The Democratic & Civic Values for Youth project opens

Gaza – Pal-Think for Strategic Studies opened the project “Strengthening democratic and civic values in youth” in the Gaza Strip with the participation of 22 young men and women and university students. Mr Omar Shaban, director of Pal-Think for Strategic Studies, spoke
of the project, which targets the youth category, being the largest segment of society, to raise
their levels of democratic and civic knowledge — making clear that the youth over the years
of division were its most prominent victim, as the democratic process and elections froze,
depriving the youth of practising one of their fundamental rights: taking part in shaping the political
system through the ballot boxes. Here comes the role of civil-society institutions in
helping youth build and strengthen awareness through democratic and civic education. Thus
came the idea of the project of strengthening democratic and civic values in youth, to serve this orientation
Pal-Think seeks in strengthening democratic concepts and practices in Palestinian
youth.

He made clear that this project, which continues for six months with funding from the Canadian government, comprises
ten educational lectures and radio episodes on the issues of democracy and political development in
Palestinian society, in addition to three training courses on topics related to the fight against
corruption and the strengthening of the tools of societal accountability and transparency in Palestinian society —
pointing out that Pal-Think worked to bring scholarly competences specialised in this field
during the project's period.

For his part, Dr Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al-Azhar University, pointed,
during the project's first lecture, which took up “the components of the Palestinian political
system”, to the definition of the Palestinian political system and the problems it suffers from,
and to the problem of the relation between the Authority and the Organization as components of the Palestinian political
system. In addition, the Palestinian political system suffers a series of crises in terms of
origin and development, and the legal environment carries within it a great contradiction in terms of the definition
of roles and the distribution of powers — which brought about an overlap in the work of the institutions forming the political
system and produced the division from which the whole of Palestine today tries to emerge.

The meeting saw great interaction from the young people, who called at the meeting's end for
the necessity of unifying youth efforts in order to wrest a real role for youth in the coming
stage, and demanded that civil-society institutions contribute to building democratic and rights
awareness in the youth segment so they can rise and demand their rights in the coming
stage