This siege will intensify to convince us to choose a harmless slavery, but with total freedom of choice.
Mahmoud Darwish, ‘A State of Siege’ (2002)Western peacebuilding in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) has been subjected to extensive and frequent criticisms, particularly that there is a contradiction in promoting Palestinian institutions, governance structures, and economic development in preparation for sovereignty in the context of Israeli occupation and colonial practices.Footnote 1 It stands further accused of failing to deliver peace.Footnote 2 However, despite writing pieces myself that argue this,Footnote 3 I am no longer convinced there is a contradiction. My argument here is that if Western donor-led peacebuilding is understood as a form of counterinsurgency whose goal is to secure a population, then the contradictions vanish, and we see that peacebuilding has not failed – in fact, quite the contrary, it has largely succeeded. Explicitly relabelling peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the oPt provides us with a ‘deep grammar’ to comprehend policies and processes that on first glance appear contradictory when viewed through the self-proclaimed benign peacebuilding lens, but are not when looked at through the lens of counterinsurgency with its unashamed focus on stabilisation. Modern counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) is based on the idea that successfully securing a population and immunising it against unrest requires serious and extensive strategies in the realm of governance, development, and security. Western donor-led peacebuilding activities also focus on these spheres – albeit with the proclaimed positive goal of developing mechanisms to avoid and/or reduce violent conflict and build a sustainable peace. The commonalities in the philosophical underpinnings of, and policy developments in, counterinsurgency doctrine and Western conceptions of peacebuilding are stark – it is therefore necessary to unpack them and subject them to critical analysis, particularly through a reconstruction of their impact in concrete examples.
The Palestinian struggle for self-determination is hugely significant in the history of insurgency and counterinsurgency.Footnote 4 The authors of the RAND study of counterinsurgency credit the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) with developing a form of highly visible popular insurgency – particularly represented through the ‘propaganda of the deed’ – that raised awareness of their struggle to the outside world.Footnote 5 Furthermore, the first intifada (1987–1993), which was based on grassroots methods of mass demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts (tax and consumer), has been regarded as a model form of popular resistance.Footnote 6 The RAND authors argue that Palestine continues to play a key role in global insurgency as a powerful recruiting tool for Jihadist groups.Footnote 7 This latter fact might possibly lead one to the common sense conclusion that if this is indeed the case, then to resolve this issue would be in the interests of those who seek global stability. But this is only true if one believes that the global stability being sought is to be underpinned by justice, equality, and self-determination, and there is nothing to suggest that this is what global counterinsurgency strategies seek to achieve. In fact, they seek to manage and suppress the instability that results from manifestations of inequality and repression, to control it not resolve it – because to do so would require a reconfiguration of global power to allow local populations to decide their own developmental and political futures.Footnote 8 This is a solution that global counterinsurgency actors cannot countenance. Alliances with local elites also ensure that these strategies become deeply embedded in the local political economy, as we shall see in the case of the oPt.
People who argue that Palestine is but one example in an unstable, unequal, and repressive world, that gets far too much academic and media coverage, miss the point. And yet it is true, as John Collins argues, that ‘the global importance of Palestine seems to be increasing in inverse proportion to the amount of territory controlled by Palestinians’.Footnote 9 The two reasons he posits for this are: firstly, that Palestinians are subject to extreme methods of control and annihilation (which he identifies as settler colonialism, securitisation, and the ‘war on terror’), and secondly, that the Palestinians are a key symbol in the struggle for global justice.Footnote 10 Palestine is internationally significant for the reason that it remains one of the last anti-colonial struggles in a period regarded as postcolonial, against a state which has the support of the world's last remaining superpower and which invokes a moral rationale based on the long history of oppression suffered by the Jewish people. For this reason the competing narratives of suffering and quest for self-determination can often displace and replace a structural analysis; this article, however, posits the case for the necessity of the latter over a focus on the former. It takes as its starting point that the Israel-Palestine conflict is fundamentally a struggle over land which pits a powerful state against a stateless people, and which has created a vicious cycle of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Israel's counterinsurgency strategies against the Palestinians involves the use of ‘kinetic’ techniques (that is, ‘killing power’)Footnote 11 that covers direct military intervention;Footnote 12 extensive repression through mass incarceration, detention without trial, torture, and house demolitionsFootnote 13 as well as targeted assassinations and collective punishment.Footnote 14 However, Israel has also developed sophisticated pacification techniques that involve methods of population control such as ‘stratified citizenship’ and restrictions on movement, marriage, and residency;Footnote 15 a closure regime of checkpoints, barriers, and the Separation Wall;Footnote 16 and the use of local proxies and collaborators.Footnote 17 And it is within this context, that the usual activities in the peacebuilding toolbox – statebuilding, security sector reform, democracy promotion, private sector economic promotion, and civil society support – have been pursued. The central argument of this article is that peacebuilding as counterinsurgency operates as another layer of pacification techniques that have complimented and meshed with the structures of domination and repression created by Israel.
In order to expand this thesis, the article is split into three sections. The first section outlines what I mean by peacebuilding as counterinsurgency by exploring the symbiosis in the philosophy and methods of COIN and peacebuilding. Section two looks at Israeli counterinsurgency and repression in the oPt versus Palestinian insurgency and resistance. The third section charts Western peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the oPt through an analysis of development assistance, governance strategies, and security coordination – and how these have meshed with Israel's methods of control, while also playing a crucial role in creating a new political economy existing side by side with a colonial peace. This political economy of colonial peace gives life to the sentiments in the epigraph provided by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian's national poet, that repression and choice are not polar opposites, but rather they are two sides of the same coin. The chapter concludes by pointing to a crucial contradiction in these two interlocking methods of control therefore holding to the principle that repression will always provoke resistance.
Securing the population: understanding peacebuilding as counterinsurgency
Until relatively recently, discussions of counterinsurgency operations and doctrine were limited to military strategists and historians. However, it is now ‘fashionable again’, as noted by David Kilcullen, an influential theorist of counterinsurgency and from 2005–6 chief strategist in the US State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Kilcullen argues that ‘classical counterinsurgency focuses on securing the population rather than destroying the enemy’.Footnote 18 The underlying rationale is to instil acquiescence and ensure control. Counterinsurgency techniques have a long and extensive history as a method of control. The colonial powers used them in an attempt to crush anti-colonial movements within their empires, and the US utilised them during the Cold War to control and defeat nationalist and socialist movements that challenged its economic and strategic interests. In the now post-Cold War and (largely) postcolonial world, they have remained central to the global control strategies pursued by the US and its allies – but have been further enhanced and developed. Overt codifications of the doctrine distil lessons from past counterinsurgency interventions remodelled for the twenty-first-century conflict environment largely defined by strategic defence documents (which elaborate on the use of other forms of power in addition to military intervention).Footnote 19 The objective is ‘to manage the tempo of activity, the level of violence, and the degree of stability in the environment’.Footnote 20 This is not to suggest, however, that intense levels of violence are not a logical and necessary corollary of modern COIN operations because direct violence still plays a crucial role if and when structural methods of stabilisation fail.Footnote 21 ‘Winning hearts and minds’ is often portrayed as a ‘soft’ approach, but this is a misnomer.
The key goal of the counterinsurgent is not to impose order but to achieve ‘collaboration towards a set of shared objectives’.Footnote 22 The 2009 US Government Counterinsurgency Guide therefore argues for the primacy of non-military means: ‘COIN is a complex effort that integrates the full range of civilian and military agencies. It is often more population-centric (focused on securing and controlling a given population or populations) than enemy-centric (focused on defeating a particular enemy group).’Footnote 23 Modern COIN doctrine thus seeks to successfully immunise countries against uprisings by ensuring control over the economic, political, and military spheres through development aid, supporting sympathetic elites, and military assistance.
This coheres with the concepts and practices of peacebuilding strategy as expressed through documents such as ‘An Agenda for Peace’ (1992); ‘A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility’ (2004); and ‘In Larger Freedom’ (2005) – and as implemented through the gamut of peacebuilding activities undertaken by Western donors and international organisations.Footnote 24 From the late 1990s, the relationship between military force and peacebuilding activities was overtly codified through their fusion in peace support operations (PSOs) in the pursuit of what Michael Pugh has labelled ‘an aggressive peace’.Footnote 25 Indeed, the 2009 US Government Counterinsurgency Guide posits that ‘[t]he capabilities required for COIN may be very similar to those required for peacekeeping operations, humanitarian assistance, stabilization operations, and development assistance missions.’Footnote 26 In constructing the ‘three pillars of counterinsurgency’ (security, political, economic), Kilcullen incorporates best practices from all these examples and compares the process of developing the ‘pillars’ as akin to conducting a USAID conflict assessment.Footnote 27 Pugh also notes that John Mackinlay, researcher of UK imperial counterinsurgency (and one of the authors of the RAND counterinsurgency study, referred to above), favoured PSOs being modified and implemented to defeat what he regarded as a ‘global insurgency that had links to terrorism’.Footnote 28 These all indicate a ‘deeply entrenched and necessary articulation between globalised militarised practices and transnational neoliberal governance’.Footnote 29
To posit that there is a structural symbiosis between the principles and goals of peacebuilding and counterinsurgency should not be controversial; many Western states openly express that their international development strategies (particularly in what is commonly referred to in donor parlance as ‘fragile states’) are working to advance counterinsurgency. And we can trace the echoes of such ideas to imperial power in the early twentieth century as encapsulated in the British Colonial Development Act of 1929.Footnote 30 In response to a tsunami of anti-colonial insurgencies against imperial rule, the British developed a strategy designed to restrict independence and ensure continued British control.Footnote 31 Britain's manipulation of Egyptian and Iraqi politics from the 1920s to 1950s, for instance, was designed to prevent economic and foreign policies that would threaten Britain's interests in the region.Footnote 32 In the case of the US, development assistance was explicitly regarded as playing a key role in its global counterinsurgency anti-Communist strategies and this was solidified through the creation of inter-agency country teams in the 1950s and codified in its first interagency counterinsurgency manual produced in 1962.Footnote 33 The Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan in the 2000s, therefore, merely provide another, more recent, example of such coordination and priorities.Footnote 34 And in the political and security realms, the US has long believed in, and practiced, the principle of propping up ‘friendly governments’ and training militaries to suppress insurgencies, particularly in its own ‘back yard’ of Latin America.Footnote 35
The crucial interrelationship between US military, development and foreign policy interests was again more recently signalled in the January 2009 US Government Counterinsurgency Guide, which was co-signed by the Department of State, Department of Defense and USAID, and whose chief author was David Kilcullen (discussed earlier).Footnote 36 This interconnected organisational and goals-orientated relationship is also reflected in the UK's practice. The UK's development agency, the Department for International Development (DFID), has its origins in various precursors connecting (and sometimes within) the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the various offices that dealt with the British colonies. Fast forward to 2001 when the UK established the Global Conflict Prevention Pool (GCPP) as a joint FCO, Ministry of Defence (MOD) and DFID mechanism for funding and managing the UK's contribution towards violent conflict prevention and reduction – and we can see just how essential are these interconnections.Footnote 37 Similar histories of the symbiosis of defence, foreign policy, and development can be traced with all the major OECD donors. For example, in 2007, Canada published a counterinsurgency field manual that developed its foreign policy as the ‘3-D approach’ – defence, diplomacy, and development;Footnote 38 and in March 2013 announced that its development agency (CIDA) would be folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 39
But, of course, counterinsurgency is not the language used by the development community. The preferred labels in the development and peacebuilding lexicon is that of the so-called ‘security/development nexus’Footnote 40 and the concept of human security, that has, since its emergence in the 1990s, been dominant in the West's analysis of how to promote violence reduction, particularly in conflict zones and ‘fragile states’.Footnote 41 And yet the symbiosis of the two strategies is obvious.Footnote 42 US General David Petraeus who, in effect, wrote the counterinsurgency ‘bible’, the 2006 US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM-324), and is one of the key people behind the highly visible re-emergence of the doctrine (which has sometimes even been referred to as the ‘Petraeus Doctrine’), proposed to Mary Kaldor (one of the major proponents of human security)Footnote 43 that the two concepts – of counterinsurgency and human security – had the same principles and goals.Footnote 44 The institutionalisation and cooptation of human security has therefore reached new heights. Initially regarded as offering a radical alternative to the dominant discourse of international security based on state security and the threat of inter-state conflict, the concept of human security, which emerged in the brave new optimistic post-Cold War world of the 1990s, promoted the idea that insecurity causes poverty and that civil wars were the major cause of insecurity. Its entry into the international lexicon was announced in the 1992 UN document, An Agenda for Peace; which is, in fact, the same document that the concept of peacebuilding made its first appearance. Both concepts captured the zeitgeist of debates in academic and policy communities; and their subsequent integration into mainstream policymaking spawned a dizzying array of definitions, matrixes, and toolboxesFootnote 45 as well as a plethora of networks and institutions, such as the UN Peacebuilding Commission, the EU Peacebuilding Partnership, the UN Trust Fund for Human Security and the Human Security Network.Footnote 46
This institutionalisation has, curiously, resulted in both a broadening and a narrowing of the application of human security and peacebuilding. The broadening has taken place in policy documents, which, on occasion, read like a wish list for the ‘good society’.Footnote 47 The narrowing has taken place in their application whereby statebuilding, security sector reform, and rule of law programmes have been prioritised. In the clash between the two versions of human security – broad (freedom from want) and narrow (freedom from fear) – the latter is privileged.Footnote 48 Donor-led peacebuilding has therefore, since the early 2000s, prioritised statebuilding and security over other aspects of peacebuilding.Footnote 49 These shifts were visible in the recommendation of the UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in 2004 that peacebuilding should focus on statebuilding, which reinforced the 2000 Brahimi Report's emphasis on civilian security and rule of law.Footnote 50 So even while the ‘security-development nexus’ promotes the popular donor tautology that ‘development requires security and security requires development’, the former is prioritised: securing the population therefore becomes a precursor to improving the economic environment. Backed up by years of World Bank research and reports that culminated in its 2011 World Development Report, the main message is that institutional and personal insecurity is the single biggest challenge to economic development and that the prime reason for this is intrastate conflict.Footnote 51 Critics argue that such conclusions merely justify greater donor involvement – as in order to secure populations more intervention is required.Footnote 52 Thus more and more programmes directed at ‘capacity building’, ‘rule of law’, ‘security sector reform’, ‘statebuilding’, and ‘good governance’ are implemented in countries deemed to require securing. And elites who try to resist these policies are either to be co-opted or marginalised. Indeed the common thread that runs through both COIN and peacebuilding – in their language and application – is control, which tells us something fundamental about the global structures of power and the emptiness of claims regarding freedom and autonomy.Footnote 53 The shared ontologies of peacebuilding and counterinsurgency on the causes, consequences, and techniques of dealing with societal violence are therefore palpable. And in their application they share the same aim: stabilisation. Nowhere is this more visible than in the oPt where Israel's techniques of counterinsurgency, implemented to suppress opposition to resource appropriation and population transfer, have been supplemented since 1993 with Western donor-led peacebuilding policies and practices which have assisted in securing the population and ensuring acquiescence in the face of violent dispossession.
Insurgency and counterinsurgency in the oPt
The suppression of Palestinian resistance to colonialism (first by Britain and then by Israel) is credited by Laleh Khalili as being a global node in the history and development of counterinsurgency strategies. She carefully documents how Palestine has been a site of innovation in counterinsurgency techniques – first by the British in the Mandate period, then by Israel after 1948 against Palestinians who remained inside Israel, extended to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem after 1967 when Israel occupied the remaining parts of historic Palestine.Footnote 54 Until 1966, Palestinians who remained in Israel lived under military rule with one-quarter defined as ‘present absentees’ – a curious and paradoxical concept that defined people as refugees in their own countryFootnote 55 and allowed the State of Israel to confiscate their homes, land, and businesses.Footnote 56 Many of Israel's emergency regulations imposed from 1948 until 1966 against Palestinians that remained within the 1949 Armistice Line (usually referred to as the ‘Green Line’) were adopted and adapted from those imposed by the British during the Mandate.Footnote 57 However, while it is important to note these continuities in techniques of control and repression, there are also important differences – and this is a product of the zero-sum struggle over land.
Israel's aims of creating and expanding its state, and securing dominance over the land and resources of historic Palestine, creates a structural imperative of control and displacement – but carefully refracted through the discourse of ‘security’. Israel has generally been regarded as a prime example of a vulnerable state where security concerns are given primacy in both domestic and foreign policy – indeed it has been labelled as constituting a ‘nation in arms’.Footnote 58 It has a large national army that has a prominent place in Israeli society and politics due to its mandatory military and reserve service (not, of course, for Palestinians in Israel, although they can volunteer),Footnote 59 which is required for access to certain jobs and state benefits. There is a very strong connection between the state and the military with high office in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) being an almost automatic stepping stone into politics as indicated by the fact that by 2005 only three of the 16 men who had served as IDF General Chiefs of Staff had not entered politics. Several former senior generals, for example Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, became prime ministers, and former IDF Chiefs of Staff, such as Ehud Barak and Moshe Dayan, became defence ministers.Footnote 60 It is therefore unsurprising that the military receives huge amounts of government funding; in fact Israel's military expenditure is the fifth highest per capita in the world.Footnote 61 In 2012, Israel spent US $15.5 billion on its armed forces, which is less, however, than in previous years, and this again dropped in 2013 to $14.638 billion.Footnote 62 There has also been a significant reduction in the number and presence of IDF forces in the West BankFootnote 63 – a factor that has been attributed to greater security coordination between Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the US.Footnote 64 This will be discussed in greater depth in the next section.
Israel justifies most of its actions towards the Palestinians on the grounds of traditional state security concerns. But an exploration of Israel's actions and elite-level debates indicates that these security priorities expand well beyond what is generally perceived as traditional state security concerns. Debates about how to preserve the Jewish character of the state in the face of a ‘demographic threat’ (provided by the 20 per cent of the Israeli population that are of Palestinian heritage and therefore are Muslim and Christian) show that the concept of security being applied is much more broad and complex. Indeed, the first Herzliyah conference, the annual gathering of Israel's political and security elite, addressed this as a key issue for Israel and it is frequently on the agenda as highlighted by the amount of policy papers and keynote speeches discussing the issue.Footnote 65 This emphasis on demographics is a product of the logic of Zionism whose goal is not just about securing a Jewish majority in Israel but is about ensuring that Israel is a home for any Jewish person in the world to come at any time and instantly be given citizenship. As Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, explains: ‘The state is not defined as belonging to its citizens, but to the entire Jewish people.’Footnote 66 This was shown by an October 2013 Israeli Supreme Court judgment against people wanting to identify themselves as ‘Israeli’ rather than ‘Jewish’ as this, so it ruled, would pose a danger to the foundations of Israel as a Jewish state for the Jewish people.Footnote 67 Land must therefore be kept under the control of the state, and this requires differential rights for Jews and non-Jews to ensure this.Footnote 68 It also helps explain why the demand, since 2009, that Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish stateFootnote 69 (a demand made to no other signatory to a peace treaty with Israel) has a hidden depth and meaning largely ignored by the mainstream media and academics.
The discourse of security is also dominant in the Oslo Accord, the peace treaty signed between Israel and the PLO in 1993. This has been understood by third party actors as encapsulating the reasonable demand that violence should cease during negotiations, but what it has meant in reality is that the Palestinian leadership has been continually forced to prove that it can deliver security to Israel before the withdrawal of occupation forces and during the continuation of land expropriation, settlement expansion, and military violence. And yet history shows us that occupiers never withdraw willingly or easily – particularly if it is territory that is coveted; a fact that multiplies when, as in this case, it is tied up with religious mythology.Footnote 70 Israel's actions show that its security concerns expand to the protection of an illegal extra-territorial population in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), which, by 2012, had doubled to 550,000 since the signing of the Oslo Accord.Footnote 71 Indeed, during periods of ‘peacebuilding’ Israel has managed to transfer more settlers to the oPt.Footnote 72 This expansion was made possible by the provision of generous Israeli state subsidies, the promise of military protection and a substantial infrastructural support system. Policies to expand the Jewish population of the oPt have gone hand-in-hand with strategies to diminish and restrict the number of Palestinians. In East Jerusalem, restrictions on building permits, demolition orders on homes, revocation of residency rights, and harassment by both settlers and the Israeli border police – all of which have increased in recent years – have this goal.Footnote 73 Between 2006 and 2011, more than 7,000 Palestinians lost their Jerusalem residency rights – which represents as many as the previous past four decades combined.Footnote 74
Israel's strategy has one main aim: to gain and retain control over as much of the land and resources (particularly water)Footnote 75 of historic Palestine with the least number of Palestinians on it while provoking minimal, or at least manageable, amounts of international condemnation. This process of modern colonisation implemented through the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ in which the tiny fragmented remains of historic Palestine are being rapidly absorbed into an expanding Israeli state was sharply exposed in August 2013 by Israel's refusal to include in agreements with the EU a territorial clause that required it to acknowledge that its sovereignty does not extend beyond the 1967 ‘Green Line’.Footnote 76 The settlers in the West Bank are therefore regarded to be an integral part of the Israeli body politic.
Palestinian responses to their experiences of dispossession and occupation include different forms of resistance, collaboration, acquiescence, and migration – and these have not necessarily been mutually exclusive. The everyday lives of Palestinians and their resistance strategies have been conditioned by the shifting geography and political-economy of Israel's control and counterinsurgency practices. Two main strategies have been followed by Israel: ‘integration’ (1967 until the early 1990s) followed by ‘skewed integration and separation’ (early 1990s until the present day).Footnote 77 In the initial period after the Six-Day War, Israel's policy was to directly rule the oPt and integrate it into the Israeli economy, but in a way that benefited Israeli businesses, therefore instituting a process that Sara Roy has referred to as ‘de-development’.Footnote 78 These policies turned the oPt into Israel's largest export market and a source of cheap migrant labour. Thus effective strategies of mass civil disobedience in the first intifada (1987–93) encompassed both street confrontations between Palestinians and the Israeli army and an ‘economic war’ designed to strike at the heart of the Israeli economy through boycotting Israeli goods and jobs and refusing to pay taxes. The cost to Israel was huge: in the first three months alone, government revenues dropped by 30 per cent (compared to the same period the previous year) and exports to the oPt declined by 40 per cent,Footnote 79 Furthermore, the withdrawal of Palestinian workers from their jobs in Israel, estimated to lie anywhere between 20–40 per cent, led Israel's minister of finance to conclude that ‘ending the uprising is one of the top priorities for the Israeli economy’.Footnote 80 In response, everyday life for Palestinians was disrupted (and suspended for those jailed) as Israel sought to crush the resistance by curfews, arrests and direct military violence.Footnote 81
In order to contain and insulate it from such mass-based insurgency, Israel thereafter adopted a strategy of ‘skewed integration and separation’ in the early 1990s. This involved restricting the numbers of Palestinian workers in Israel, encouraging Israeli companies to subcontract to Palestinian firms in the oft, and ‘outsourcing’ responsibility for the population of the oPt to a Palestinian-run administrative entity without sovereignty, that is, the Palestinian Authority, established as part of the Oslo Accords and discussed in further detail in the following section. The institution of the ‘closure regime’ and the classification of Palestinians as either residents of Jerusalem, Gaza, or the West Bank (and within the West Bank between Areas A, B, and C with Israel retaining control of 70 per cent of it), created a political economy that transformed the relationship between space, power, and resistance. The ‘separation’ aspect of the strategy was imposed through the closure regime, which dramatically reduced the ability of Palestinians to negatively affect the Israeli economy. And it masked the source of real control in that the economic framework created financial hardship but strikes no longer impacted on the Israeli economy (only the PA's budget). The territorial, economic, social, and political fragmentation of the Palestinian body politic, which was further enhanced by the Oslo framework, reduced the ability of Palestinians to resurrect the types of community action witnessed in the first intifada.Footnote 82 Actions thereafter took place in defined geographical spaces: on the fringes of ‘autonomous’ Palestinian zones (Area A), and Israeli settlements (Area C), and at army checkpoints (into and out of Areas A, B, and C).
In addition to everyday resistance to the occupation, that is, refusing to leave land and homes (referred to by Palestinians as sumud) despite Israel's methods of direct and structural violence to do so, resistance strategies in the post-second intifada period have taken four main forms: popular resistance committees, attacks on settlers, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and (specific to Gaza) the firing of rockets into Israel. Popular resistance committees (re)emerged after 2004 in villages in the West Bank affected by the route of the Separation Barrier being built by Israel – and they have held weekly demonstrations which are often violently suppressed by the IDF. Attacks on settlers and soldiers take place on a regular basis, but they are usually random rather than planned, due to the level of control and surveillance in the West Bank. Recognising the asymmetries of power and the reduced ability to harm Israeli interests through local actions, the BDS movement directs the boycott mechanism as a tool of resistance to be applied to Israel by international actors (including governments, international organisations, and businesses).Footnote 83 Insurgency strategies in Gaza, however, given the blockade, have largely taken the form of the firing of rockets into Israel. Because of the asymmetric nature of the conflict, raising and keeping the Palestinian issue in the international media has been the key aim of these resistance strategies.
As outlined in the previous section, Western counterinsurgency techniques have developed from attempts at outright suppression to ‘winning hearts and minds’ to a shared ontology with the goals and principles of human security and peacebuilding. In comparison with these advances in COIN theory and practice, Israel has tended to rely on ‘deterrence by punishment’ and disproportionate violence, designed to make the population believe that resistance is futile.Footnote 84 This has involved policies of mass incarceration: between the beginning of the occupation in 1967 and the middle of 2009, approximately 700,000 Palestinian men, women, and children had been detained by Israel.Footnote 85 And from 2000 until September 2013, Israel issued 700 life sentences against Palestinians, with 430 sentenced during the second intifada alone.Footnote 86 It is therefore rare to meet a Palestinian who has not had a family member imprisoned.
Israel has also followed a strategy of assassinating the political leaders and cadre of Palestinian resistance groups. From September 2000 until 30 June 2008, for instance, the IDF carried out 348 extra-judicial executions using Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, tanks, and booby-trapped cars that killed 521 Palestinian activists (as well as 233 bystanders including 71 children and 20 women).Footnote 87 Intense levels of direct violence have been supplemented by the structural violence of collective punishment techniques such as curfews and blockades. The Gaza Strip, for instance, is completely encircled by a perimeter electric fence with patrol roads and observation towers for the IDF. Israel controls the movement of goods and people in and out of the area despite its ‘disengagement’ in September 2005.Footnote 88
After a split in the Palestinian Authority in June 2007 that left Hamas governing the Gaza Strip and Fateh governing the West Bank, Israel defined the Gaza Strip as ‘hostile territory’ and imposed a partial blockade that has restricted fuel and electricity supplies and has dramatically decreased humanitarian aid and commercial exchange.Footnote 89 On frequent occasions, Western donors have warned that the Gaza Strip is on the brink of economic collapse,Footnote 90 which is a deliberate policy of Israel's as exposed by Wikileaks in 2011.Footnote 91 Smuggling tunnels that emerged as an alternative avenue for goods transformed the political economy of the Strip.Footnote 92 But these were regularly bombed from the air by Israel and attacked by Egypt on security grounds, as the tunnels were also used to bring in equipment for the rockets being shot across Gaza's frontier with Israel. The small impoverished enclave was further devastated in the 23-day military campaign Operation Cast Lead that ran from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, which killed 1,500 Palestinians and wounded 5,300,Footnote 93 inflicted property damage estimated between US $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion, and made over 10,000 people homeless.Footnote 94 The widespread destruction of physical infrastructure and public and private property has been a key feature of Israel's counterinsurgency tactics. Operation Defensive Shield (28 March–21 April 2002), for instance, which was Israel's largest military operation in the West Bank since its occupation in 1967, is estimated to have inflicted damage worth US $3.5 billion.Footnote 95
In addition to these ‘kinetic’ and ‘enemy-centric’ counterinsurgency strategies,Footnote 96 Israel has, on occasion, tried to foster acquiescence through other more benign methods, which had more success when taken up by Western donors and repackaged as peacebuilding. In the economic arena, for instance, in 1989, in response to the first intifada, Israel considered a development plan that focused on creating sealed industrial zones linked to the Israeli economy, and which would absorb Palestinian workers. This policy re-emerged after 1993 under the tutelage of the World Bank.Footnote 97 And in the political sphere, Israel tried to foster sympathetic elites and governance structures in the oPt, such as the Village Leagues introduced in the late 1970s.Footnote 98 Some critics have charged that the creation of the Palestinian Authority is a more sophisticated form of this type of policy.Footnote 99 This is because the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord in 1993 and the creation of the PA did not alter the relationship between colonised and coloniser. Israel remains the sovereign power, despite the fact that the Accords and the PA have masked this, and has made possible a creeping reconceptualisation of the occupation and colonisation of Palestine as one of political dispute rather than legal fact.Footnote 100
Into this context, Israel's techniques of control and repression have been supplemented by techniques and mechanisms introduced and developed by international peacebuilding actors that appear benign and well meaning. Since the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord, the methods used to deter Palestinian resistance to colonisation have been a combination of Israeli counterinsurgency strategies and peacebuilding counterinsurgency techniques – which have reinforced each other in crucial ways.
Peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the oPt
Israel's counterinsurgency techniques applied to the Palestinian population (as charted in the previous section) are mostly based on direct violence. But this has been inherently unstable and has twice been challenged by full-blown insurgencies, that is, the first and second intifadas, which were deeply damaging to Israel's international image as it used huge military force to crush them. The more subtle methods of counterinsurgency that have eluded Israel – the ones designed to immunise a population against unrest through instituting a form of self-policing – have been more successfully applied by Western peacebuilding agencies, as they are not directly involved in the processes of dispossession that spark opposition and insurgency.
In essence, Western peacebuilding policies pursue a modern version of the mission civilisatrice by attempting to implant Western sociopolitical and economic forms (or, rather, an idealised version) while ensuring security and control.Footnote 101 But peacebuilding does not operate in a vacuum. There is a substantial body of research that documents how peacebuilding processes interact with local political economies to create peacesFootnote 102 or ‘hybridities’.Footnote 103 Peacebuilding therefore takes place in concrete socioeconomic and political settings, and interacts and affects these political economies in crucial ways. The ways in which peacebuilding practices have intertwined with Israel's methods of control has therefore created a particular form of ‘colonial present’Footnote 104 in the oPt which has interacted with and assisted in the emergence of a Palestinian elite who are policing their own people and mediating between them and the occupier. This has created a subtle and more legitimate form of securing the Palestinian population and ensured some level of stability.
But peacebuilding as counterinsurgency takes time to implement and implant because it is about establishing pacification techniques deeply embedded in recipient societal structures; it is about creating a particular form of political economy that stabilises from the inside in partnership with local elites who benefit from its implementation. And yet the position of the Palestinian elite is also unstable and contradictory (dependent as it is on the Oslo peace framework); so the counterinsurgency circle is not completely sealed.
The application of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the oPt has therefore followed certain principles. In the realms of governance, Western strategies have focused on supporting sympathetic Palestinian elites and embedding their power in opposition to others who reject the vision of peace on offer. Using aid to prop up preferred political elites is common in peace processes or at the end of conflict, in which international legitimacy is given to some actors and withheld from others. Indeed, it is an essential characteristic of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency. But in this context, the definition of sympathetic/unsympathetic elites is defined as those with which Israel will negotiate and which are acceptable to the US and this is a crucial method of control.Footnote 105 In the realms of economic development, Western strategies have focused on supporting the development of infrastructure and a Palestinian business elite with vested interests in ensuring stability (albeit one which they wish would lead to statehood). But within a broader strategy of tying the oPt into a regional economic system designed to normalise relations between Israel and the Arab states. And in this context this has also intensified Palestinian economic dependency on Israel. While Western peacebuilding agencies have a preference for neoliberal economic and good governance policies their adoption in the oPt has been gradual and patchy – and has been the outcome of struggles and changes within the Palestinian elite, helped and facilitated by changes in the policies of Israel and pressure from Western donors. In the security realm, Western peacebuilding strategies have continually focused on the creation of a Palestinian security force able to ensure stability. But in this context this has meant promoting and regulating security coordination between the PA and Israel under conditions of occupation.
And so a picture emerges of a political economy that is the outcome of the interaction of the policies and practices of Israel, the donors, and different sections of the Palestinian elite under the auspices of peacebuilding as structured by the Oslo Accords. Because it is this interaction that has shaped responses and changes in the oPt political economy over the past twenty years, it makes sense to analyse it chronologically rather than thematically. By doing so, it therefore also exposes the nuanced application of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in response to changing circumstances. So far there have been three main phases: here labelled the ‘Interim’ period (1993–9), the ‘Roadmap’ period (2002–6), and the ‘West Bank First’ period (2007-present).
After the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PLO, formerly an exiled national liberation movement that had mediated between Palestinian society and the regional and international state-system, returned to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and its cadre became the elite staffing the institutional structures of the Palestinian Authority (PA) with Yasser Arafat as first president.Footnote 106 Palestinian diaspora capitalists also returned, and were prioritised by the PA over local capitalists therefore giving them influence in determining PA economic plans and access to privileged monopolies that had to be coordinated with Israel and through Israeli companies.Footnote 107 One of the most prominent representatives of this new economic elite was the conglomerate, the Palestinian Industrial Development Company (PADICO), which brought together expatriate investors.Footnote 108
Into this context, and indeed providing the essential support for these processes given the dire state of the oPt's political economy after 26 years of occupation and six years of intifada, came a huge expansion of Western aid and donor involvement. The rationale was to ‘mobilise resources to make the agreement [Oslo] work’.Footnote 109 Western donors have therefore continually committed significant resources towards supporting the Oslo process, as shown by the level of official overseas development assistance which rose from US $39.24 million in 1993 to $1.741 billion in 2009; it thereafter dipped slightly so that by 2011 it was $1.562 billion. In this same time period, therefore, total aid from OECD donors and multilateral agencies has constituted nearly US $12.2 billion.Footnote 110 To coordinate this aid and supervise the Palestinians in their institution-building, an elaborate layer of oversight committees was formed by the Western donors, which reflects common donor practice in other developing and war-torn societies.Footnote 111 However, the PA was created to govern in a context that was not postconflict but one of continued occupation and colonisation. It has neither sovereignty nor control over its resources, and it has no defined borders. The only body that holds sovereignty over the land and resources of the oPt and controls the borders is Israel – and this control has been used to continue a process of colonisation.
This situation has necessitated large and continuing amounts of aid to mitigate and manage the economic and social problems created by Israel's policies of skewed integration and separation (as outlined in the previous section). Donors are therefore indeed subsidising Israel's occupation, as charged by their critics.Footnote 112 This is not an unintended consequence, however, but a necessary corollary of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the context of a colonisation process. The large numbers of donors (over forty) and multilateral agencies (over twenty) involved in the oPt, necessitated the creation of an ‘aid politburo’ of the dominant players: the US, the EU, the World Bank, and the UN.Footnote 113 Their roles and actions have been described as ‘the US decides, the World Bank leads, the EU pays, the UN feeds’.Footnote 114 The net effect of these donor governance structures has been to ensure that Israel's security paradigm (critically unpacked in the previous section) is prioritised, that there is a progressive institutionalisation of neoliberal economic and good governance policies, that budget support to the PA continues, and that humanitarian aid is provided because the alternative is regarded to be much worse, that is, either the emergence of a Palestinian political movement with widespread support that is opposed to the Oslo process, and/or extreme poverty and political instability.
These strategies of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency are packaged and regarded as legitimate tactics in the pursuit of peace. On occasion, overt methods have been employed, but as they are more visible and tend to spark more opposition, it has been regarded as desirable that these are kept to a minimum. Ensuring that Palestinians police other Palestinians against resistance is the goal. Palestinian political elites, meanwhile, who secure external support, have an advantage over their political opponents by gaining access to essential sources of aid and political support. But the ability of Palestinian elites to manipulate the peacebuilding agenda, as documented in other circumstances,Footnote 115 is limited to what Israel will accept before it utilises kinetic counterinsurgency measures that have the potential to destabilise the situation and upset peacebuilding as counterinsurgency.
In the ‘Interim’ period, supposed to last only five years, the interaction of the policies and actions of Israel, the Western donors and the PA political elite facilitated the emergence of a neo-patrimonial state, trading monopolies and unaudited accounts, and a proliferation of security institutions under the direct control of the PA president not the parliament.Footnote 116 This was initially supported by Israel and the donors who downplayed any democratic or human rights obligations of the PA because it did not serve their purposes of ensuring stability which they reckoned required a repressive regime. The PA used political patronage, nepotism, and violence to build its power base and to control, suppress, buy-off or pacify those who sought to continue the armed struggle.Footnote 117 The underlying principle of aid in the ‘Interim’ period was ‘peace now, democracy later’, despite strong internal Palestinian campaigns for democratic reform.Footnote 118
Economically, the oPt remained a captive market for Israel as codified in the Paris Economic Protocol (PEP), the economic part of the Oslo Peace Accord, which formalised the de facto customs union imposed on the oPt by Israel after 1967. The PA has a huge, and ever-expanding, trade deficit with Israel, which in 2012 accounted for US $3.7 billion – equivalent to 77 per cent of the total Palestinian trade deficit and 37 per cent of GDP.Footnote 119 The PEP also, however, introduced new control mechanisms that affected the political economy of the oPt and the PA in crucial ways. Firstly, the PA's fiscal revenues are collected and transferred to the PA by Israel (through a tax clearance system). Given that, in 2012, clearance revenues accounted for around 70 per cent of all PA revenuesFootnote 120 this gives Israel huge amounts of power over the financial health of the PA as these transfers can be withheld at any time, and frequently have been. Secondly, trade to the oPt is controlled by Israel through Israeli import agencies and trading monopolies. This meant that in 2002, for instance, 98 per cent of PA imports were from or via Israel.Footnote 121 And thirdly, Palestinian labour movement has been more strictly controlled (and reduced) by Israel through the permit system.Footnote 122 Alongside these PEP arrangements, Western donors attempted to insert and encourage neoliberal economic practices on the PA, such as limiting the developmental role of the state, prioritising the private sector, emphasising the service sector over agriculture, and promoting trade openness and lax regulatory mechanisms for investors – although initially this was with limited degrees of success. For instance, donors initially turned a blind eye to the PA's (mutually beneficial) trading monopolies with Israel, its accumulation of significant public assets, and corruption.Footnote 123 These strategies were all deemed necessary to facilitate the expansion of the PA's bureaucracy and patronage network as a method of stabilisation.Footnote 124 Nevertheless, however, the central involvement of the ‘aid politburo’ in the structures of the PA ensured that, right from the start, the oPt had a far more open economy than any of its Arab neighbours. The Palestinian Investment Law, for example, ensured that no restrictions were put on foreign ownership or the transfer of net profits. Codified in the documents of the major donors was the belief that promoting trade openness and a facilitating environment for private enterprise would build regional interdependence and stability, which would help to end the Arab boycott of Israel, create a shared interest in stability, and integrate the Middle East (including the oPt) into the global economy.Footnote 125 Given the circumstances, the PA's initial embrace of neoliberal policies was very patchy – but changes within the Palestinian elite, changes in the policies of Israel, and pressure from Western donors facilitated their increased adoption.Footnote 126
In the security realm, Western donors put a huge amount of effort, both financial and practical, into building up the PA's security services and creating trilateral security coordination arrangements between Israel, the PA, and the US.Footnote 127 The primary task of the PA, as codified in the Oslo agreements, was to stop attacks on Israel and so there has been consistent annual expenditure of around 30–35 per cent of the PA's budget on the security sector.Footnote 128 The function of the PA security forces is not, therefore, to protect the Palestinian population against external threats (which is, in this case, the Israeli military), but to protect the PA and Israel against insurgents.Footnote 129 All opposition was regarded as illegitimate and the 1998 Wye River Memorandum equated all forms of resistance with terrorism.Footnote 130 Arafat monopolised all decisions and there was no democratic oversight (a situation that continues today), which, according to Western donor agencies' good practice guidelines, should be an essential component of peacebuilding security sector policies.Footnote 131 The PA's arbitrary powers and policies of repression were not only ignored by Western donors – they were occasionally supported. In 1995, for instance, US Vice-President Al Gore praised the PA's State Security Courts, which had been condemned by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch because of their ‘pattern of grossly unfair trials’.Footnote 132 The huge build up of PA security forces, coupled with the large covert operations of the CIA and the Shin Bet (Israel's domestic intelligence service), meant that the oPt was a highly policed society.Footnote 133 The involvement of Palestinian security personnel in the second intifada does not deter from these facts; it merely goes to prove that the PA itself is in a contradictory position, and its elites (and the military forces that protect them and the Oslo framework) continually have to make decisions to participate in this process.
The creation of the PA and other institutions facilitated the rapid growth of the public sector. The Israeli-imposed Civil Administration, which had ruled over the oPt during the occupation, employed 20,000 Palestinians on the eve of Oslo. By 1999, the numbers employed by the PA was 120,000.Footnote 134 This, plus the expansion of the NGO sector, drove the growth of a middle class in the oPt, which became a solid foundation for peacebuilding as counterinsurgency. Indeed, by 2013, 56 per cent of PA expenditure went towards paying public employee salaries, while 15 per cent went towards the payment of social benefits – meaning that more than 70 per cent of the PA's expenditure went towards upkeep of the population.Footnote 135 The PA is thus in essence a large social security net tying a huge section of the population into its stability and future existence.
The first, ‘Interim’, period of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency ended in insurgency, with the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000. This ushered in Israel's direct ‘kinetic’ counterinsurgency practices (as implemented through Operation Defensive Shield), and led the donors to change some policies in order to reimpose stability and re-establish peacebuilding as counterinsurgency. The Quartet, made up of the US, the EU, Russia, and the UN, was created as a new diplomatic forum to get it back on track; and in July 2002, it created the International Taskforce on Palestinian Reform, which comprised representatives of the Quartet members, Japan, Norway, the World Bank, and the IMF. Its job was to monitor and support reform of the PA.Footnote 136 In this second, ‘Roadmap’, period, Western peacebuilding strategies in the political realm were powered by the conclusion that consolidating Arafat's regime was no longer in the interests of stability and the peace process.Footnote 137 Arafat was blamed for the violence of the second intifada, particularly the suicide bombings, and his fall from grace was sealed by the January 2002 Karine A weapons smuggling incident.Footnote 138 Efraim Halevy, Mossad's chief at the time, explains in his memoirs how Israel persuaded the major Western donors to get rid of Arafat.Footnote 139 But given Arafat's centrality in Palestinian political life, and the outcry an overt method of removal from power would have likely provoked, this was achieved by diluting his power through democratic reform, that is, by creating the position of prime minister, which was initially assigned to Mahmoud Abbas.
During the ‘Roadmap’ period, there was a struggle for control within the PA itself; marginalising Arafat, however, took time.Footnote 140 As part of the internal political struggle in the PA, there was a battle over reform of the security forces, the infrastructure for which had been almost completely destroyed by Israel during the second intifada. Security coordination had disintegrated and there was a breakdown in law and order as armed groups proliferated.Footnote 141 Plans for security sector reform were drafted by the EU and the US, but it was not until Arafat's death in November 2004 and his replacement by Abbas as President in January 2005, that changes were made and Israeli-PA security cooperation was rebuilt, overseen by the Office of the US Security Coordinator (USSC).
Economically, Western donors were only able to enforce neoliberal policies on the PA as a by-product of Israel's counterinsurgency strategies. Firstly, Israel's military actions during Operation Defensive Shield bankrupted the PA due to the damage inflicted on the oPt infrastructure and PA facilities. And secondly, Israel demanded an end to the unaudited accounts that it had happily (and secretly) been paying into for years and which had been a key source of Arafat's power and independence.Footnote 142 The Palestinian political elite, however, were also increasingly embracing neoliberalism as a policy framework for the PA, reflecting the changes taking place in the oPt political economy and class structure,Footnote 143 although this was not solidified until the third, ‘West Bank First’, phase. It also reflected regional changes triggered by the Free Trade Agreements signed between the US and the Gulf states throughout the 1990s (after the signing of the Oslo Accords). Palestinian diaspora capital had largely developed as a subsection of Gulf capital, and so this process of internationalisation, which also meant normalisation with Israel, required a PA that progressively embraced neoliberal strategies.Footnote 144 But by getting rid of the unaudited accounts and introducing price controls, the PA reduced its revenue and contingency funds, therefore making it more dependent on both Israel and the donors.Footnote 145 Furthermore, Western donor policies focused on developing a services and export-oriented economy – sectors which are largely dependent on connections with Israel and Israeli businesses.
There is little doubt that neither Israel nor the donors (nor indeed the ruling Fateh party) expected that the January 2006 democratic elections ushered in by the Roadmap and the reform process would bring Hamas to power: a party that rejected the Oslo framework.Footnote 146 Donors then employed overt methods to marginalise and remove these new political elites that sought to challenge the whole edifice. Israel withheld revenue transfers, while economic and political sanctions were imposed by the Quartet and enforced by the US Treasury using anti-terror legislation. The period between the election of Hamas (January 2006) and the administrative split between the West Bank and Gaza (June 2007) is often portrayed as one of donor disengagement and withdrawal of aid, but this is wrong. This was a period marked by the direct use of overt methods of elite manipulation. Donor funds, which actually increased in this period, particularly from the US, deliberately bypassed the elected government of the PA and reinstated practices used under Arafat's rule that the good governance reforms instituted as part of the Roadmap had tried to eradicate: funds were channelled directly to the Office of the President, payments were made to political allies and opponents were excluded.Footnote 147 Furthermore, money and weapons were supplied to Fateh to build up a presidential guard that could remove Hamas from power.Footnote 148
The Palestinian civil war between Hamas and Fateh, underpinned by Western donor actions, led to the split between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – which further entrenched Palestinian geographical and political fragmentation. Hamas was thereafter contained and isolated in the enclave of Gaza, placed under blockade by Israel, and left to its own devices to follow a different form of political economy to that of the West Bank: one that is highly dependent on humanitarian assistance and, until 2013, the smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt.Footnote 149 Western donors thereafter supported the part of the PA based in Ramallah and operational in the West Bank, under the control of Abbas. The Western boycott was officially lifted and Israel restarted revenue transfers: the ‘West Bank First’ phase was thus ushered in.
The ‘West Bank First’ phase, which has also been variously labelled ‘Fayyadism’Footnote 150 or ‘neoliberalism as liberation’Footnote 151 was codified in the 2008–10 Palestinian Reform and Development Plan (PRDP) and the 2009 Programme of the 13th Government.Footnote 152 These plans document the PA's focus on building institutions within the framework of Oslo, promotion of the private sector and good governance (rather than democracyFootnote 153), and greater security coordination with Israel and the US. This signifies the adoption and internalisation of neoliberal economic and governance strategies and therefore the convergence of the concerns and needs of the Western donors with that of a section of the Palestinian elite. Indeed, the PRDP was written by one PA adviser and one seconded consultant from the UK Department for International Development, without proper consultation with the different PA ministries and without a proper analysis of what each sector required.Footnote 154 To ensure the success of this phase of stabilisation, financial support for the PA was at an all-time high, until 2011 when it dipped again.Footnote 155 This huge commitment of funds and intense donor involvement was crucial to ensure that peacebuilding as counterinsurgency continued, all of which necessitated keeping the PA operational and supporting the elite which could keep the edifice erect.
Because of the amount of donor involvement, Nathan Brown concluded that the PA had become a ‘de facto international trusteeship’.Footnote 156 Security coordination with Israel and the US was tightened and enhanced.Footnote 157 The National Security Forces re-established central authority and law and order, largely through arrests and detentions, and managed to keep control of the West Bank during Operation Cast Lead, Israel's bombing campaign against Gaza in December 2008 to January 2009. The US Security Coordinator, Lt General Keith Dayton, regarded this deployment as crucial in preventing the outbreak of a third intifada.Footnote 158 Israel also praised the deployment and the relative, but oppressive, calm that prevailed in the West Bank. PA political elites were upset at these comments, arguing that they made the PA look like a collaborator regime.Footnote 159 But, sidestepping emotive accusations such as this, it is in the interests of the PA, and the elite that surround it, to ensure stability – and this is a stability possible only if Israel agrees to it and the donors help pay for it. ‘We have an interest in having a financially sound Palestinian Authority’, said a senior Israel Defence Forces official in October 2013, ‘this keeps violence down’.Footnote 160
And so it is in this, the ‘West Bank First’ phase, that we witness the coming to fruition of twenty years of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency: the creation of an environment where Israel, Western donors, and sections of the Palestinian political elite are working in tandem to ensure a stable environment. In the West Bank, the population is under authoritarian rule, neoliberal policies have become more deeply embedded, and security coordination between the PA, Israel, and the US is tighter than it has ever been. Gaza is also under authoritarian rule, its economy is on the verge of collapse (but sustained as an international charity case) and it has been largely contained with its ‘borders’ policed by Israel and Egypt. East Jerusalem is leaderless, marginalised, and ignored. And yet, as with all situations of colonialism, which provoke insurgency and counterinsurgency, the situation is inherently contradictory and unstable.
Conclusion: the contradictions of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency in the oft
In the summer of 2012, a Palestinian theatre company toured the West Bank with its production, Beit Yasmine (House of Yasmine). Showed to packed theatre houses, the play narrates the story of the shooting and subsequent treatment of human rights activist, Yasmine. While she lies critically wounded, her family is required to write and submit a proposal for medicine, which will only be accepted if they also supply a written assurance that none of it will go to ‘terrorists’.Footnote 161 When the medicine arrives, the family discuss whether it will be addictive or not; a debate ensues where they are assured by the ‘medical expert’ that in small doses it will be beneficial. However, simultaneously, other ‘experts’ arrive with more types of medicine, and it soon becomes clear it is best that Yasmine remains ill in order to continue receiving such care, and for those around her to profit from it. The rebellious son of Yasmine, who initially opposes the medicine, is plied with offers of paid study abroad or a comfortable salary in a good job for his silence and acquiescence – therefore posing him with a severe moral dilemma.Footnote 162 Clearly Beit Yasmine was articulating some of the dilemmas and frustrations felt by Palestinians towards Western aid and peacebuilding in the oPt – in particular that it is addictive, that it is not fixing the problem, and it has largely become a mechanism for reducing rebellion and ensuring acquiescence, tainting all involved in it.
This article offers an explanation for why this is the case. The argument advanced is threefold. First, that there is a deep structural symbiosis in the philosophy and methods of counterinsurgency and peacebuilding that lie in securing the population against unrest through the implementation of governance, development and security strategies that instil acquiescence and ensure control. The second argument advanced was that the Israel-Palestine conflict is fundamentally a colonial struggle over land and resources that pits a powerful state against a stateless people, and which has created a vicious cycle of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Israel's counterinsurgency techniques against the Palestinians involve both direct violence and more subtle methods of population control to ensure acquiescence to the process of colonisation, which is progressively disenfranchising, dispossessing and disarticulating the Palestinian body politic. And it is into this context that Western peacebuilding strategies of governance, security coordination, and neoliberal economics have been pursued. This has constituted a further layer of pacification techniques through the pursuit of a political economy that stabilises from the inside in partnership with a section of Palestinian elites. The political economy of the oPt has thus undergone a radical transformation since 1993 which has created an internal constituency also keen on stability. The third argument advanced, therefore, was that peacebuilding as counterinsurgency has complemented and meshed with the structures of domination and repression created by Israel in subtle but crucial ways that are not always visible, are often difficult to detect, and appear benign. And it is in this type of political economy that repression and choice are no longer polar opposites but merge, as articulated by Mahmoud Darwish in the epigraph of this article.
The Oslo framework has been a successful method of counterinsurgency because it has fragmented what was left of the Palestinian body politic: the outcome of which, in 2013, was an isolated and blockaded Gaza, an East Jerusalem increasingly integrated (but in a skewed and unequal manner) into Israel, and a West Bank with widely varying political economies (between middle class and prosperous towns such as Ramallah to desperately poor refugee camps and rural villages) living side-by-side with wealthy Jewish settlements integrated into Israel via an extensive road network system while enjoying political representation in the Knesset (Israel's parliament) and the protection of Israel's military and legal system. And yet there is a glaring contradiction that lies at the heart of these interlocking methods of control that could blow the whole edifice apart. Ensuring stability and acquiescence while an occupying state implements policies that are, in effect, a form of colonisation and primitive accumulation is inherently destabilising. Taking land and resources from people will always provoke opposition. What is more difficult to predict, however, is how, when and in what form this opposition will emerge.
