Lisa Bhungalia Jeannette Greven and Tahani Mustafa argue that the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against the Palestinians—which gives Israel free reign to violently dispossess Palestinians while simultaneously withdrawing US aid for food, schools and hospitals—has both worsened Pal
The modern history of Palestine is one of continuous intervention. International actors have long supported the overarching aims of the Zionist movement, and later Israeli state-led colonization, while attempting to manage the effects of Palestinian dispossession through various forms of development and humanitarian assistance.
The United States has been at the forefront of efforts that paradoxically attempt to buffer the impacts of Israeli settler-colonialism on the Palestinian population while directly enabling it to continue. Today, Washington stands as Israel’s primary patron, providing it with roughly $3.8 billion in military aid per year. Since 1967, US military aid to Israel has totaled over $120 billion.[1] The United States has also been the largest contributor to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established in 1949 to administer relief to Palestinian refugees, and is among the top six donors of aid to the Palestinians since the Oslo Accords of 1993—committing over $5 billion in bilateral assistance.[2] Since the 1970s, Washington has also sought to retain stewardship over the “peace process” and assert its dominance in the Middle East by promoting a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From Camp David in 1978 to the 1993 Oslo Accords to the Annapolis Conference of 2007, Washington has safeguarded Israel’s political objectives while promising to deliver a compromise between Israel and the Palestinians.[3]
US intervention in Palestine has long been defined by a mix of hard and soft power, which includes material support and coordination for Israeli and Palestinian security forces as well as funding for UNRWA and United States Agency for International Aid (USAID) civilian aid projects for Palestinians. The United States has used these levers of power to shore up Israel’s settler colonial project while helping Israel manage and control—often through aid—the Palestinian population.
In light of this dynamic, one might presume that recent US aid cuts to Palestinians under the Trump administration—slashing the budgets for UNRWA, USAID projects and limiting support for Israeli-Palestinian security coordination—would be a welcome development. The implications, however, are more complicated. As Washington sheds any pretense of concern for the Palestinian population by waging unprecedented pressure policies, the Trump administration is undermining its own ability to pacify Palestinians and manage political dynamics on the ground. This moment may provide a promising opening. At the same time, as skewed as American policy has always been, the United States has at times restrained Israel’s most maximalist aspirations. In the absence of any kind of counterweight to the realization of Israel’s full-throttled settler-colonial ambitions, the future appears grim for Palestinians.
In the context of the shifting realignment of US power and intervention in Palestine, the rapid demise of US soft power has three interrelated but distinct effects. First, the United States has undermined its ability to project its will through indirect modalities of rule and governance built into civilian aid and security programs. Second, the Trump administration policies have undermined the long-term viability of US leadership on the international stage. At the same time, however, the US assault on the Palestinians inflicts very real violence, particularly in the Gaza Strip, where sudden US cuts to UNRWA have created significant resource shortages for some of the most vulnerable. This moment is one of uncertainty rather than definitiveness. Amidst these rapidly shifting configurations of power in Palestine the status quo is unraveling; the direction politics will take in the foreseeable future remains to be seen.
Few following the Trump Administration’s bellicose rhetoric about the Middle East during his presidential campaign would be surprised by the hardline direction in Washington’s new approach toward the Palestinians. While Trump-the-candidate expressed interest in toppling established norms in order to compel the Palestinians to capitulate to Israeli demands, his inner circle departs from precedent only through its even more ardent embrace of Israel. The Trump administration has embraced a zealous Christian Zionist outlook that vocally denies Palestinian national rights and endorses Israel’s most maximalist claims, all the while consorting with anti-Semites and elevating a hyper-militarized vision of the Middle East.[4]
This vision is apparent in the way the Trump administration has broken a number of long-standing norms of US diplomacy such as recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in May 2018 and expelling the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office from the US capital that September. Taken together, these moves return Washington’s approach to the era before the 1991 Madrid Conference when the United States refused to recognize the PLO. In substance, American-Palestinian diplomatic relations have all but disappeared.[5]
In addition to shifts in the diplomatic arena, the Trump administration ended American civilian aid to the Palestinians in 2018, thus relinquishing the historic US semblance of concern for the welfare of the Palestinian population. In August 2018, the United States ended its contributions to UNRWA, which totaled $360 million in 2017 and constituted over a quarter of the agency’s annual budget. These cuts immediately jeopardized health care, education, employment and food security for Palestinian refugees. Recent reports estimate that over 1 million people in Gaza face dire food insecurity if UNRWA’s budget crisis is left unresolved. The agency has also been forced to slash mental health and short-term employment programs, cutting lifelines to a population under a decade-long siege.[6] Washington’s aggressive new stance went even further in January 2019, when it announced that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was ceasing all operations in the occupied Palestinian territories. USAID has since dismissed all but a handful of its staff, abandoned half-finished infrastructure projects including water, road and sewage systems and left underfunded local municipalities to pick up the pieces.[7]
The Trump administration unambiguously framed its decision to cut US assistance to the Palestinians as a political maneuver to compel them to the negotiating table. Some have speculated that the Trump administration’s moves are part of a larger goal to unilaterally remove key issues (such as refugees and Jerusalem) from the negotiating table in time for the grand reveal of Trump’s “Deal of the Century.”[8] More sinisterly, however, American defunding of UNRWA can also be read as an attempt to dissolve the category of refugee altogether. As one Palestinian Authority (PA) official remarked, “UNRWA is a preamble to the refugee issue.”[9] The velocity of the changes Washington has enacted amounts to what Ilana Feldman aptly terms a “full spectrum assault on Palestinian politics.”[10]
Despite the Trump Administration’s hardline approach to the Palestinians and withdrawal of civilian aid that historically had been used to manage Palestinians in support of longer-term US and Israeli interests, the US impact on foreign aid governance over Palestinians is still viscerally felt. This impact is the result of the decades-long US imposition and amplification of aid securitization. The American model of securitizing aid has subsequently been adopted by almost every major donor operating in Palestine and will likely remain for the foreseeable future.
The post-September 11, 2001 moment marked the intensification of a heavily securitized aid approach by US organizations. On September 23, 2001, President Bush signed Executive Order 13224, a proclaimed “strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network.” Part of a growing legal infrastructure of American terrorism financing law, the order prohibited US monies from being channeled to US-designated foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). This order had direct implications for Palestinians. Given the deep entanglement of the American and Israeli security apparatuses, there is considerable crossover between groups bearing the terrorist classification on US lists and those identified as such by Israel. Groups designated as FTOs include Hamas and a number of Palestinian leftist organizations. In addition to freezing the US assets of official designees, the order imposed a host of other criteria that could result in being denied aid, ranging from having a relative in Israeli prison to inscribing the name of a martyr on a building or other edifice.
The tethering of US counterterrorism law to civilian aid has produced expansive policing and surveillance regimes over the past decade as responsibility for ensuring compliance with US law has been offloaded onto the many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private contractors that handle American monies.[11] As part of this risk-transference, civilian agencies that implement US funded projects are responsible for collecting the personal information of potential aid recipients. This data is then screened through US and Israeli intelligence apparatuses. Prospective aid applicants must confirm that they will not work with any group or individual bearing the designated terrorist classification through the signing of an anti-terrorism certificate (ATC). The conditionalities and prohibitions imposed by US terrorism financing law on aid to the Palestinians have impeded necessary coordination and networking between groups and individuals cleared by Washington’s intelligence apparatus and those denied clearance or consigned to the banned FTO category.
The reverberations of this securitization regime have been profound. To ensure a consistent flow of aid money, many NGOs and contractors have built anti-terror infrastructures into their programs, such as screenings, certificates and restrictive contractual terms to ensure they are viewed as low risk investments. Likewise, it was in fact the United States that coined the notion of “terrorist infrastructure” to target Islamic charities and organizations, before Israel adopted the term to put Hamas in the crosshairs.[12]
These measures have not been adopted without challenge, however. When USAID introduced the ATC in 2003, many Palestinian NGOs and charitable organizations boycotted American funding to protest the US imposition of the term terrorism on Palestinian politics. For many in Palestine, signing the ATC directly sanctioned the American equation of Palestinian resistance with terror. As one Palestinian NGO worker in the West Bank noted, “No group actually wants to use the funds to support terrorism. Rather, this is a battle over principle. Who has the power to define?”[13] In perpetuating the premise that Palestinian charitable bodies must adhere to American and Israeli political demands in order to be legitimate, the United States exacerbated fragmentation and exclusion in Palestinian collective organizing.
Despite the Trump administration rollback of American aid, therefore, the securitized norms the United States instituted after September 11 continue to persist in Palestine today. As the director of an NGO in the West Bank remarked, the War on Terror gave rise to infrastructures of surveillance that are fundamental to the way aid works in Palestine today. “This is now normalized,” he stated, and “the US paved the way for this trend.”[14] In a similar vein, another director of a Palestinian development NGO reflected on intensifying aid securitization throughout the foreign aid regime in Palestine:
The ATC emerged in 2003, and we boycotted this. It’s not our role to do vetting; it’s not our role to replace the police. [However] it didn’t stop with USAID. It spread [to] UN agencies. They [other donors] started adding some articles in their contracts. Then it went to other organizations like the Scandinavian countries, and they started adding a BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] condition.[15]
The counterterrorism paradigm aggressively promoted by the United States, which has grown to encompass large facets of Palestinian political life, will be difficult to roll back—whether or not American civilian aid to the Palestinians resumes.
Perhaps more perniciously, the Palestinian Authority has appropriated the counterterrorism framework for its own purposes. Charges of terrorism are a useful tool to prevent Islamist political organizing and to exclude Hamas from the PA, ensuring the hegemony of Fatah—the political party in power in the West Bank and that dominates the PA. The PA’s self-identification as a partner in the War on Terror is a key obstacle to Palestinian pluralism. The counterterrorism imperative criminalizes resistance and empowers draconian decrees like the 2017 Electronic Crimes Act.[16] The PA enacted the law at the request of the Israeli government as part of a censorship system whose premise is to combat terror online.[17]
Emblematic of the US aid securitization paradigm—and its intractability—is the office of the US Security Coordinator (USSC), the main channel for American-Palestinian security coordination, based in Jerusalem. Against the backdrop of US aid cuts, the USSC is today the only direct forum for American engagement with the Palestinian leadership. The role of the USSC exemplifies both the incongruity of recent US policy changes, and the insidious effects of US interventions in Palestine.
Established in March 2005, the USSC was originally mandated to oversee security arrangements related to Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip later that year. The USSC ensured that all multinational efforts to fund and implement reforms in the West Bank foregrounded Israeli security concerns after the Second Intifada (2000-2005). Between 2007 and 2009, the USSC oversaw the PA-led counterinsurgency campaign against armed militias that returned the West Bank’s Area A to PA control. Funded through the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), the USSC was mandated to retrain the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF), vetted by Israel, to fully cooperate with the Israeli security and intelligence establishments. By 2009, its head of mission Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton was able to claim that the USSC was responsible for the creation of battalions of “new Palestinians.”[18] The USSC has since been instrumental in the construction of the police proxy regime in the West Bank, which is wracked by civil and human rights abuses.[19]
Under the Trump administration, however, the USSC has quickly become a site of entangled interventions. Since its inception, the USSC has relied upon key allies—a British Support Team and the Canadian Proteus mission—to build capacity in the PASF.[20] Recent US government policies have, paradoxically, threatened the USSC’s ability to smoothly insert Israeli security demands into the fabric of the Palestinians’ limited self-governance.
In the first instance, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act in March 2018, which charged the PA with incentivizing violence by providing the families of martyrs and prisoners in Israeli jails with financial support. The Taylor Force Act ended all American civilian program funding to the PA. It similarly set the stage for Israel to punish the Palestinians in February 2019 by withholding taxes that Israel collects on behalf of the PA.[21] Combined, these cuts sparked an expanding budget crisis that compelled the PA to slash Palestinian civil servants’ salaries, including those of its security forces.
Secondly, the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (ATCA) of October 2018 caused unforeseen complications in PA-Israeli security coordination. Pursuant to ATCA, entities that accept American aid “consent” to personal jurisdiction under US law. As such, they can be sued for past acts of terrorism—the definition of which, under existing US “material support laws,” is expansive.[22] In effect, ATCA renders any recipient of American aid vulnerable to multi-million-dollar lawsuits in the United States. Recognizing the crippling impact ATCA could have, the PA subsequently announced it would cease to accept US funding.
As a further repercussion of ATCA, Washington defunded the INL office in the Consulate, cutting off the USSC’s official stream of support. ATCA also accelerated the closure of the Jordan International Police Training Centre, host to trainings for regional partners in America’s War on Terror including the PASF since 2008. Similarly, plans for construction at the US-funded Central Training Institute campus in Jericho slowed and are now being transferred to the PA, which will have to locate funding or face lawsuits from local subcontractors.
Following public outcry by Israeli security officials, who understand the intrinsic value to Israel of security coordination with the PA, current coordinator Lt. Gen. Eric Wendt travelled to Washington in December 2018 to compel legislators to see the folly of their decision. As a State Department official clarified, ATCA’s impact on the PASF was “unintentional,” despite the fact that the bill was the handiwork of pro-Israel groups explicitly devoted to bankrupting the PLO and PA.[23] Cognizant that ATCA poses a distinct threat to the PA’s ability to pacify Palestinians, on which Israel relies, American lawyers have drafted up a fix—endorsed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a “legislative priority”—which would eliminate “personal jurisdiction” from strategic funding streams.[24]
Moreover, the diplomatic downgrading of the US Consulate General in March 2019 complicated the relationships the United States depends upon to intervene in Palestine. The USSC physically sits in what is now the “Palestinian Affairs Unit.” The continued British, Canadian and Turkish role in the USSC was called into question as the explicit American subordination of its relationship with the PA to Israel contradicts these states’ positions.
The USSC’s existence today—without any diplomatic framework and only tenuous international support—reveals how fragile the American stranglehold over securitized aid to the Palestinians has become. The USSC’s behind-the-scenes endurance makes glaringly clear that the United States values the PA—at its core—as a native police force to meet Israel’s demands. Because of the Trump administration’s priorities, funding to the USSC persists without the State Department’s support.[25] In doing so, Washington pushes its allies and the PA into an increasingly untenable situation. As of April 2019, the PA’s financial crisis became so severe that it withheld 50 percent of civil servants’ salaries, while channeling nearly 30 percent of its total budget to the PASF, which serves Israel.[26] How much longer can Washington compel the PA to uphold Israel’s demands when acquiescence to the United States yields only humiliations?
Despite the uncertainties that emerge from the forceful approach to the Palestinians adopted by the Trump administration, its policies are less disruptive than they appear. Trump acts upon the same Israel-focused “security first” perspective that has persisted throughout the peace process from the Oslo Accords to the Bush-era Road Map for Middle East Peace.[27] Though the Road Map was an abject failure, the model for progress it enforced—endless Palestinian reform to meet perpetually-moving, Israeli-determined performance benchmarks—is deeply entrenched in the aid community today.
At a structural level, the Trump administration is an aberration in US policymaking primarily in the manner in which its policy toward the Middle East is decided. One State Department official described an ideologically-driven coterie of decision-makers—a “black box”—dictating to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The State Department is disconnected from the decision-making process: The recent endorsement of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, for example, was not previewed at any level within the State Department.[28]
The upheaval ushered in by the Trump administration is nevertheless significant because it strips the pretense of measured liberalism from American interventions. In substance, however, the yet to be unveiled “Deal of the Century” developed by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner and White House Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt promises to sustain the combination of “economic peace” and technical fixes to Israeli control that Washington has long promoted.[29] While Trump’s associates are more explicit in their disregard for Palestinian national claims, the same calculation was the backbone of US engagement with the Palestinians under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies. Indeed, as one State Department official hinted, Kushner’s plan for the blockaded Gaza Strip is sure to include a package of securitized aid modelled on the 2008 Jenin Initiative—which tied economic aid to security reforms by the PA—and Palestinian businessmen are his target audience.[30]
Moreover, while European policymakers may proclaim that they disagree with Trump’s brash disregard for international norms, in reality they consistently adhere to American and Israeli-determined lines toward the Palestinians. European donors are prominent supporters of programs designed to improve the rule of law and promote the principles of good governance and accountability within the PA’s governing apparatus through justice reform initiatives. Yet, these European-funded initiatives have only served to facilitate the PA’s transformation into an authoritarian proxy. By funding capacity-building programs for a judicial system that answers to no one but donors and a president with an expired mandate, these programs keep the wheels spinning in Ramallah while insulating the PA from civic dissent. Funds are disbursed in exchange for compliance with a status quo—Palestinian self-policing—that serves Israel.[31] In such circumstances, promoting the “rule of law” in Palestine is a euphemism for fine-tuning Israeli control.
With less room to maneuver, European partners dismayed by erratic shifts in American policy struggle to find viable alternatives to the United States’ driving role in Israel-Palestine. A State Department official pointed to the recent Israeli expulsion of observers from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron as an example of the Europeans’ limited political leverage.[32] Where the Europeans can contribute, they struggle to break out of the confines of the security-driven aid paradigm the United States established. In one telling example, Sweden moved to fill the funding gap to the PA security forces left by the United States. Despite Sweden’s pretenses of solidarity by recognizing Palestinian statehood, Sweden in fact upholds US and Israeli-driven priorities through aid to the Palestinians.[33]
Cosmetic shifts in the provision of aid to the Palestinians aside, the PASF will continue to benefit from the largesse of an international community entrenched in an endless program of “reforming” and “strengthening” Palestinian institutions. Further, patronage of the PASF’s Preventative and Intelligence services through bilateral backchannel funding and logistical support is sure to grow. Covert support has long underpinned Fatah’s dominance in the West Bank, designed to prop up a compliant proxy and combat targeted groups like Hamas. In September 2018, the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hosted Majed Farraj, head of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service, and a potential replacement for aging PA President Mahmoud Abbas.[34] As open channels of bilateral American aid fade and Israeli demands for security coordination persist, covert support to the PASF is sure to increase in importance.
While the rapid succession of moves made by the Trump administration are audacious, they cannot alter certain fundamental truths. Defunding UNRWA will not, as Toufic Haddad observes, liquidate the Palestinians’ “legal claims, memories, organizing efforts, and institutions.”[35] US endorsement of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital does not change its internationally-recognized status nor Palestinian political claims to it. While Trump’s characteristically spectacular maneuvers constitute a new round of fire on the Palestinians, this latest onslaught may very well have the opposite effect.
What the Trumpian vision has done is reaffirm US support for unqualified Israeli sovereignty and political claims over the land and affirm that the United States views the Palestinians as the problem to be dealt with. Equally, Washington’s recent moves remove its facade as a neutral broker, if it was ever taken seriously in the first place. Perhaps even more crucially, Trump may ultimately narrow US influence and leverage by so starkly isolating the United States from other international players and forces in Palestine. It is here that productive openings may emerge for those promoting Palestinian rights.
It is notable that few other states have followed Washington’s lead. Only Guatemala, Romania and Australia have relocated their diplomatic missions to Jerusalem—and Australia limited its recognition to West Jerusalem. Likewise, on the aid front, multilateral, European, Asian and other donors have not shown any significant shifts in their posturing, aside from lacking any forward-thinking political vision, a long-standing problem.
At the same time, the political transformations taking shape through the close alliance between the Trump and Netanyahu administrations have real and dire implications that will extend well beyond their tenures: Israeli lawmakers are explicitly drawing on American recognition of Israeli annexation in the Golan Heights as a model for justifying the application of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. In this context, inescapable questions plague Washington’s moves. If Israel annexes the West Bank, with American approval, what happens next? How long can the PA survive, financially powerless yet continuing its policing duties? Can the United States underwrite a policy of blatant apartheid after the PA falls? Will international actors distance themselves from the American position? What voices for justice for Palestinians will emerge in these shifts and fissures? And most importantly, how are Palestinians mobilizing and responding to this moment and the political openings it presents?
Much of the danger in recent American moves resides, perhaps, in the slow, grating, shifting of norms surrounding key issues: Jerusalem, the right of return, Palestinian political representation, and most of all, broad-based support for Palestinian dignity and freedom. To refuse normalization of the right-wing politics of the present is perhaps the most urgent task at hand. But this is in effect a negative demand. More productively, this moment presents a series of openings and reconfigurations of power in Palestine that have the potential to fundamentally alter the status quo—but in which direction remains to be seen. This direction depends, in large part, on how those on the outside relate to these shifting dynamics, as much as how and in what ways Palestinians on the inside and beyond are supported in their long—decades too long—struggle for justice
and dignity. ■
[1] Nathan Thrall, “The Past 50 Years of Israeli Occupation. And the Next,” New York Times, June 2, 2017.
[2] Jim Zanotti, “US Foreign Aid to the Palestinians,” Congressional Research Service, July 3, 2014.
[3] Khaled Elgindy, Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2019).
[4] Amy Kaplan, “The Old ‘New Anti-Semitism’ and Resurgent White Supremacy,” Middle East Report 283 (Summer 2017).
[5] Mouin Rabbani, “Team Trump’s Magical Thinking on Palestine,” The Nation, September 14, 2018.
[6] Jennifer Rankin, “One Million Face Hunger in Gaza after US Cut to Palestine Aid,” The Guardian, May 15, 2019.
[7] Daniel Estrin, “Palestinian School and Sewage Projects Unfinished as US Cuts Final Bit of Aid,” NPR, January 17, 2019.
[8] Gilbert Achcar, “Safqat al-Qarn wa Istikmāl al-Nakba,” Al-Quds, July 18, 2018.
[9] Interview conducted by Lisa Bhungalia, July 2018, Ramallah.
[10] Ilana Feldman, “Trump’s Full Spectrum Assault on Palestinian Politics,” Middle East Report Online, December 2, 2018.
[11] Lisa Bhungalia, “Managing Violence: Aid, Counterinsurgency, and the Humanitarian Present in Palestine,” Environment and Planning A, 47/11 (2015).
[12] Beverley Milton-Edwards, “Securitizing Charity: The Case of Palestinian Zakat Committees,” Global Change, Peace & Security 29/2 (2017).
[13] Interview conducted by Lisa Bhungalia, March 2010, Ramallah.
[14] Interview conducted by Lisa Bhungalia, July 2018, Ramallah.
[15] Interview conducted by Lisa Bhungalia, June 2018, Ramallah.
[16] Alaa Tartir, “Criminalizing Resistance: The Cases of Balata and Jenin Refugee Camps,” Journal of Palestine Studies 46/2 (2017).
[17] Tahani Mustafa, Transforming Security Landscapes: Security Sector Reform in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis (London: SOAS University of London, 2017).
[18] Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, “Program of the Soref Symposium: Michael Stein Address on US Middle East Policy,” May 7, 2009.
[19] Human Rights Watch, “Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent: Arbitrary Arrest and Torture Under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas,” October 23, 2018.
[20] John Deverell, “The West Bank Shapes Up,” Prospect Magazine 27 (August 2009).
[21] US Congress, “H.R. 1164: Taylor Force Act,” February 16, 2017; Israel Hayom, “Cabinet Approves $138m in Cuts to PA Tax Funds Over Terror Payments,” February 18, 2019.
[22] See Wadie Said, Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[23] Harry Graver and Scott Anderson, “Shedding Light on the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act of 2018,” Lawfare Blog, October 25, 2018.
[24] Americans for Peace Now, “PeaceCast #71: Anatomy of the ATCA.”
[25] Interview conducted by Jeannette Greven, March 2019.
[26] Sabrien Amrov and Alaa Tartir, “Subcontracting Repression in the West Bank and Gaza,” New York Times, November 26, 2014.
[27] Mandy Turner, “The Power of ‘Shock and Awe’: the Palestinian Road to Reform,” International Peacekeeping 16/4 (2009).
[28] Interview conducted by Jeannette Greven, March 2019.
[29] Tariq Dana, “The Symbiosis between Palestinian ‘Fayyadism’ and Israeli ‘Economic Peace’: The Political Economy of Capitalist Peace in the Context of Colonialism,” Conflict, Security and Development 15/5 (2015).
[30] Jeannette Greven, “The Jenin Initiative: Counterinsurgency by Capacity-Building,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, forthcoming.
[31] Asem Khalil and Raffaella Del Sarto, “The Legal Fragmentation of Palestine-Israel and European Union Policies Promoting the Rule of Law,” in Raffaella Del Sarto, ed., Fragmented Borders, Interdependence and External Relations: The Israel-Palestine-European Union Triangle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
[32] Noa Landau and Yotam Berger, “Israel to Expel International Monitoring Force in Hebron After 20-Year Presence,” Haaretz, January 28, 2019.
[33] The Guardian, “Sweden Officially Recognises State of Palestine,” October 30, 2014.
[34] Barak Ravid, “Scoop: Palestinian Intelligence Delegation in DC for Talks with CIA,” Axios, September 2, 2018.
[35] Toufic Haddad, “Palestine on a Precipice,” New Politics 17/2 (2019).
