A number of interesting recent works have focused on the significance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Palestinian society and politics. Among the most important have been Rema Hammami's titled “NGOs: The Professionalization of Politics” (Race and Class 37 [January 1995]: 51–63), Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar's (2005) The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs, and Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground, edited by Michael Keating et al. (2005), which focuses on the effect of foreign donations on Palestinian society and economy. Benoît Challand's book is a significant addition to this corpus.

Challand's main argument is that “the overuse of civil society and its subtle imposition by external actors might become a source of heteronomy for the Palestinians,” as donor-driven, “civil society” discourse does not admit the needs, concerns, and ideas of the Palestinian people themselves (p. 164). Challand defines heteronomy as the inability of a particular group to make and adhere to its own laws, and suggests that both the discursive performances of the NGOs and the demands of the donors in effect exclude Palestinians from participatory processes and exacerbate the heteronomy forced on Palestinians by Israeli occupation. To make this argument, he focuses on health-provision and advocacy NGOs, respectively. The book is based on interviews with representatives of more than 50 NGOs and more than 40 donor organisations.

Palestinian Civil Society is divided into two parts. In the first part, scholarly civil society debates are summaried, and Challand offers an interesting suggestion that rather than viewing civil society as a vehicle for democratization, it should be seen as an architect of political autonomy. The author conceives of autonomy along the lines of Rousseau's Social Contract, maintaining that “the ultimate test of human freedom resides in the fact that the group (‘l'état civil’) has the capacity to give and agree on its own laws…. In this process, the participation of each member of the social contract is the necessary component to this process of legislation” (p. 35). He then usefully (and unusually) examines Arab theorizations of civil society in light of this conceptualization, outlining three different views regarding the reality and possibility of civil society in the Arab Middle East. Challand describes Azmi Bishara's analysis as skeptical, where Bishara does not see civil society as a fully autonomous sphere of political action; summarizes Saad Eddin Ibrahim's conceptualization as pessimistic vis-à-vis Islamists, and therefore as cautious and potentially exclusive toward them; and celebrates the more inclusive theorization of Burhan Ghalioun, which conceives of civil society as inclusive of all political actors. Challand also usefully sketches the historical background of Palestinian NGOs since the 1970s.

In the second part of the book, the author provides a detailed analysis of the international donors and their specific approaches to civil society, a careful interrogation of the modus operandi of health-provision and advocacy NGOs and the way they deploy civil society discourses, and a critical reading of the mechanisms by which these NGOs politically, sociologically, and ideologically exclude the very people whose political participation would be the fundamental basis of political autonomy. These mechanisms include donor emphasis on projects that are aimed at supporting the defunct “peace process,” rather than local needs and demands; the professionalization of the NGO leadership which rather than depoliticizing the NGOs produces a peculiar kind of homogenous and implicit politics; the creation of a class of globalized elite more responsive to international donors than to their Palestinian constituency; and a Eurocentric hierarchy that privileges certain familiar NGO organizational structures over more indigenous civil society forms.

Challand's research is fascinating, and the basic argument is sound. The focus on participation—rather than the devalued and contested concept of “democratization”—is innovative and useful beyond the bounds of Palestine. His knowledge of Arabic and his firsthand interviews with so many NGO operatives also means that a great deal of the research material here is new and not easily available elsewhere. Furthermore, although his critique of the concept of civil society does not go far enough (after all, as scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman have argued, today the “social” inherent in “civil society” explicitly elbows out political engagement and contestation), nevertheless, it is a sobering addition to the growing body of literature that has explicitly challenged the civil-society-promotion industry.

I wish that the book—which is cognizant of the way civil society has largely been reified and reduced to NGOs (p. 30)—had actually spent some time looking at other “civil society” institutions, such as unions or popular committees, that have been such a significant part of Palestinian politics. Furthermore, although Challand goes further than most in his discussion of Islamic and Islamist nongovernmental organizations, the fascinating material here is all too brief and leaves one wanting more.

As a final substantive point, one wishes that instead of the rather long-winded “ground clearing” in Part I, more pages had been devoted specifically to the encounter between the NGOs and the Palestinian population they ostensibly serve. Although Challand provides interesting abstract analyses here, it would have been extremely useful (and also novel) if we could have had a brief ethnography of the precise way in which NGO professionals deal in a quotidian context with the people who come to them for support.

More pedantically, the book is badly served by the publisher, who has not provided any copyediting, resulting in errors in word usage, such as “unaccessible” instead of “inaccessible” (p. 13), “predicator” instead of “predictor” (p. 29), “apparition” instead of “appearance” (p. 142), and so on. In some places, particularly in discussions of theory, the lack of any proofreading by the publisher has rendered the text more complicated than it should be. This carelessness is a shame, given that the intelligent and critical Challand has conducted extensive and thoughtful primary research in the Arabic language, and given that the book advances an important and novel argument about foreign donors exacerbating Palestinian heteronomy. He points the way toward a more critical examination of NGOs and civil society, and his fidelity to on-the-ground fieldwork is well worth emulating.