The term fascinating can sometimes feel overused in academic circles and in descriptions of new research. But, in the case of Kareem Rabie's Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited, there really is no better way to describe this thought-provoking study. Rabie indeed provides a fascinating and crucial look at the private development—Rawabi (a planned city built for Palestinians in the West Bank)—to demonstrate the direction Palestinian state-building is taking, how Palestine is being integrated into the global economy, and the impacts of these trends on Palestinian politics and resistance. Rawabi is a microcosm and a precedent, one manifestation of the ways in which Palestine is a state-building project within a neoliberal framework, and how a number of vested interests are using the economy as a means for political stabilization. Rabie relies on an ethnographic study, with insights from Rawabi the corporation, the Palestinian Authority and its officials, and the villagers impacted by this development.
The takeaways for Rabie's study, however, go beyond the Palestine case. As Rabie notes, this book speaks to “general relationships between states, aid, and national economics” (11). Palestine is not so different, the author argues, from other neoliberal states where governments have abdicated responsibility for social services, and ceded ground to private interests, often at the expense of public accountability. Expulsion, he contends, is “central to formation of global capitalism” (14), and “private-public partnerships might be contemporary language for the same kinds of political economic relations at the heart of colonialism, settler colonialism, and enclosure” (31). In my view, this is an essential claim that merits greater discussion. Scholars who build on this work have opportunities for comparative analysis in very interesting directions to explore the lines of differentiation between neoliberal state erosion more generally as a global trend and where colonialism, with its inherent logic of replacement, exists. There are echoes of similar lived experiences and processes across both contexts, but how they differ is also an important question.
As a political scientist reading this, I was struck by the parallels to a number of topic areas within my own discipline, including work on authoritarian practices, state capacity, and institutional formalization. Rabie's attempt to push back on research that looks at Palestine only through the lens of occupation, ignoring the “complexity, geographies, time horizon, or actors complicit in Israeli control over Palestine,” (201) reminded me of the literature on authoritarian practices and the concept of “transregional authoritarian logistics space” (TALS). This literature would be very useful in conceptualizing and naming the processes Rabie describes, including how national politics is both international and local; how other actors aside from the “state” impact land, sovereignty, and resistance, such as corporations and nongovernmental organizations; how Rawabi's management as well as the Palestinian Authority (PA) engage in obfuscation of information and disempowerment of neighboring villages to sabotage accountability to the Palestinian public; and more. Reading Rabie within this framework would also help correct the narrative, to some degree, on the issue of the Palestinian public. Rabie writes that “powerful publics do not tend to exist within Palestine,” when, in fact, mobilizing capacity and ability to make demands—and force concession—did once exist (75). They were indeed actively destroyed. If seen through the lens of authoritarian practices, such a dynamic—that is, political pacification as the key outcome of Rawabi—becomes much more central.
In addition, many of Rabie's insights brought existing work on state capacity to mind. The author convincingly describes the way in which the state has ceded space to private forces, retreated from its role in planning, imposing laws and channeling public will more generally. Instead, the PA has decentralized itself as it empowers local institutions. Nevertheless, Rabie also describes how both local and national governance are coming under the control of the Ministry of Local Government, which then enables large projects in terms of national priority. This leads to the question: Is the PA disempowering or circumventing the public and institutions which might hold it accountable? Or is it indeed in retreat, as it takes fuller form as a neoliberal state? Here the literature on state capacity might have clarified how both dynamics exist at the same time, by using concepts of coercive versus infrastructural capacity. The concept of coercive power or capacity encompasses the range of actions that state elites can undertake without routine negotiation with civil society groups, while infrastructural power is the capacity of the state to enforce policy throughout its entire territory. When viewed through these terms, the PA has clearly built a good deal of coercive capacity, through repression and co-optation mechanisms, while simultaneously eroding its infrastructural power in key policy realms—such as housing—in order to surrender space to private entities.
Finally, the literature on institutional formalization, particularly the work of Palestinian scholar Nadya Hajj, provides an interesting juxtaposition to Rabie's findings. Hajj finds that in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, despite the transitional nature of the camp and lack of formalized institutions or classic state authority, Fatah (as a non-state hegemon) was able to engage in the process of nation-state building given sufficient capital for local investment. Private capital facilitated formalization of property rights and maintained the cohesion of the camp. In the case of the West Bank in the last decade, similar processes are leading to the erosion of national will, a lack of unity amongst the middle class, and widespread political pacification, according to Rabie. It would be interesting to read the two studies in dialogue and understand why these two contexts, despite both being Palestinian communities, arrive at such different outcomes.
This book is about Palestine, specifically the West Bank, the Ramallah bubble, and the ways in which national politics has collapsed into narrower relationships. But, the questions raised and the practices described in the study go much further, beyond the scope of this particular case. Palestine Is Throwing a Party can contribute to a wide range of literatures and, as mentioned previously, across disciplines. It should prove crucial reading to all those interested in the future of Palestine, modern manifestations of the state as a “node in the global political economy” (19), as well as political economy approaches more broadly.
