The State of Palestine

A critical analysis

Philip Leech

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351967099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Palestinian national movement reached a dead end and came close to disintegration at the beginning of the present century. This critical analysis of internal Palestinian politics in the West Bank traces the re-emergence of the Palestinian Authority's established elite in the aftermath of the failed unity government and examines the main security and economic agendas pursued by them during that period.

Based on extensive field research interviews and participant observation undertaken across several sites in Nablus and the surrounding area, it provides a bottom-up interpretation of the Palestinian Authority's agenda and challenges the popular interpretation that its governance represents the only realistic path to Palestinian independence. As the first major account of the Palestinian Authority's political agenda since the collapse of the unity government this book offers a unique explanation for the failure to bring a Palestinian state into being and challenges assumptions within the existing literature by addressing the apparent incoherence between mainstream debates on Palestine and the reality of conditions there.

This book is a key addition to students and scholars interested in Politics, Middle-Eastern Studies, and International Relations.

1Introduction

In 2010, As’ad Ghanem described the apparent demise of the Palestinian national movement:

The Palestinian national movement reached a dead end and came close to disintegration at the beginning of the present century. In the Post-Arafat period, in particular in 2006, internal and external processes ripened in the Palestinian national movement, which provided clear evidence of its failure and made it a ‘failed national movement’.

(2010, 18)

This book offers a critical analysis of internal Palestinian politics in the West Bank during the period 2007–12, when the Palestinian Authority (PA) appeared to be searching for an escape route out of Ghanem’s ‘dead end’. It tracks the re-emergence of the PA as a significant institutional force in the context of Palestinian politics in the aftermath of the Second Intifada – a major uprising by Palestinians against Israeli rule between 2000 and 2007 – and the main security and economic agenda pursued by the PA during that period. Its primary concern is to challenge the popular interpretation of the PA’s governance, that is, to challenge the idea that the PA’s statebuilding project represented a realistic path to achieving Palestinian independence.

Instead, the argument of this book paints a very different picture: that Palestinian statebuilding never stood any real chance of success. This is for two main reasons. First was simply that any and all efforts that would be undertaken by the PA – regardless of what underlay the motivation for them – could never be capable of challenging the strategic envelope imposed on the Palestinians by Israel. The second reason was that, despite a great deal of rhetoric emanating from international actors – including foreign states, donor organisations or multinational groups – that pledged commitment to the creation of a Palestinian State, there would be no real help forthcoming. A strong case can be made that international interference in the conflict was never intended to rein in Israel’s occupation, but, instead, was largely self-serving. Moreover, the impact of international actors actually bolstered Israeli supremacy over the Palestinians and, when it counted, they even abandoned their rhetorical support for the PA by rolling back on their own promises of seeking a two-state solution through peaceful means (for instance, when the US threatened its veto-power to scupper Palestinian hopes of a United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution recognising its independence in 2015). In short, any effort to challenge the status quo during this period – including the PA’s statebuilding project – was doomed even before it had begun. This was because, from below, Palestinian agency alone had insufficient force and, from above, the international actors that did have the power to change the situation were deficient in their commitment to the cause. Thus, there was never a real hope of challenging Israel’s debilitating occupation of Palestinian lands and Palestinian lives during this period.

More generally, this book’s three main original contributions to contemporary Palestine Studies are as follows: first, it is based on extensive field research undertaken across several sites in Nablus – a place with a unique heritage of resistance and a historic centre of Palestinian intellectual and political life (Moors 1994; Doumani 1995) – and the surrounding region. This distinguishes it from the majority of academic research in this field to date, which tends to be based on fieldwork conducted primarily in Ramallah (the PA’s de facto capital) or East Jerusalem (the de jure capital of Palestine, which exists under direct Israeli occupation). Second, it serves as the first book-length account of the PA’s statebuilding agenda – which has been discussed at length in academic and journalistic circles – as an apparently distinct and previously untested path to independence. Third, this book’s argument does not take for granted an analytical framework that is predicated on either the ‘one-state’ or ‘two-state solutions’, which have become near-ubiquitous as the sole points of reference in most contemporary academic literature on the subject. (The ‘two-state solution’ refers a possible partition of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, while a ‘one-state solution’ describes the possibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing it, perhaps in a bi-national state.) Rather, drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s ‘War of Position’, this book presents a broader standard that rests on a more comprehensive analysis of the deeper power dynamics in this context.

This book presents a detailed critique of the PA’s statebuilding project. While it argues that the statebuilding agenda never really offered a serious challenge to the status quo, it suggests that a better way to understand the project was as a programme of internal reforms that were designed to make the PA more efficient in terms of executing the priorities of interested external parties. These priorities were (a) reform and development of the Palestinian security forces in order to make them more capable of combating Hamas – an Islamist movement that rejects negotiations with Israel – and (b) the implementation of a range of austerity-focused reforms of the Palestinian public sector. The first of these priorities was driven by the Israeli desire to stave off a potential third popular uprising and it also aligned with broader Western concerns regarding Islamist political movements in the context of the ‘Global War on Terror’. The second priority was also a product of multiple drivers. In the short term, the major priority of the international community was to curtail the serious issue of corruption within the PA that had syphoned off an indeterminate (though reportedly significant) quantity of foreign aid donations. At the same time, this statebuilding project appeared to offer international actors a renewed opportunity to implement an economic agenda that combined the concept of ‘functionalism’ – a sub-school of liberal peace theory emphasising the idea that though working together in the day-to-day mechanics of governance, broader peace becomes more likely – with a long-standing commitment to neoliberalism as a development strategy.

However, neither of these agendas would play out that way. The improvement of the Palestinian security forces effectively served to strengthen the hand of some of the PA’s most anti-democratic forces. Moreover, the neoliberal economic agenda suffered from the fact that the basic framework underlying Israel’s domination of the West Bank was never challenged. This included the basic legal norms that were in use, as well as the structures – both legal and material – that constrained Palestinian agency and frustrated Palestinian political coherence. Rather, in a continuation of the same philosophy that underlay Israel’s ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip – a strategic withdrawal to militarised borders in 2005 – the material structure of the occupation in the West Bank was further entrenched during this period of time.

There was another factor, however. This was a surge of popular outrage that coincided with the uprisings across the region known as the ‘Arab Spring’. There were several factors that produced these events in Palestine. First was the resumption of so-called peace negotiations between the PA’s leadership and Israel despite the fact that Israel continued to construct illegal settlements in the West Bank, effectively undermining its rhetorical commitment to peace and continuing the expropriation of Palestinian lands and resources in the process. Second was a failure on the part of international donors to maintain the level of financial support to the PA necessary for it to meet its outgoings. This resulted in a severe fiscal crisis for the PA that was so bad that public sector salaries went unpaid. All of this added to already significant levels of popular discontent. In the end, this series of events brought about the demise of the statebuilding project as it had originally been formulated. It also allowed the President of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, to take advantage of the situation to remove his perceived rival, the then Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, and opportunistically hijack the notion of statebuilding by taking the issue to the UN General Assembly in pursuit of high-profile, but largely meaningless, symbolic recognition.

These events also exposed the fact that the roles undertaken by Western donors in terms of the statebuilding project were apparently often incoherent. For example, where on the one hand there is strong evidence to support an argument that the Western governments – particular the UK and the US governments – played an instrumental role in inculcating authoritarianism in Palestine for the sake of preventing unrest, the fact that donors failed in the relatively simple task of ensuring that the PA did not run out of money – and thereby indirectly inculcating popular strife – demonstrates that their approach to the project was inconsistent to say the least. In addition, while it was clear that some of the institutions working on the ground (for instance, the policy team from the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID)) seemed to be seriously committed to Palestinian ‘statehood’ in some form or other, achieving parity between the two sides was never a serious prospect. Rather, the ‘state’ that they had in mind would have been little more than a façade designed to mask continued Israeli dominance.

Background to this discussion

At a donors’ conference in Paris in 2007, the PA launched the precursor to its statebuilding agenda, the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan (PRDP), which was met with an enthusiastic reception from representatives of various Western governments, all of which had – until only a few months before – supported a crippling boycott on all aid to the occupied Palestinian territories (oPts). However, having purged any Hamas influence from its ranks (effectively overturning the results of the 2006 legislative elections) in a brutal crackdown – with the support of Western intelligence agencies (see Rose 2008; Black and Milne 2011) – in the eyes of its donor audience, the PA was reborn as the presentable face of Palestinian governance.

Through both in the development of the PRDP itself and in its willingness to work with Western backers – in coordination with Israel – against Hamas, the PA appeared to be embarking on a previously untested strategy. This was to accede to the key demands of Israel and the international community with the aim of achieving economic development and, ultimately, ensuring Palestinian independence from Israel’s occupation. This would be through statebuilding rather than through direct resistance or confrontation as had been tried in the past. According to this strategy – which was formalised in subsequent documents: Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State (2009) and Homestretch to Freedom (2010)¹ – the PA would embrace the role that had been demanded of it by foreign governments ever since its inception as a product of the so-called Oslo ‘peace process’ (1993–2000). In practical terms, this meant that the PA would build on two major policies that were of central importance to Israel, the US and its allies. First, it would continue to comply with Israeli security demands, in particular disrupting and degrading Hamas and its support network in the West Bank. Second, it would confront issues of corruption, which had plagued its recent history and had become a serious concern for donor countries (some of which had invested and lost millions of dollars).

The international community was extremely receptive and, at the meeting in Paris’s Hôtel Park Hyatt; donors pledged $7.7 billion (some $2.2 billion more than had been requested) in support of the PA. Tony Blair, the recently appointed representative of the International Quartet, adopted the role of an advocate to the Israeli government on behalf of the PA, lobbying for greater cooperation between the two sides and the facilitation of the PA’s agenda through, for example, the easing of some restrictions on movement. However, some five years on from these events, and despite winning overwhelming support from members of the UN General Assembly in 2012, the Palestinian national project stalled once again and the new ‘State of Palestine’ that emerged lacked independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty. Though various moves towards achieving more substantive progress had been attempted, Israel countered by accelerating the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank and threatened expansion into the highly contentious ‘E1’ area, a move that would effectively and decisively cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, thereby terminating any prospect of a two-state solution to the conflict.

Figure 1.1Total Israeli settlement population⁵

****

This book addresses the reasons behind how and why these events came to pass and offers an explanation from within the sphere of Palestinian political dynamics for the PA’s failure to bring a meaningful Palestinian state into being. In addressing this question, the book presents a bottom-up analysis of the political and economic impact of the PA’s statebuilding agenda. Thus, it offers a very different approach from the majority of commentaries and analyses that have become prevalent and have tended to adopt an external and often top-down perspective (for an example, see Bröning 2011). Towards this end, this book performs two important tasks. First, it serves as a diagnostic of the impact of the PA’s agenda on the general Palestinian population in four sites in the Nablus region: (1) a major urban centre – Nablus city, (2) Balata Camp, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank, and two villages, (3) Qaryut and (4) Yanoun. Second, it interprets that data in the context of the broader conflict and its impact on the power relationships between Palestinian, Israelis and other relevant actors.

Data collection²

As mentioned above, one product of Israel’s occupation has been to fragment and divide Palestinian society based on geography. In this context, it made sense to focus on geography as the main variable. This was in order to analyse the consequences of that statebuilding agenda on a cross-section of Palestinian society living under these fragmented conditions. The following sections provide background information on all four of the main sites that formed the basis for this research.

The city of Nablus

Nablus’ rich and intricate history as a cultural and economic hub and as the political power base for a number of Palestine’s oldest and most powerful families is an intriguing topic of study in its own right. There is not sufficient room here to outline a historical narrative of Nablus in any great depth. However, given the relevance of Nablus’ role in Palestinian history to its current political status, for the purposes of this account, it is appropriate to outline a few of the reasons for Nablus’ reputation. According to Beshara Doumani, the appellative ‘Jabal an-Nar’ (The Mountains of Fire) illustrates the city’s reputation for fierce resistance to foreign conquest as the name originates from the turn of the nineteenth century when, in order to repel the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, the population of the city (colloquially known as Nabulsis) ‘set forests and olive groves ablaze, burning the French soldiers’ (Doumani 2004, 37). Further, in 1834, the city led a revolt against the Egyptian invasion under Ali Pasha, and 102 years later, it was an important nucleus of resistance in the Arab Uprising (1936) against the British mandate. Further, in 1963, four years before the beginning of the Israeli occupation, Nablus declared its autonomy from Jordanian rule. The city was also famously a focal point of resistance movements in both the First and the Second Intifadas and became known as the centre of terrorism in the Israeli media (Doumani 1995; 2004).

Nablus’ Old City was symbolically important because of its historic role as the hub of soap and olive oil production, a vibrant commercial exchange and as the seat of power for the city’s dynastic ruling class. It was also the nucleus for wider networks of social and economic relationships. Evidence of this was visible in the variety of churches, mosques and other sites of historical significance dotted in and around the Old City, including one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The ‘state’ and Palestine
• 3 The fragmentation of Palestine
• 4 Making plans
• 5 Palestinian authoritarianism
• 6 The ‘State of Palestine’
• 7 ‘Economic peace’
• 8 Disaster, capitalism and Palestine
• 9 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index