an ethic of familialism structures power’ (Ham- mami and Johnson 1999: 324), most clearly seen in the power and patronage concentrated in the President, and in the manner in which this power is both exercised and accessed. Familialism has also included a reassertion of affiliations based on tribalism and kinship, including the establishment of a Department of Clan Affairs. As Labadi shows, this department played an important role in the utilization of shari'ÿ-based but uncodified customary law in the aftermath of the Hebron factory fire. Familialism and formal law are in many ways antagonistic in operation and in competition, and the formal legal system was seriously undermined during years of direct Israeli occupation and has not, by all accounts, been able to redress all of its shortcomings in the post-Oslo period. As for the utilization of diverse systems to Securejustice, as Botiveau (1999: 76) observes in relation to the relevance of social diversity to studies of the legal field: ‘Competition is a reality.
Any individual can, in certain circumstances, draw on more than one normative register.’Finally, the Palestinian Authority is highly dependent for its very existence on the support of the international community, and in particular the donor community. Aside from state powers, particularly the United States, all the major international institutions have played major roles in the transitional period, with the World Bank the main coordinator of donor funding, along with the United Nations (Pederson and Hooper 1998: 14). While the World Bank and IMF showed scant interest in gender issues (Kuttab 1995; Taraki 1995), other donors, such as the United Nations and a number of European states, had gender agendas, which led them to support a variety of useful projects and initiatives, but also created severe imbalances in the resources and programmes of women’s groups, as donor interest in training and workshops - often focused on topics of democracy and citizenship - were reflected in a superabundance of such activities, some productive and others activity for activity’s sake, while other interests of women were relatively neglected (Jad et al. 2000: 141). Although overall donor support for activities for women and gender equality were quite minimal in terms of a proportion of the whole - the amount of donor aid directed at ‘women’ amounted to only 0.5 per cent of the $3,314 billion of donor disbursements in the period 1994-2000 (Hilal et al. 2003: 34) - it demonstrably increased the vulnerability of the women’s movement to being attacked as ‘Western’. Indeed, one prominent Islamist, attacking the model parliament initiative of the women’s movement, focused on its foreign funding from the United Nations Development Programme.
Donors have also focused funding on strengthening the legal system and legislative capacity, legal reform and human rights, with a May 1999 report estimating that $100 million had been dispersed since Oslo (UNSCO 1999). This amount may seem large, but in fact it constitutes a very minor part of all donor disbursements. While this report led to government attacks on the NGO sector for what was seen as a disproportionate share of the funding, a more pertinent assessment would assess the activities in terms of their outcomes. Here, the record is mixed: while legal education has been strengthened and institutionalized, other activities - from technical assistance to the Legislative Council to support for
Ministry of Justice initiatives to harmonize the laws of the West Bank and Gaza — are obviously critical, but suffered from a perhaps common malady in donor- sponsored initiatives of addressing large-scale legal and political processes and problems through ‘projects’ and ‘training’. As we will see in Chapter g, this dynamic affected one of the most interesting and successful of these legal reform projects, the women’s model parliament.