JPS “Hidden Gems” and “Greatest Hits”: The Political Economy of Palestine and the Palestinians

Abstract

Examining the Journal’s fifty-year trajectory documenting the political economy of Palestine and of the Palestinians (not one and the same), author Leila Farsakh highlights contributions by a rich mix of economists, anthropologists, and other scholars: from Yusif and Rosemary Sayigh, Sara Roy, George Abed, Raja Khalidi, and Linda Tabar to Darryl Li, Judith Gabriel, Nicholas Pelham, Sobhi Samour, Omar Jabari Salamanca, and Helga Tawil-Souri (to name only some). Taken together, Farsakh argues, their writings expose “the diversity of Palestinian economic realities,” and highlight the continuing relevance of the settler-colonial paradigm as “the most useful analytic for understanding the Palestinian economic predicament.” Far from being a neutral technocratic process, economic development is “embedded in power structures that need to be dissected and understood at both macro and micro levels.”