Description
By (author) Rabie, Kareem
:
In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In this book Kareem Rabie examines how the conference and Fayyad”s rhetoric represented a wider shift in economic and political practice in ways that oriented state-scale Palestinian politics toward neoliberal globalization rather than a diplomatic two-state solution. Rabie demonstrates that private firms, international aid organizations, and the Palestinian government in the West Bank focused on large-scale private housing development in an effort toward state-scale economic stability and market building. This approach reflected the belief that a thriving private economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state. Yet, as Rabie contends, these investment-based policies have maintained the status quo of occupation and Palestine”s subordinate and suspended political and economic relationship with Israel.
Table of contents:
Introduction 1
1. The Site 37
2. Developers and Designers 54
3. Image, Process, and Precedent 67
4. Public Urban Planning 81
5. Housing Shortage and National Priority 93
6. Public-Private Partnership 105
7. Buyers and Villagers 131
8. Critique, Capital, and the Landscape 149
9. Settlers and the Land 163
10. The Law, Mirroring, and the State 183
Conclusion 199
Acknowledgments 213
Notes 217
References 235
Index 255
Review quote:
“Palestine Is Throwing a Party is a brilliant, carefully researched, and thoughtful book. Kareem Rabie uses the lens of urban planning and development to show us how global processes of unequal capital accumulation, racialized labor and property regimes within Israel/Palestine, and the managerial rule of Palestinian technocrats and capitalists collaborating with Israel all persistently reproduce the violent systems of settler-colonial expropriation in Israel/Palestine since 1948.” – Laleh Khalili, author of (Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula) “Drawing on his exceptional knowledge and understanding of Palestine, along with a considerable amount of original, innovative, and detailed fieldwork, Kareem Rabie presents thought-provoking insights on the question of urbanism in Palestine. This extremely interesting study makes an important contribution.” – Adam Hanieh, author of (Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East) “[A] detailed, often dense but intellectually penetrating look at how that conference heralded a significant change in both economic and political strategy.” – Ian Black (Tel Aviv Review of Books) “The capitalist concept of Palestine, despite its exclusion, is part of the normalised state-building process, which in turn normalises dealings with Israel. Rabie”s book is a pragmatic approach that does not necessarily condone the alteration of Palestinian territory, but takes a dispassionate look at the facts.” – Ramona Wadi (Middle East Monitor) “By applying the analytic of settler colonialism without essentializing indigenous identity, and by theorizing the effects of global capitalism on Palestinian class formation, Palestine is Throwing a Party shows the way forward. Though there is nothing optimistic about its portrayal of relations between Palestinians and Israelis as a dark, distorting mirror, its reminder that the two groups are forever shaping one another against a backdrop of steep global inequalities will be crucial for any politics of democratic decolonization.” – Matan Kaminer (+972 Magazine) “Palestine Is Thr
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