On the economy and the occupation

I asked a good friend of mine what he thought had changed since my previous visit in 2007. He told me that 'Ramallah doesn't fight wars anymore. It is only concerned with making a good economy'. Although I didn't think about this much before I came, this relationship between (neoliberal) economic development and the current phase of the Israeli Occupation will be one of the key questions that animates my research.

In a previous post I alluded to a potential parallel between a historical event (the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) which began in 1987) and a potential future (an anticipated third intifada). I have also been struck by another parallel. When Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, many of their initial policies with regards to the newly colonized Palestinian populations under their control promoted economic development. As detailed by Neve Gordon in his book Israel's Occupation, these policies were designed to benefit the Israeli economy, but also to discourage the formation of any national political consciousness. As history teaches us, these attempts to discipline the occupied population failed.

In the present day, Netanyahu's is waging an economic peace campaign, ably assisted by former International Monetary Fund employee and Palestinian Prime Minister Salem Fayyed. International activism against the Israeli Occupation has also recently taken on an explicitly economic dimension in the form of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. Current attempts by the Israeli government to pass legislation that would ban the promotion of such boycotts, and punish both Israeli and foreign internationals found guilty of doing so, are perhaps the most significant indicator that the BDS movement is effective.

Faced with such parallels, perhaps the most appealing question to ask is what kind of future will be manifest by this current turn to economism. While it is tempting to think that the promotion of economic 'good' in the place of political agency will lead to history repeating itself, present day conditions are very different from the 1970s, not least because of the historical legacy. Massive tracts of land have now been colonised by Israeli settler-colonists. While I don't know enough about the geographies of the Occupation in the 1970s, present day events both take place amidst, and create, uneven geographical development within West Bank, and between the West Bank and Gaza. Perhaps the more pertinent question to ask is therefore how can we understand the emerging relationship between colonialism and neoliberalism? My sense is that what we are facing is not some kind of hybrid colonial-economic form, but rather two distinct assemblages of practices, discourses and ethos that have found (new) ways of resonating with each other, in a way that is similar to the American style Capitalism and Christianity that Bill Connolly analyses. While religion might also play a role in the Palestinian context, this has been commented upon rather more extensively.

This relationship is something I hope to discuss with people who live and work here in forthcoming weeks. So consider the musings in this post preliminary thoughts that will develop this summer (hopefully).