This book explores the development of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from a liberation movement to a national authority, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Based on intensive fieldwork in the West Bank, Gaza and Cairo, Nigel Parsons analyzes Palestinian internal politics and their institutional-building by looking at the development of the PLO. Drawing on interviews with leading figures in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, delegates to the negotiations with Israel, and the Palestinian political opposition, it is a timely account of the Israel/Palestine conflict from a Palestinian political perspective.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank explores the manner in which the Palestinian Authority’s performative acts affect and shape the lives and subjective identities of those in its vicinity in the occupied West Bank. The nature of Palestinians’ statelessness has to contend with the rituals of statecraft that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its Palestinian functionaries engage in. These rituals are also economically maintained by an international donor community and are vehemently challenged by Palestinian activists, antagonistic to the prevalence of the statist agenda in Palestine. Conceptually, the understanding of the PA’s ‘theater of statecraft’ is inspired by Judith Butler’s conception of performativity as one that encompasses several repetitive and ritual performative acts. The authors explore what they refer to as the ‘fuzzy state' (personified in the form and conduct of the PA) looks like for those living it, from the vantage point of PA institutions, NGOs, international representative offices, and activists. Methodologically, the book adopts an ethnographic approach, by way of interviews and observations in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank makes an important and long-due intervention by integrating performance studies and politics to suggest an understanding of the theatrics of woeful statecraft in Palestine. The book is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in the study of the state, International Relations and Politics, Palestine Studies, and the Middle East.

Tourism in Palestine has been receiving an increasingly important profile given its economic and religious importance and the significant role it plays in Israeli-Palestinian relations, representation of Palestinian statehood and identity, and wider Middle Eastern politics. Nevertheless, Palestine, like much of the Middle East as a whole, remains extremely underrepresented in tourism literature. This title aims to fill this void by being the first book dedicated to exploring the significance of tourism in relationship to Palestine. The book examines the role of tourism in Palestine at three main levels. First, it provides an overview of destination management and marketing issues for the tourism industry in Palestine and addresses not only the visitor markets and the economic significance of tourism but also the realities of the difficulties of destination management, marketing and promotion of the Palestinian state. Second, it provides a series chapters and case studies that interrogate not only the various forms of tourism in Palestine but also its economic, social, environmental and spiritual importance. This section also conveys a dimension to tourism in Palestine that is not usually appreciated in the Western mainstream media. The third section indicates the way in which tourism in Palestine highlights broader questions and debates in tourism studies and the way in which travel in the region is framed in wider discourses. A significant dimension of the book is the attention it gives to the different voices of stakeholders in Palestinian tourism at varying levels of scale. This timely volume will offer the reader significant insight into the challenges and issues of tourism in this area now and in the future. It will benefit those interested in tourism, Middle East studies, politics, economics, development studies and geography.

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide and is central to European policies of outsourcing migration management. Hybrid Political Order and the Politics of Uncertainty is the first book to critically and comprehensively explore the parallels between the country’s engagement with the recent Syrian refugee influx and the more protracted Palestinian presence. Drawing on fieldwork, qualitative case-studies, and critical policy analysis, it questions the dominant idea that the haphazardness, inconsistency, and fragmentation of refugee governance are only the result of forced displacement or host state fragility and the related capacity problems. It demonstrates that the endemic ambiguity that determines refugee governance also results from a lack of political will to create coherent and comprehensive rules of engagement to address refugee ‘crises.’ Building on emerging literatures in the fields of critical refugee studies, hybrid governance, and ignorance studies, it proposes an innovative conceptual framework to capture the spatial, temporal, and procedural dimensions of the uncertainty that refugees face and to tease out the strategic components of the reproduction and extension of such informality, liminality, and exceptionalism. In developing the notion of a ‘politics of uncertainty,’ ambiguity is explored as a component of a governmentality that enables the control, exploitation, and expulsion of refugees. Introduction Chapter of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This meticulously curated edited volume presents an assemblage of insightful, critical, and contemporary perspectives on how Israeli domination has been sustained and reproduced in new forms and means using various mechanisms and techniques of control, coloniality, and settler colonialism. Based on original empirical fieldwork, the contributors to this book adopt interdisciplinary and decolonial approaches in their examination of the intricate functions and structures of domination that permeate Palestinian life by illuminating the power dynamics at play and revealing the mechanisms that sustain the settler-colonial regime. This book identifies sites of colonial control and domination exerted on Palestine by Israel, and demonstrates how these sites of control are also sites of Palestinian resistance. The first section explores the political sites of control by focusing on governmentality, institutions, and technologies and mechanisms of control including how Israel manages access to health, life and death. The second section examines the economic mechanisms of exploitation, dispossession, and de-development including banking, taxation and the relationships between finance capital, aid and military occupation. The third section turns attention to environmental sites of control, focusing on land, indigeneity, space and racial capitalism. Finally, section four scrutinizes the intellectual sites of control, highlighting how norms, narratives, and knowledge production perpetuate domination.

In opposition to the PA, liberal as well as Islamic social forces promote policies of protest and resistance, through media tools, against the authoritarian policies of the PA. The media is viewed as a public sphere in which these forces compete. Media institutions play an important role in setting the parameters of communication in processes of state building: promoting public debate and forming public spheres influence the modes of statecivil society relations. Combining concepts of political communication with social movement theory, the author examines the extent to which public opinion plays a role in determining the character of the political regime. The rising tension between the Palestinian Authority's attempts to deepen its control over society and the reaction to this development by opposition groups informs the analysis of each civil institution: the role of NGOs, the Islamic movement, the women's movement and Palestinian feminism, and the liberal-democratic intellectual elite, are all assessed through their media institutions and communication policies, to reveal the character of the emerging Palestinian public sphere.

This book presents a coherent picture of the origins of the Palestinian problem. The author offers an analysis of factionalism in Arab society, with a detailed examination of the social and political history of the Palestinian Arabs between 1939 and 1948. Khalaf weaves together the socio-economic, sociological, political, and politico-military dimensions that have led to social disintegration. He focuses on the role of the urban elite in perpetuating factionalism and using nationalism as a weapon to deflect opposition during a period of rapid social change. For those who are concerned with peace in Israel, the book provides a meaningful historical appreciation of a highly-charged, emotionally-laden conflict.

Sound policy making and regulatory policy are critical for responsive, efficient government and public service delivery. This report analyses the institutional and policy framework for policy making and regulatory policy in the Palestinian Authority.

The Six Day War was the climax in the deterioration of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This study deals with such issues as: the relevance of the Filastin problem as key to understanding the descent to war; the pivotal Syrian water struggle as a key motivating factor; and, the Hashemite regime's response to Palestinians' heightened national awakening.