ABSTRACT
It is now time to look at the most important historical and legal phases for the development of a multi-layered Palestinian civil society and to assess how a mix of legal texts, remnants of previous occupations, still interact with the new Palestinian National Authority (PNA)’s legislation on the regulation of civil society activism. Thanks to an original longitudinal database, we will portray what are the most important subgroupings of civil society active by the year 2000. We will then shed light on the historical involvement of international donors around the globe and in Palestine. Overall, this chapter suggests that even if large amounts of monies are disbursed by non-governmental and professional bodies, there is an increasing division of labour and that the sources of funding are largely governmental ones. In the Palestinian case, regional Arab funding (dominant until the late 1980s) has been massively supplanted during the Oslo peace process by western governmental or multilateral aid. Parallel to this shift, voluntary and mass-based civil society activism in the Territories has gradually disappeared at the expense of newly founded professional elite organizations, leaving charitable organizations working with scarce western funding (though not forgotten by Islamist funding) in poorer and remoter zones of the Territories.
