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Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to develop in Palestine after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, but only a few of these can be considered peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs). P/CRO growth was hindered by the culture of antagonism with Israel, the neopatriarchal structure of Palestinian society and the autocracy of the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli occupation's stifling effect on civil society, and many Palestinians have preferred armed resistance. P/CROs were usually internally democratic; ideology played an important role in success or failure, most relied on international funding, and all either regarded themselves as complementing the Palestinian Authority or monitoring it. P/CRO activities included human rights advocacy, the representation of Palestinian interests to the international community, and domestic consciousness raising. However, the P/CRO contribution to peace building has been insignificant, and the true Palestinian “peace camp” is the Palestinian Authority.

This chapter analyzes Israeli compliance with its obligations on safe passage for Palestinians between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, on the establishment and operation of a seaport and airport in the Gaza Strip, on economic questions, and on other related questions of infrastructure and civil affairs. It argues that most of the so-called ‘Israeli responsibilities’ on ports, passages, and economics are really joint obligations of negotiation and implementation. In particular, Israel and Palestinian Authority are both obliged to negotiate and implement in good faith.

This chapter focuses on Palestinian efforts at state-building, beginning in earnest with the signing of the Oslo Accords. States are not created out of thin air. They have institutional antecedents, social roots and progeny, and, at times, even founding fathers. The state-like apparatus that grew out of the Oslo process had all these ingredients, none of which boded well for its evolution into a full state. But it also operated within a highly constrained framework of territorial, legal and political, and economic restrictions. What has emerged as a consequence is a form of Palestinian “self-rule” that hardly extends beyond municipal government, of which, for now at least, there is a Palestinian National Authority variety in the West Bank and a Hamas version in Gaza. After more than two decades, the state-building process has brought the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza only added separation and apartness, increased confinement into ever-smaller pieces of land, and no closer to meaningful statehood.

By the turn of the new millennium, Israel had almost totally abandoned forms of control whose goal was to manage the lives of the Palestinian inhabitants residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and was also reluctant to allow the Palestinian Authority to continue administering the occupied population. The difference between Israel's decision to distribute clubs and Rabin's “break their bones” policy from the first intifada and the firing of a million bullets during the second uprising's first month signifies a change in the primary principle informing Israel's occupation, that is, a shift from the principle of colonization to the principle of separation. This chapter describes these two principles and emphasizes that they actually contaminate each other so that there is always a trace of one in the other.

This chapter considers the Palestinian record on counter-terrorism and security matters. The Palestinian Authority has a disappointing record on its obligation to prevent and punish terror and other forms of violence. It has taken some steps to strengthen security cooperation with Israel, but has permitted (and sometimes engaged) in inflammatory anti-Israel propaganda verging on incitement to violence.

As the years passed, the fact that Israel would be unable to quell the popular uprising began registering among larger segments of the Israeli public. Many Israelis believed that the economic, political, and moral cost of upholding the occupation was too high and that Israel had to modify its policies in the Occupied Territories (OT). It became clear that the existing forms of control were not producing the desired calm and that another strategy was needed. The ingenious idea was to “outsource” the responsibility for the population to a subcontractor. A Palestinian authority was established to take on the task of managing the occupied inhabitants. This chapter describes how the reorganization of power was implemented and why it too failed to normalize the occupation. It reads the different Oslo agreements, which the two parties signed over a period of six years, not as part of a peace process or a withdrawal of power, but rather as texts that outline the reorganization of Israeli power in the OT. The chapter then goes on to analyze the changes on the ground, showing how the Oslo accords precipitated the second intifada.

This chapter asks whether the Palestinian Authority (PA) is complying with the limits on Palestinian self-government imposed by the Accords. It argues that the PA appears to have exceeded some of the Accords' restrictions on Palestinian self-government. The size of the Palestinian police force exceeds that permitted by the Interim Agreement, though it remains to be seen whether Israel will vigorously object to this development, which might help the PA abide by its obligation to maintain a ‘strong’ police force. The PA also appears to have exceeded the geographic and functional limits on its governmental activity, in particular at Orient House in East Jerusalem.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the closest thing the world has to a lawfare laboratory. Hamas, Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and their allies are each vigorously waging lawfare, albeit in different ways. This chapter focuses on the PA’s use of law as a weapon against Israel and Israel’s and Israel’s allies responses to that lawfare. One major element is the campaign to gain recognition of Palestine, as a full sovereign member state of the international community, outside the negotiations process with Israel and any concessions that might require. A second major element is the PA’s decision to join the ICC. A third major element is the PA’s efforts to use the processes of international organizations and treaties, including those to which it is not a party, to advance its claims against Israel. The chapter analyzes the PA lawfare campaign’s remarkable impact and potential future.

The most important new actor in Israel’s security apparatus is the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose security forces are trained by the United States and the European Union and deployed to suppress resistance inside the West Bank enclaves. This chapter begins by discussing the dynamics of Israeli (in)security and situating the West Bank within the broader array of forces and strategies deployed to police the Palestinian people. The chapter then traces the genealogy of security coordination between the Israel military and the PA security forces under Oslo. It then analyzes the strategies and tactics of security coordination. Although justified by a discourse of “Palestinian/Arab/Muslim terrorism,” the coordinated security forces target all Palestinian opponents of Oslo. Finally, the chapter analyzes the dynamics of contestation and cooperation within the security network, with attention to the reliance on the low-wage labor of Palestinian security officers. Security coordination in the West Bank is one of the world’s most sophisticated efforts to manage an unruly population. But tensions and contradictions undermine the illusion of stability.

Just as George H.W. Bush’s and George W. Bush’s worldviews impacted their decisions regarding war, these worldviews impacted their approach toward the Middle East peace process. It begins by illustrating how George H.W. Bush was initially reluctant to pursue peace in the Middle East, but later translated victory in the Persian Gulf War into a diplomatic process promoting Middle East peace. The chapter then turns to George W. Bush’s unwillingness to directly engage in the peace process. The chapter returns to the George H.W. Bush administration, discussing George H.W. Bush’s negotiations to ensure a peace conference between Israelis and Palestinians at Madrid, Spain. It concludes by examining the impact of George W. Bush’s neglect of the peace process. Throughout, the chapter focuses on the importance of personal relations. George H.W. Bush’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir proved to jump-start the peace process, since George H.W. Bush’s dislike of Shamir translated into his willingness to deal with the Israelis more sternly than his predecessors had. Likewise, George W. Bush’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led him to support the Israeli policy, often unquestionably.

This chapter deals with Al Jazeera’s long history of covering Gaza, Hamas, and the Palestinian question generally. Al Jazeera’s reporting on leaked Palestinian Authority documents diverted the network’s attention from the revolutionary environment in North Africa just as the Jasmine Revolution was reaching its climax and the Egyptian revolution was nearing a boiling point. The network’s preoccupation with a story that served little purpose other than to embarrass the Palestinian Authority is exemplary of the network’s solidarity with Hamas, which appears to trump the network’s dedication to other Arab and Palestinian social movements. In the democratically elected, theologically driven Hamas government, one can see a beta version of the democratic Islamist political ideal that the network would openly advocate in postrevolutionary Tunisia and Egypt.

This chapter examines the Palestinian Authority's (PA) compliance with its human rights obligations under the Accords. The PA has a discouraging human rights record. It cannot justify its human rights violations by pointing to similar (or dissimilar) violations by Israel.

In some instances the existence of a certain circumstance can deny a court jurisdictional competency to deal with the pending civil dispute. This chapter identifies these circumstances as those pertaining to land situated in the Palestinian Territories, family law disputes pertaining to Palestinian residents, and claims filed against the Palestinian Authority. The analyses offered in this chapter reveal once again the close connection between the jurisdictional doctrines that instructed Israeli courts when evaluating their jurisdictional competency to deal with such disputes and Israeli policies generally in relation to the Palestinian Territories.

The issue of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails is considered one of the most sensitive for the Palestinian people. It is central to all of the different Palestinian organizations, their supporters, and their social and national bases. This chapter focuses on all aspects of the issue of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in the period between the signing of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) in 1993 and the Annapolis negotiations that stopped in 2008. It also focuses on the Israeli position on this issue and how the state has dealt with it over almost two decades of negotiations, as well as the position of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian negotiators. It discusses how the prisoners have been affected by these negotiations, as well as how the prisoners' cause has impacted Palestinian–Israeli negotiations. The chapter is based on the author's personal experience as a former prisoner who spent twelve years in Israeli prisons and was a spokesman for the prisoners for many years.

Chapter 4, “The Colonizer in the Computer”, is an examination of how the colonial past and present can affect maps. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the provisional Palestinian government, was founded in the mid-1990s, and they were immediately charged with making their own maps. Their efforts roughly coincided with the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. As such it was part of the broader political practice of sumud, or steadfastness, an effort to further the ongoing presence of Palestinians in the local landscape. Throughout their early years, however, the PA experienced constant challenges to its stability, including military raids on its offices and data infrastructure. These affected its ability to build stasis, which is here defined as the ability to ‘stay put’. Furthermore, the only existing maps they had to work with were from 60 year-old British colonial sources. These two factors, the Israeli raids and the British colonial maps, fundamentally shaped the state maps made by the PA. As a result, their maps were less useful for purposes of daily governance like elections, utilities, and infrastructure. PA cartography therefore illustrates the both the challenges and innovations of establishing material sovereignty over knowledge in colonial and postcolonial landscapes.

This chapter discusses the Palestinian moment of liberation. It recognizes that Hamas presents an extreme case because Palestinian postcoloniality has, to an extent, been concretized by way of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and its accompanying institutions under the Oslo Accords. Nonetheless, the case of Hamas shows that liberation is not entirely contingent on the singular moment when the colonizer withdraws from the lands of the colonized. Instead, the colonial subject begins the process of conjuring up a liberated peoplehood while still in a colonial condition. Thus, in the case of Palestine, this means that Gaza is not just a story of siege, war, and the challenges Hamas faces while maintaining its dual role or its growing authoritarianism. If one considers the long moment of liberation to have begun already, one also notices that a Gaza Strip under the canopy of a single Palestinian leadership becomes, albeit minimally, reminiscent of the eventual liberated State of Palestine as a single territorial unit, inhabited by the Palestinian people and ruled by a Palestinian government.

This chapter discusses the development of media and technology in Palestine in the wake of the Oslo Accords. For the first time in their modern history, the Palestinians were afforded, by the accords, the freedom for collective self-expression through mediated forms, such as radio and television. Palestinians were also permitted to build their own telecommunications infrastructure for land and mobile telephony, establish digital services, and engender an industry that would eventually make up a significant amount of the Palestinian GDP and play an important role in Palestinian society. However, the accords also inhibited the formation of these very industries. None of these media fields would be representatively or geographically national, many have operated quasi-illegally, and all of them continue to be hindered by Israeli policies and by the conditions of Palestinian Authority-international funding agreements that Oslo made possible.

This chapter examines the United Nations's involvement in the economic development of the Palestinian Authority. It begins with an overview of the key stages of the UN involvement in Palestinian development, focusing on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and various UN development agencies. It then considers cracks in the UN's development mission, architecture, and resources amid the rising swell of globalization and liberalization. It also explains how and why the Palestine Liberation Organization bought into neoliberalism and concludes with an assessment of why the UN still matters to Palestine. The chapter offers suggestions for ensuring a better future for the Palestinian people as compared to the past twenty years, as well as for realizing Palestinian efforts at achieving statehood.

This chapter addresses lawfare against Israel by Palestinian NGOs and their allies. Section I analyzes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), including EU guidelines restricting grants to Israel; BDS citing Israeli “war crimes” as justification for damaging Israeli-affiliated businesses; and lawfare by Israel supporters combating BDS. Section II describes attempts to generate “universal jurisdiction” prosecutions of Israelis in third countries for alleged war crimes. Section III analyzes efforts to instigate legal action against non-Israeli companies in third-country courts for allegedly “aiding and abetting” Israeli “war crimes.” Section IV discusses Israeli responses. Section V compares the Palestinians’ sophisticated waging of lawfare with the PA’s and Hamas’s poor compliance with international law and the rule of law. Section VI assesses lessons learned and the future of lawfare by the PA and Palestinian NGOs and their allies, as well as future Israeli responses.