:Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank

Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank is a sobering ethnography about the current and possibly future situation in Palestine or, ...

Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. Kareem Rabie (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). Pp. 275. 26.95 paper. ISBN: 9781478011958 - Volume 54 Issue 1

Article Kareem Rabie: Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank was published on February 7, 2022 in the journal New Global Studies (volume 0, issue 0).

Part 1 Introduction - nationalism and Palestinians: Palestinian Israeli conflict and nationalism nationalism as an ideology of boundedness space and time homogenization and state-building national identities - self and other, nation/ethnicity as family key issues and analytical scheme discussion on method. Part 2 From elite to mass based revolution: factionalism and early elite mobilization formulation of Palestinian nationalism great revolt and popular proto-nationalism catastrophe and dispersal arab nationalism as dominant discourse 1948-1967 nationalism of al-Fateh PLO between nationalism and patriotism, between unity and liberation - Arabism and Marxist fronts, struggle, revolution and exile, institution-building, class, gender,m refugees, Arab states and PLO, steps towards shifting goals and strategies 1974. Part 3 From intifada to self-government: Israeli politics towards occupied territories Palestinian politics prior to intifada - West Bank, Gaza intifada - institution-building and leadership organization, nationalism of intifada, end to intifada Islamism as counter-discourse - as an organisation, Islamic Jihad, Islamist movement and Palestinian nationalism, Islamic movements and struggle. Part 4 State-building and peace process: state building - institution-building and political structure, revolution versus state-building state-building - is country to be made - agreements - the best of worse, Fateh - state-building party and internal opposition leftist opposition - long term solution - a democratic state in all of Palestine Islamism - agreements - we are true owners of Palestine, long-term solution - we have to get rid of Israel from this area reformism - agreements - will retain authority. Part 5 Palestinian identity - border construction: denial state to struggle to suffer identities in negotiation -remnants of Arabism, identity betrayed, Islam, nationalism and identity - Islam is main thing Palestinian national authority - official nationalism - we don't have magic stick -leftism and PNA - it is so limited, so poor, so bad, Islamism and authority - if they don't succeed, are people to fill gaps, reformism and authority - there is much to be hoped for internal conflicts - official nationalism - Hamas are our brothers inside-outside - have to change their mentality. Part 6 Perceptions of other. (Part contents).

Health of Palestinian people in the ghettos: from Gaza to Shatila

Egypt, Tunisia, and the area controlled by the Palestinian Authority are not ruled from bunkers by elites beholden to clans, tribes, or other traditional social formations. In the case of Egypt and Tunisia, and the prospective Palestinian state, the ruling elites are at once both more narrowly and broadly based. Their rule rests almost exclusively on the institutional power of the military/security/party apparatus, but because these elites are not drawn from a clearly identified social formation, they are at least not unrepresentative of their relatively homogeneous political communities. Because the state provides the primary underpinning for these regimes, they have relatively little incentive to build and maintain ruling coalitions based in their respective political societies. The rulers of each of them seem content to restrict their extrastate coalition building to the placation of rural and traditional elites. Rent-seeking arrangements with crony capitalists are more for the purposes of serving state-based patronage networks than for broadening ruling coalitions. The differences between bunker and bully praetorian republics, other than the key issue of the lack of autonomy of the bunker states from social formations, are not great. The leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, not having been forced to forge societal as opposed to state-based coalitions to come to or maintain their power, lack the political legitimacy that flows, as Max Weber described, from tradition, charisma, or rational-legal procedures. Yasser Arafat used a combination of his coercive capacity based in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and support from Israel and the United States, as well as political alliances on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza, to assert control over Palestine. By virtue of having built those alliances and because of his historical role as state builder, Arafat personally enjoyed considerable legitimacy, but after his death in 2005, the Palestinian “state” lost much of its legitimacy. Fatah, the party he had founded, was attempting in 2010 to restore that legitimacy, but it also required credible progress toward a two-state solution. Meanwhile Iran, discussed in Chapter 7, was apparently losing any semblance of democratic legitimacy and relying ever more on police and paramilitary power like the other bully praetorians.

T extension of the higher education “franchise” to significant numbers of young people with modest means and from underprivileged strata since the mid-1970s has had far-reaching social and political consequences for Palestinian society. This brief article will investigate how Palestinian institutions of higher education—primarily the four universities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—were implicated in the formation of an influential and hegemonic generation of activist intelligentsia in the crucial two decades preceding the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. It will also discuss this generation’s fortunes under the current social and political regime in Palestine. It is appropriate to locate the widening of opportunities for higher education in the mid-1970s within the general trajectory taken by the Palestinian national movement during the same period. It may be noted briefly that changes in the strategic thinking of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after 1974 identified the Occupied Territories as the site of the future Palestinian state and the main arena for the struggle for its realization. Thus, the establishment of an infrastructure of national institutions as well as a network of political parties and front organizations to promote the struggle can be viewed as the cornerstones of the Palestinian state-building strategy. The few institutions of higher education existing in the Occupied Territories were thus “nationalized,” and their rapid expansion after the mid-1970s was supported by funds channeled by the PLO into the Occupied Territories. Wide sectors of society took advantage of this unprecedented availability of highly subsidized “mass” university education, and enrollment in local institutions of higher education rose dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s. Although the PLO and some political parties were instrumental in providing university education in the Arab world and abroad (mainly through scholarships offered by some Arab and then-socialist countries), the bulk of university graduates in the Occupied Territories after the 1970s have been the products of the local educational system. Palestinian universities during the latter part of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s were the prime site for the formation of a cadre of political activists who at important junctures were in the vanguard of the national resistance to occupation. While such cadres were also being recruited and built within other institutions such as secondary schools, labor unions, and women’s organizations, the universities were by far the most enabling medium for the crystallization of a politicized cohort of activists. Higher education has been perceived as, and has actually been, an avenue of social mobility for sons and daughters of peasants, refugees, and the urban middle and lower classes in Palestinian society. In this sense, graduates of local universities constitute a significant segment of the growing middle strata in Palestinian society, especially in the period after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the expansion of employment opportunities in the growing public and private sectors. What concerns us here, however, is how Palestinian universities were implicated in this process by constituting the environment par excellence for the elaboration of a politically hegemonic elite during the period prior to and after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. The “nationalization” of the universities during this critical period meant above all that—by virtue of the fact that they were being supported by public, national funds (through the Palestinian Council for Higher Education)— they were part of the national project. As such, their administrations were expected (and often compelled) to allow full freedom of political activity and to align their institutions with the national movement. While political activity was largely conceived of as national, anti-occupation resistance, there was at the same time an increased student focus on internal university politics, embodied in activities such as the campaign for “Arabization” of the curriculum and the struggle for student representation in university bodies. Elected student councils succeeded in wresting a considerable degree of authority (and recognition of the legitimacy of that authority) from university administrations and became a powerful force in university life.

Palestine is throwing a party and the whole world is invited: capital and state building in the West Bank

Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank By KareemRabie. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 272 pp.

Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. KareemRabie. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 272 pp.

Reviewed by: The Palestinian National Movement: Politics of Contention, 1967-2005 Gregory Mahler, Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs The Palestinian National Movement: Politics of Contention, 1967-2005, by Amal Jamal. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. 229 pp. $22.95. The first thing to say about this book, as will be obvious to any potential reader, is that it is extremely timely. The Palestinian national movement is in the news on almost a daily basis, has proven to be among the top news stories of the last six months, and it is not likely to go away in the near future. The Palestinian National Movement provides a very good and well-documented portrait of a national liberation movement that has faced challenge after challenge, frustration after frustration, and yet has not only survived but has grown stronger over time. Although discussion of more distant historical material is included where needed, the concentration of the book focuses upon the period following the Six Day War in 1967, when the nature of so many Palestinians' lives changed dramatically as Israel became the occupying power in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The first chapter of the book focuses upon the historical context of the Palestinian national movement and includes discussion of who the political elite were in Palestine and how the outcomes of the 1967 War affected the lives of Palestinians. The War resulted in an Occupying Power (Israel), and led to a mobilization of the nationalist movement in a way that it had not been mobilized previously, shifting the political process "from nation building to state building" (p. 15). There is much discussion of the changing political structures of the Palestinians under Occupation, and how the Palestinians resisted the Israeli policy of "de-Palestinianization" on a regular basis. The issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a significant one, of course, both because of interactions between the Israelis and the Palestinians and because the philosophy and practice of Israeli settlements had significant consequences for what the Israelis were prepared to let the Palestinians do. This was a large "zero-sum game," and as Israeli settlements grew there were corresponding diminutions of Palestinian communities. Jamal does a very good job of describing the efforts of the PLO leadership as they tried to coordinate Palestinian dissent and resistance to the Israeli occupation. [End Page 194] This resistance often resulted in deportations, destruction of Palestinian property, and limitations on political freedoms of Palestinians. Of great interest is Jamal's discussion of the relationship "between exterior and interior in the Palestinian national movement" (p. 38), in which decisions were often made based upon which audience was being considered—the domestic Palestinian audience, the Occupying Israeli audience, or the more external World audience. Differences between the Fatah/PLO leadership and the Palestinian National Front began to surface in strategic terms, and the Palestinian National Guidance Committee often found itself in a position of having to struggle to make peace among the various groups of Palestinian political elites. The "politics of steadfastness" (p. 63) is the term used by Jamal to discuss the Palestinian strategy for responding to Israeli policy in the occupied territories, and a substantial effort is made in this book to discuss and analyze this complicated and terribly important topic. What can be called the "politics of occupation" has been a major, indeed, the major influence affecting the lives of Palestinians over the last four decades, and the discussion presented here examines the role of the Jordanians in this challenge, the role of domestic para-political structures such as the General Federation of Trade Unions, and the role of international actors in helping to provide financial assistance to keep the Palestinian organizations going. Among the most interesting areas of analysis for this reader was the discussion of Palestinian political leadership that is offered here, and the examination of the interaction between Islamic actors and more secular actors. Jamal tells us that "after founding Hamas and experiencing direct confrontation with the occupation authorities, the religious elite of the occupied territories sought to establish itself as an authentic representative of the Palestinian masses" (p. 110). This...

The Palestinian National Movement: Politics of Contention, 1967-2005, by Amal Jamal. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. 229 pp. $22.95. The first thing to say about this book, as will be obvious to any potential reader, is that it is extremely timely. The Palestinian national is in the news on almost a daily basis, has proven to be among the top news stories of the last six months, and it is not likely to go away in the near future. The Palestinian National Movement provides a very good and well-documented portrait of a national liberation that has faced challenge after challenge, frustration after frustration, and yet has not only survived but has grown stronger over time. Although discussion of more distant historical material is included where needed, the concentration of the book focuses upon the period following the Six Day War in 1967, when the nature of so many Palestinians' lives changed dramatically as Israel became the occupying power in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The first chapter of the book focuses upon the historical context of the Palestinian national and includes discussion of who the political elite were in Palestine and how the outcomes of the 1967 War affected the lives of Palestinians. The War resulted in an Occupying Power (Israel), and led to a mobilization of the nationalist in a way that it had not been mobilized previously, shifting the political process from nation to state building (p. 15). There is much discussion of the changing political structures of the Palestinians under Occupation, and how the Palestinians resisted the Israeli policy of de-Palestinianization on a regular basis. The issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a significant one, of course, both because of interactions the Israelis and the Palestinians and because the philosophy and practice of Israeli settlements had significant consequences for what the Israelis were prepared to let the Palestinians do. This was a large zero-sum game, and as Israeli settlements grew there were corresponding diminutions of Palestinian communities. Jamal does a very good job of describing the efforts of the PLO leadership as they tried to coordinate Palestinian dissent and resistance to the Israeli oc- cupation. This resistance often resulted in deportations, destruction of Palestinian property, and limitations on political freedoms of Palestinians. Of great interest is Jamal's discussion of the relationship between exterior and interior in the Palestinian national movement (p. 38), in which decisions were often made based upon which audience was being considered-the domestic Palestinian audience, the Occupying Istaeli audience, or the more external World audience. Differences the Fatah/PLO leadership and the Palestinian National Front began to surface in strategic terms, and the Palestinian National Guidance Committee often found itself in a position of having to struggle to make peace among the various groups of Palestinian political elites. …

After nearly three decades of their existence, neither the Palestinian Authority (PA) nor the internationally-adopted and sponsored Oslo framework, brought the Palestinian people any closer to realizing their inalienable right to self-determination. In fact, these decades of peace and state building processes, have made Palestinians weaker, more fragmented, and further away from statehood, let alone equality, justice, and freedom. This chapter aims to explain this conclusion through offering a contextual analysis of the Palestinian-Israeli security coordination in the shadow of a failed “peace” process. It utilizes the Oslo framework’s security coordination lens to illustrate how Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have had to (and continue to) live under and suffer not only from the brutality of the Israeli colonial occupation but also from additional layers of oppression created by their own national governing bodies. The chapter examines the Oslo Accords from a security perspective and presents its recipe and triangle, and offers an analysis of the ramifications of the security doctrine adopted by the PA in its venture to build a Palestinian state. It concludes that over the past three decades complex structures, contradicting dynamics, and undemocratic institutions had emerged and solidified in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and therefore, reversing the Oslo’s Triangle is a prerequisite to ensure a prosperous Palestinian future.

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

On November 11,1920, Sharif Abdullah arrived from Medina by train in the British mandatory territory of Transjordan. Previously serving his father, King Hussein of the Hijaz, as foreign minister, Abdullah announced in the border town of Maan his will to redeem the Syrian Arab Kingdom whose short life had ended with the French advance into Damascus on July 24, 1920 (Salibi 1993, 49). At this point in time, prospects to transform the Transjordanian territorial remnants of the Arab Kingdom into a modern national state were pretty bleak. Under Ottoman rule, the territory was never an administrative unit and because of its tribal social nature (almost) impossible or difficult to be governed by Istanbul. Moreover, the territory was part of the British mandate and therewith under colonial rule. Given these conditions, state building required strategies for both internal nation building and external efforts to gaining international recognition as an independent state. The crucial balancing act for Abdullah was to cultivate a sense of national unity among independent tribes and to achieve the support of London to establish a sovereign national state. Although formal independence from Great Britain was achieved in May 1946, the very difficult internal nation-building process was further aggravated by the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948–1949. Following his long-standing territorial ambitions, King Abdullah eventually succeeded in incorporating the West Bank into the Transjordanian state in 1950.KeywordsPolitical PartyCivil Society OrganizationMuslim BrotherhoodIslamic SocietyIslamic TraditionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.