2021 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Project editor: Lisa Lawley
Designed by Aimee C. Harrison
Typeset in Minion Pro and Trade Gothic LT Std by Copperline Book Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rabie, Kareem, [date] author.
Title: Palestine is throwing a party and the whole world is invited : capital and state building in the West Bank / Kareem Rabie.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028899 (print)
LCCN 2020028900 (ebook)
ISBN 9781478011958 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781478014096 (paperback)
ISBN 9781478021407 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : Economic development projectsWest Bank. | UrbanizationWest Bank. | Housing developmentWest Bank. | EconomicsWest Bank. | West BankEconomic conditions. | West BankSocial conditions. | West BankPolitics and government.
Classification: LCC HC 415.254 . R 335 2021 (print) | LCC HC 415.254 (ebook) | DDC 333.33/8095492dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028899
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028900
CONTENTS
IN 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited the world to attend a huge party in the West Bank. It was a party of a specific kind, with specific people attending, and according to Fayyad it was a rather big deal (Fayyad 2008):
Dear Investors,
The Palestine Investment Conference [ PIC ] promises to be a historic event. As the first high profile investment conference ever held in Palestine, PIC -Palestine will jumpstart a process of integrating Palestine into the global economy.
The time has come to invest in Palestine. The international community showed its overwhelming support of the Palestinian economy in Paris last December, and PIC -Palestine intends to continue this process of creating an environment conducive to investment-led growth.
While the conference is private sector run, the Palestinian National Authority offers its full support and is working to make the conference a success. This conference will provide an opportunity to showcase the many promising investment opportunities in Palestine while strengthening public-private partnership and reforming the economy.
We are throwing a party, and the whole world is invited. This conference is a chance to show a different face of Palestine: a Palestine conducive to economic growth and international investment. I welcome you to Palestine for a chance to enjoy our hospitality, and to learn first-hand that you can do business in Palestine.
DR. SALAM FAYYAD
Prime Minister
MAP INTRO.1 The West Bank. Map by Meagan A. Snow.
What is in the invitationPalestines integration into the global economy, the work to create the foundation for profitable investment, the admixture of public and private, the exuberance and party atmosphereis as important as what is absent. That is, Israel and its ongoing military, legal, and practical control and integration of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. Fayyads invitation captures the vision and direction established during his tenure, and the ideologies and productive practices I uncover and analyze in this book. Under the rubric of state building, his tenure marked a new phase of market-centric rhetoric and practice in Palestine. With echoes of past forms of responsibility and local control under colonization, the idea was that Palestine could build a private economy and that subsequently, eventually, a functioning and free state would emerge. Formal Palestinian aspiration was slowly translated away from nationalist politics and into practices and political economic languages that circulate worldwide. From the outside, and especially in popular and news media, the situation in Palestine is often described as a series of chaotic, violent, active moments, or as almost apolitically prehistoric. But from a wider perspective on political economic change, the situation seems more coherent and productive. As far as Palestines relationship to Israel or capacity for self-rule is concerned, ideas and the constitution of power seem stable; significant change anywhere would probably require massive change everywhere.
In response to the failure of the so-called peace process to achieve peace (Massad 2006; Haddad 2016; Hanieh 2013b), its emergence in a period of intensifying globalization (Samara 2000), and given the nature of the contemporary global political economy, the investment conference made sense to its participants. If the peace process was a series of related international attempts to formalize and maintain Palestine vis--vis Israeli occupation, the state-building period did the same. But it was framed as though it were possible to circumvent politics through economic mechanisms, a subtle reorientation of political practice. And although Fayyad is gone, and we may be in a different period with a different prime minister today, forms of spatial and political concentration and economic restructuring have not been significantly altered under his successors.
Some of the ways actors in the state and private sector frame their claims about politics in Palestine are new. Instead of describing instability, they focus on potential, with Ramallah as a model. They work explicitly to attach Palestinian politics to capital growth and development by enhancing relations with outside markets, despite the pervasive subordinate relationship with Israel. In other ways this is not new: Palestine has been the target of intervention since well before the establishment of Israel and the global importance of the conflict rendered it subject to constant international attention. As Mandy Turner and many others have convincingly argued (Turner 2011, 2012; Turner and Shweiki 2014), development and peace interventions work in concert to produce consistency within Israels occupation. Yet todays interventions, ideas, and projects for Palestines economic growth, and descriptions and models of political change, often are based on assumptions that contradict the reality on the ground in Palestine.
Palestine is stratified and geographically fragmented. People in different places are subject to Israeli state and Palestinian violence in much different ways. Israel has long tried to outsource the directly violent parts of the occupation and maximize the distancepolitical and social, as understood and livedbetween Israelis and Palestinians, and between Palestinians themselves. Since 2007 coalitions of Palestinians within Palestine have been openly working to cultivate that distance and enhance stability to produce common sense around practices of investment, privatization, and state building.
The practices that surround ideas and representations go a long way in producing stability and orienting ideas and frameworks around future interventions. In a Middle East characterized by the widespread resistance to autocratic governmentsresistance that has often been inspired by the Palestinian struggle against colonization and Israeli occupationRamallah might be, in some ways and for some people, one of the more insulated and stable places in the region. In terms of class aspiration and stability, there are not many places in the West Bank other than Ramallah where a refracted image of normal everyday life is permissible. Palestine refers to less and less territory, and fewer and fewer Palestinians; at the same time, as a target of interventions, it does much more work. Economic interventions orient Palestine toward the global market (Taraki 2008a, 2008b); the Palestine of the West Bank stands in for Historic Palestine, Gaza, and the diaspora and comes to limit wider possibilities. As far as Palestinian cities are concerned, Ramallah and its surrounding areas are the primary sites for development as market building, and they exist in a vacuum enabled by the distribution of Israeli state violence elsewhere. Moreover, Ramallah is an idea and representation that circulates to further plans and interventionsit is a place and an image for aspiration and growth as politics.
