This paper examines how Palestinian social change actors negotiate Western foreign aid interventions. It argues that, rather than passively accepting foreign aid, social change actors display a range of responses including accepting aid, manipulating aid in their own interest, and evading aid. Social change actors’ agency in the foreign aid regime has implications for our understanding of the effects of Western intervention on Palestinian civil society. The Western aid that flowed to Palestine after the 1993 Oslo Accords significantly transformed Palestinian civil society. Prior to Oslo, Palestinian civil society was rooted in grassroots communities and consisted primarily of charities, self-help groups, popular committees, and social movements and have been credited with laying the groundwork for the first and second intifadas. The foreign aid that arrived after Oslo constructed a sector of professional, project-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have been widely criticized as being tools of the West, disconnected from local citizens, and ineffective agents of change. But to write off Palestine’s NGO sector and the larger civil society of which it is a part as debilitated by foreign aid risks overlooking the ways in which Palestinian social change actors negotiate Western aid interventions. Drawing upon one year of ethnographic research in the West Bank, this paper analyzes how two groups of Palestinian social change actors respond to foreign aid: 1) employees of NGOs, which rely on foreign aid for survival, and 2) members of Voluntary Grassroots Organizations (VGOs), which operate largely outside of the foreign aid system but interact with it in various ways. I argue that social change actors affiliated with each type of organization face distinct sets of opportunities and constraints when confronting foreign aid and I analyze how these opportunities and constraints shape social change actors’ responses to foreign aid—responses which, I argue, range from passive acceptance to creative manipulation to outright rejection of aid. By examining social change actors’ agency in the face of Western intervention, this paper contributions to our understanding of the effects of foreign aid on civil society as well as the emancipatory potential civil society even when confronted with foreign aid regimes.