A FRAMEWORK FOR NATIONAL STRUGGLE
On June 2, 1980, a bomb exploded in the car of Bassam Shaka‘a, the mayor of Nablus. Nablus is one of the largest cities in the West Bank, a part of historic Palestine that, by then, Israel had militarily occupied for thirteen years.1 At the time, the territory was home to more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians and at least seventeen thousand Israeli Jewish settlers. The latter number had been growing rapidly since the inauguration of a hawkish, right-wing Israeli government three years earlier.2 The attack against Shaka‘a was carried out by members of the Jewish Underground, a hardline offshoot of the fundamentalist settler movement Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”). Gush Emunim embraced the use of violence to promote mass settlement and Jewish sovereignty over what it deemed “the whole land of Israel,” including the West Bank.3 As a result of the attack, Shaka‘a had both of his legs amputated from the knees down. He was targeted that day along with two others: Karim Khalaf, then mayor of Ramallah, and Ibrahim Tawil of the neighboring city of Al-Bireh. All three survived, but Khalaf was also permanently maimed.
Shaka‘a, born to a prominent family in Nablus, had previously been a member of the Arab nationalist Ba‘ath party. He spent time in Egypt and Syria, returning to Nablus in his thirties as a political independent.4 Five years after Shaka‘a’s return, Nablus, like the rest of the West Bank, fell under Introduction
Israeli military rule. The 1967 war (the “Six-Day War” or al-Naksa, “the setback”) displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Many had been rendered refugees following the mass flight and expulsions of the 1948–49 war (Israel’s War of Independence, or al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”), and thus found themselves uprooted for a second time roughly twenty years later. In the wake of Israel’s capture of the West Bank, Jewish Israelis began settling the land almost immediately, first in the form of military outposts facing toward Jordan, where Palestinian commando bases were stationed, and subsequently as full-fledged residential communities. Settlements were built either on land expropriated from private Palestinian owners or on formerly Ottoman-designated miri lands, most of which Palestinians had lived on, cultivated, and used for generations.5
During the first decade of occupation, in what some would describe as a “perplexing” move,6 Israel allowed Palestinian municipal elections in the West Bank. The year was 1976, and, while a previous set of elections for local councils had taken place four years earlier, Israel had recently—and perhaps shortsightedly—expanded the franchise to include women and propertyless men.7 By this time, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had been internationally recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and it was politically ascendant. In towns and cities across the West Bank, local politicians like Shaka‘a swept into office. These leaders openly opposed Israeli military rule and sought Palestinian national self-determination rather than, for example, a reattachment of the West Bank to the neighboring state of Jordan.8 Unlike the mostly pro-Jordanian mayors and municipal council members who had come into office in 1972, the politicians elected in 1976 were, on the whole, younger, less conservative, and better educated; they represented an overt challenge to Israel’s claims over the land.9 While they did not always identify with specific political factions, they were, in general, ideologically supportive of the PLO. Thus, the 1976 local elections resulted in unapologetic Palestinian nationalists gaining formal governing power within historic Palestine for one of the first times in history.10
When my research assistant and I reached Shaka‘a’s house in Nablus in December 2014, we were almost an hour late. One of Shaka‘a’s friends and former colleagues greeted us on our arrival. He cautioned us that Shaka‘a, then eighty-four years old, would need to speak slowly with frequent pauses.
However, his friend assured us, Shaka‘a’s memory was strong, and he was ready to answer our questions.11 As our conversation began, Shaka‘a told us that he had initially planned to boycott the 1976 elections. Much of Nablus had been without services since the previous council had resigned. When asked what convinced him to run, Shaka‘a responded pragmatically: “Nablus was in need of electricity; it was in need of water; it was in need of many services.”12 He described how the municipality was in debt for two electricity generators that the previous council had purchased in an effort to avoid connecting the city to the Israeli grid. In the meantime, Nablus’s residents were struggling to pay their bills, creating a budgetary crisis. In fact, electricity had long been a political issue in Nablus.13 As mayor, Shaka‘a would fend off Israeli pressure to connect the city to Israel’s grid. He would also face regular interference from Israel in his efforts to extend lines to neighboring villages; in a 1982 letter he penned to his colleague in the city of Tulkarem, he recounted how occupation authorities arrested Nablus’s municipal engineers and workers on site.14 In the letter, he described these actions as part of Israel’s broader strategic approach in the West Bank, writing, “all this coincides with the policy to annex the land with the intention to empty it of its population . . . to confront them [other regional and international actors] with a fait accompli.” The nuts and bolts of municipal governance were running up against Israel’s program of gradual, settlement-based annexation. Despite having been elected to office, Shaka‘a realized that his position— heading a major Palestinian municipal council under Israeli occupation—was potentially sensitive. Shaka‘a recalled how, at the time, he had felt compelled to communicate to both Israeli military authorities and to the people of Nablus that “we,” the newly elected council, “are not part of the occupation.” He was tested on this stance even before taking office. In May 1976, Lina alNabulsi, a seventeen-year-old girl, was walking home from school when an Israeli soldier shot and killed her.15 As the city mourned, the Israeli military governor of the West Bank placed a call to Shaka‘a. Although Shaka‘a had not officially begun his term as mayor, the Israeli official ordered him to task municipal staff with scrubbing political graffiti from the walls and removing posters that Palestinians had hung around the city in the wake of al-Nabulsi’s murder. Shaka‘a refused. He recalled telling the Israeli official, “This is why the last municipal council resigned. We will not do the same things. We are here to represent the people, not oppress them.”
Speaking with Shaka‘a, I began to understand that this earlier generation of mayors—their experiences, and the relationships they had with
their occupiers—would shape the ensuing trajectory of Israeli rule in the West Bank. Mayors like Shaka‘a became prominent oppositional actors rather than cooperative intermediaries within Israel’s political regime. Instead of depositing the municipal budget in an Israeli bank, Nablus’s municipal council members stored it in cash dispersed across their own homes. In 1979, after Israel alleged that Shaka‘a made remarks supporting violent Palestinian resistance, he was arrested and threatened with deportation to Jordan.16 The effort was unsuccessful—Shaka‘a appealed the decision to Israel’s High Court of Justice, and mayors across the occupied territories resigned in protest, convincing the Israeli military to drop the expulsion order.17 Shaka‘a was released from prison and defiantly returned to Nablus amid popular celebrations. The Israeli Arab journalist Rafik Halabi summarized the moment: “Now that the military government had reversed itself, the mayor of Nablus was more than a local figure, more than a national one: he had become an emblem, a power to be reckoned with in the West Bank.”18
Ultimately, the capture of municipal institutions by Palestinian opponents of the occupation was short-lived. Shaka‘a, along with other popularly elected Palestinian nationalists, was removed from office and replaced with an Israeli-appointed mayor in 1982. In addition, Israel banned the National Guidance Committee, an important organization of Palestinian business leaders, union representatives, religious leaders, and nationalist mayors, which included Shaka‘a and Khalaf among its members.19 Lessons had been learned. In 1986, Meron Benvenisti, a keen Israeli observer and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, wrote, “Israeli authorities still view independent, elected municipalities as a security and political risk. When residents of the town of Dura . . . petitioned the High Court of Justice and demanded municipal elections, the High Court rejected their petition. The court accepted the authorities’ position that municipal elections in the West Bank were a framework for national struggle and an instrument for the PLO to undertake subversive activities. Thus, the Palestinian community remains disenfranchised, even at the local level, and devoid of any autonomous authority.”20
I found myself in Nablus again in July 2019, wondering if Palestinian municipalities could ever provide a “framework for national struggle”
again. Bassam Shaka‘a had passed away just days prior. Posters featuring his portrait blanketed the city, while an enormous banner in his honor was draped from the multistory municipality building. His funeral procession drew thousands. In an environment of enduring Palestinian political polarization, it was notable that Shaka‘a was eulogized by leaders from Palestine’s two most powerful and disparate political factions: Fatah (Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini, or the Palestinian National Liberation Movement) and Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement).21
The level of solidarity expressed after Shaka‘a’s death surprised me at first. However, it soon reminded me of an earlier conversation with Hilary Rantisi, a Palestinian-American colleague and friend, about her late father, Audeh. Audeh Rantisi was elected deputy mayor of the city of Ramallah in 1976—the same elections that brought Shaka‘a to office. After the car bomb attack against Karim Khalaf, Rantisi—a reverend and a refugee from Lydda, a city from which the Israeli military had forcibly expelled tens of thousands of Palestinians in 1948—assumed the position of mayor of Ramallah.22 Israel placed Rantisi under house arrest and targeted him with movement restrictions several times, but his defiance revealed itself in his sense of humor and sharp moral provocations, both of which often confused and disarmed Israeli soldiers. At the time, Hilary mentioned how all political factions and prominent families from Ramallah were represented at Audeh’s funeral, paralleling what I would later see with Shaka‘a. As we spoke in her office on that fall day in 2017, Hilary reflected on how a number of her Palestinian friends and acquaintances had recently expressed nostalgia for the municipalities of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Shaka‘a, Khalaf, Tawil, and figures such as her father had been in office. “Now,” she remarked, “many mayors are just perceived as technocrats.”
Indeed, the environment changed dramatically over the ensuing decades. Israeli military rule and state-backed settlement of the West Bank continued unabated. However, unlike Shaka‘a and his contemporaries, the mayors, municipal council members, and local staff whose activities form the empirical basis for this book worked under a new intermediary—the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA), a vast organization created in the mid-1990s to take over select governing responsibilities in Palestinian communities in the occupied territories. The way Hilary described these newer generations of mayors stayed with me. Back in Nablus, I wondered
if her impression that they were “just technocrats” was true. Had Israel and the PA successfully muted resistance from the corridors of Palestinian local government? Had the office of mayor been transformed from a platform for nationalist mobilization into a depoliticized provider of services, or simply another cog in a patronage-driven bureaucracy? Might the municipalities ever be transformed once again?
UPGRADING THE INDIRECT RULE REGIME
UNDER ISRAEL’S OCCUPATION
Since Israel gained control of the West Bank in 1967, it has, like the other empires and states that preceded it, experimented with various forms of rule. From the earliest days of the occupation, Israel attempted to delegate certain functions of government to Palestinians whom it hoped would serve as reliable agents or, at the very least, help sustain Israel’s regime.23 However, several years after the defiant mayors elected in 1976 were deposed, the outbreak of the first intifada—a mass uprising in the occupied territories— offered proof that Israel’s cooptation efforts had not quelled Palestinian resistance and thus had not stabilized Israeli military rule. The intifada represented a culmination of Palestinian nationalist mobilization against the occupation; Palestinians coordinated on an unprecedented scale in a largely nonviolent resistance campaign that included the imposition of roadblocks, boycotts, strikes, and mass protests.24 Israel responded to the uprising with force; an estimated 1,356 Palestinians and 253 Israelis were killed by the end of 1994.25
On the heels of this unprecedented display of Palestinian resistance, Israel’s strategy to rule the West Bank underwent a dramatic transformation. The Oslo Accords—a set of agreements between Israel and the PLO signed in the 1993–1995 period—created a new, expansive, Palestinian governing structure with political authority centralized under the dominant party, Fatah, and its leader, the longtime chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat. In 1994, the PA was officially inaugurated and assumed responsibility for certain aspects of governance in Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In particular, much of the day-to-day policing of Palestinian communities was delegated to the new Palestinian security apparatus—a set of institutions that formed a vital and oversized part of the PA and were predominantly populated by Fatah loyalists. Following
Israeli military withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Jericho, Arafat, after nearly a full lifetime in exile, arrived triumphantly in Gaza, where he would soon be elected the first president of the new PA.
Instead of attempting to restrain municipal leaders, Israel’s preferred intermediary would become the executive branch of the PA, including its policing and security organs, under the one-party control of Fatah. In cultivating such a relationship, Israel was pursuing a strategy of indirect rule, an approach used by dominant powers—empires, colonial states, postcolonial states, or specific governments within them—that do not want to or cannot, except at great cost, govern some subset of the population that they control. Under such arrangements, rule is carried out in part through collaboration with intermediaries from the “native,” indigenous, or preexisting population.26 Israeli continued its military rule over the West Bank and Gaza, in conjunction with the state-supported project to settle the territories—and the West Bank, in particular—with Jewish Israeli citizens. However, Israel entrusted the PA to take on the role of managing daily civil governance tasks within major Palestinian cities and towns, while the land surrounding these population centers was increasingly fragmented and hemmed in by Jewish Israeli settlements, Israeli firing zones, Israeli-designated state lands, and Israeli infrastructure built to serve the settlers and the military occupation.
The thousands of cheering Palestinians who greeted Arafat on his arrival in Gaza masked the stark divisions that the Oslo Accords had introduced into the Palestinian public. Numerous Palestinians did not cheer on the Oslo Accords or the creation of the new Palestinian governing authority. After all, the PA’s authority was heavily circumscribed, both geographically and functionally. It was to have an elected president and legislature, but it did not control any geographic borders, thus it had no externally facing defensive capacity, nor was its central government empowered to collect many of its own taxes. It could not adopt its own national currency unless “mutually agreed” on with Israel, nor could it pursue urban planning or rural development throughout most of the West Bank without Israeli approval.27 In the over 60 percent of the West Bank known as “Area C,” Palestinian development—not to mention the presence of Palestinian police forces—was all but totally forbidden.28 Finally, although the PA was established as a transitory arrangement, there was no guarantee that Palestinians would obtain statehood at the conclusion of the five-year “interim” period.
Influential political factions from both within and outside the PLO rejected the deal; critiques arose from politicians, academics, and militants alike, many of whom had decried arrangements for Palestinian “autonomy” without sovereignty since its reference in the 1978 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. The famed Palestinian scholar and writer Edward Said called the Declaration of Principles “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.”29 Ten ideologically disparate Palestinian opposition groups—including PLO members, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Al-Jabha al-Sha‘biyya li-Tahrir Filastin, PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Al-Jabha al-Dimuqratiyya li-Tahrir Filastin, DFLP), and non-PLO groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—formed a nominal alliance based on their shared opposition to the Oslo Accords and their commitment to the continuation of armed resistance.30 Fatah, for its part, was riven by internal divisions but soon came to be associated with al-sulta (“the authority”) rather than al-muqawama (“the resistance”).
HOW INDIRECT RULE SHAPES LOCAL GOVERNMENT
The creation of the PA introduced a new regime—or a new system of formal rules and informal expectations that determine the distribution of power within the political system.31 It was one which, for some Palestinians at the time, hinted at an eventual path to Palestinian self-rule but which, for others, foreshadowed a reconfigured and more stable form of Israeli domination. Existing Palestinian municipalities in the West Bank and Gaza were subsumed under the new PA structure, while many new ones were also created. The central focus of this book is to develop an understanding of how Palestinians have engaged in everyday, local governance under this regime. This casts a spotlight on municipal-level actors, in particular—mayors, town and city councils, and their staff—while also illuminating how the local is connected to the national. From the historical and empirical record of the specific case of the West Bank, I develop a theory of how indigenous actors will pursue the core functions of states and governments—namely, coercion, extraction, and distribution—in such settings and some of the challenges they will face in doing so. In brief, I find that systems of indirect rule, when part of a regime of domination, produce different incentives and challenges for the governance projects of indigenous actors. Those
perceived as regime intermediaries are likely to enjoy resource advantages yet suffer reputational deficits, while those perceived as regime opponents will likely benefit from reputational advantages while facing resource deficits. These conditions, in turn, shape the nature and type of governance strategies they pursue. In moving from the case of the Israeli-occupied West Bank toward more general propositions, I contend that my findings are most likely to be reproduced in contexts where indirect rule is part of a regime that promotes the domination of one ethnic, religious, racial, or other identity-based group over another while, nonetheless, facing considerable, sustained resistance.
First, I examine the precursors to, and origins of, this regime in the West Bank. I argue that the particular form of indirect rule that emerged from the Oslo Accords differed from earlier variants pursued by Ottoman, British, and Jordanian powers in Palestine and how it also diverged markedly from the strategy pursued by Israel itself before the 1990s. These regimes also depended on the delegation, or outsourcing, of local governance to indigenous Palestinian intermediaries. Tasks entrusted to the local level included the extraction of both taxes and labor and the provision of certain distributive goods. These earlier powers experienced both success and failure in their efforts to coopt local elites. However, I document how Israel differed from earlier empires and states in its approach to the West Bank due to its unique goal of exclusive annexation—namely, its intent to assert indefinite control over the territory of the West Bank, control that was to be strengthened through state-sponsored settlement to “right-people”32 the land while politically excluding its existing population. Thus, I find that Israel’s iterated attempts at ruling the West Bank via Palestinian intermediaries were distinctive in that they were driven by this logic.
Israel’s approach to the occupied West Bank had two effects. First, it shaped the trajectory of institutional design such that the internal policing of the Palestinian population would become a predominant function of the Fatah-led PA, in turn facilitating Jewish settlement and territorial expansion. This contrasted with earlier imperial and state rulers in modern Palestine, where coercive capacity mainly rested with the center. Under these earlier empires and states, there was occasional but, overall, little formal reliance on Palestinian intermediaries for securing order through coercion and violence. Second, Israel’s goal of exclusive annexation—and thus its need for a political regime that secured the domination of one racialized,
ethnoreligious group over another—meant that Palestinian intermediaries would incur substantial reputational risks from collaboration.33 These two conditions would influence the governance strategies of Palestinian mayors and the municipal councils they headed.
The empirical analysis in the second half of the book focuses on a time of heightened vulnerability for Israel’s rule in the West Bank. To summarize these conditions in more general terms, this period combined a renewal of collaboration between the dominant state (Israel) and its preferred intermediary (the Fatah-affiliated leadership of the PA) while the intermediary faced mounting challenges to its legitimacy. The fissures in the indirect-rule regime had burst open with the outbreak of the second intifada—a much more deadly Palestinian uprising, which lasted from 2000 until 2005— leading to the temporary collapse of Israel-PA collaboration.34 It was during this time when—for the first time since the 1976 polls that had brought an earlier generation of regime opponents to power—competitive elections were held for municipal office. Both Fatah and its main opponents— Hamas, PFLP, and independents and smaller parties—participated. As a result of these elections, challengers to the Israeli-PA regime would obtain formal governing power in Palestine for the first time. Following Hamas’s landmark victory in general elections held in January 2006, Israel and international donors recommitted to strengthening collaboration with the Palestinian security apparatus, all branches of which ultimately answered to Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Thus, the newly elected municipal councils in towns and cities across the West Bank found themselves governing in an environment of extreme political polarization.
How did Palestinian mayors and their municipalities approach governance in such a setting? Drawing on geocoded, local-level data on the political, economic, and security environment in the West Bank, an original and detailed data set of 107 municipal budgets from 2006 to 2012, and over fifty interviews conducted in small and large towns across the West Bank from 2014 to 2019, I analyze the activities of local governments, comparing those controlled by mayors affiliated with the regime intermediary, Fatah, with those led by its opponents. I find that nuanced relationships can develop between indigenous politicians at the local level. Indeed, in general terms, some will align with intermediaries who cooperate with the dominant state, while others will represent opponents who resist the state’s project of domination. However, even in environments of sharp political
polarization, blurry boundaries can characterize individual relationships between intermediaries and opponents on the ground, many of whom live in the same neighborhoods, share familial and professional networks, and are sometimes even friends. At the local level, ideological differences may even fade into the background at times.
Nonetheless, my analysis shows that local politicians representing Fatah versus those representing its opponents pursued distinct approaches toward local governance. I find evidence that municipalities led by Fatah underperformed their opponents in mobilizing revenue from their constituents while also forbearing from using the party’s control over PA police forces to do so. Meanwhile, Fatah-affiliated towns took advantage of malleable budget constraints to spend relatively more on broadly desired, collective goods, such as electricity and water, than their opposition-led counterparts. On the other hand, I find qualitative evidence that opposition-led towns, in general, mobilized voluntary contributions from constituents and drew on other creative measures to reduce spending. Hamas-led towns, in particular, were more likely to increase their revenues over time and exercise fiscal discipline.
From these findings, I build the general argument that indirect rule induces intermediaries, such as Fatah, to perform politically risky governance tasks among their own communities. In particular, the dominant state usually depends disproportionately on the intermediary for one of the following two core capacities: the use of noneconomic, coercive force to police the indirectly ruled population, or the extraction of material resources or revenue from the population.35 This introduces reputational costs for individual politicians and local-level actors who are associated with the intermediary and, thus, cooperation with the regime. In settings where the intermediary’s legitimacy with the indigenous population is already weak, I argue that intermediary-affiliated actors will be more likely to reduce, or forbear from, the politically risky task (i.e., coercion or extraction) that is less central to their relationship with the dominant state. Further, intermediary-affiliated actors are more likely than their opponents to use distributive goods to enhance their local reputations.
I also develop an argument about how indigenous opponents of the regime, such as Hamas and others, will approach local governance. In general, these regime challengers may have fewer opportunities or fewer incentives to participate in governance via formal institutions. A subset of regime
INTRODUCTION
opponents may either capture formal political office or pursue “rebel governance” projects in the midst of armed conflict. In either case, they will find themselves in a different position than intermediaries. Relative to regime intermediaries, opponents of the regime face little to no pressure to fulfill the demands of the dominant state. Furthermore, opponents will often possess a legitimacy advantage over the intermediary. However, I argue, due to their ideological position, they are likely to face resource challenges when trying to develop the capacity to govern. They may face direct repression, sanctions, or other punitive measures carried out by the dominant state, the intermediary, or like-minded allies. Thus, my findings suggest that indigenous opponents of the regime will structure their governance programs around overcoming these resource constraints. This may mean increasing their capacity to raise revenue from their constituents or finding costefficient ways of achieving their productive and distributive goals.
CONTRIBUTION
Scholarship on Palestine, with rare and important exceptions, has not been fully integrated into mainstream political science. Those exceptions have enhanced our understanding of the role of civic associations in regime survival;36 how movement structure,37 inclusion in state institutions,38 and mobility restrictions39 shape resistance strategies and participation; how both time and movement interact to project power and structure Palestinian life in urban areas40; and how Palestine can assist us in theorizing about individualized (noncollective) types of regime opposition.41 Dana El Kurd, in particular, has analyzed how the Palestinian Authority has reduced Palestinian political mobilization in the Oslo era, which she argues is explained by its reliance on international support.42 El Kurd’s emphasis on the polarizing effects of the post-Oslo regime in the occupied territories finds echoes in some of the local-level political dynamics explored in this manuscript. Further, a body of important work by political scientists has explored local-level organization and mobilization among Palestinian refugees in the diaspora, examining diverse outcomes including the formation of diasporic social and political institutions across countries43, militant group socialization and recruitment,44 the enforcement of property rights in Lebanon’s refugee camps,45 and the use of information and communication technology to cultivate community protection.46 Of particular theoretical
“With nuance, rigor, and fascinating revelations based on original data collected in the West Bank, Diana B. Greenwald analyzes how Palestinian mayors navigate being stuck in the ‘middle’ of Israeli occupation, Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and the pragmatic needs of local constituencies. Her book is the first comprehensive account of how these mayors develop a political logic for survival. Using deeply moving interviews and granular local data, this book is a valuable contribution to the field of Palestinian studies and the thriving body of research on comparative local governance.”
Nadya Hajj, author of Networked Refugees: Palestinian Reciprocity and Remittances in the Digital Age
“In a work of meticulous scholarship, Greenwald uses ‘indirect rule,’ both historically and theoretically, to offer an unprecedented study of municipal governance in the Israel-dominated West Bank. She complements a thorough analysis of revenue and spending with fascinating in-depth interviews. Her volume documents the corrupting results of Israel’s instrumentalization of the Palestinian Authority while explaining surprising successes Hamas-affiliated councils had in mobilizing their constituencies. This valuable book highlights the barriers to Palestinian agency and its potential.”
Ian Lustick, author of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality
“Mayors in the Middle is a crucial, timely text that outlines the ways local politics has played a role in the Palestinian national movement. Using cutting-edge data, Greenwald skillfully demonstrates how the Israeli state has created a unique type of indirect rule in the West Bank—affecting the day-to-day lives of Palestinians and the trajectory of their struggle for self-determination.”
Dana El Kurd, author of Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine
“Greenwald breaks new ground by delving into the consequences of Israeli indirect rule in the West Bank. She demonstrates how Fatah mayors try to overcome the reputational damage of cooperating with Israel by refraining from extraction and boosting debt-financed spending. Meanwhile, opposition municipalities exhibit superior revenue-raising capacities. This book is an important addition to the literature on Palestinian politics.”
Melani Cammett, author of Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon
Diana B. Greenwald is an assistant professor of political science at the City College of New York.
Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics
Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns
Cover image: AP Photo / Nasser Ishtayeh