The Oslo agreements and the Palestinian authority: Or how to convert freedom fighters into docile colonial administrators
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: In view of the increasing repression to which Palestinians are subjected by their own government today, this contribution revisits the role of the Palestinian Authority, in order to question a widespread but misleading idea: that because the PA is not a state, but rather a sort of local administrative entity with no sovereign power and whose limited jurisdiction is systematically violated by the Israeli occupation, it has had little impact on Palestinian life and does not deserve much of our attention. The paper argues that even though in international legal terms the Palestinian state does not exist, in sociological terms it certainly does exist and Palestinians experience it in undeniable ways. They are dispossessed, arrested, repressed, tortured, and killed by their own government, while a monopoly on the "use of physical violence," the concentration of economic power, and the centralization of the instruments of symbolic domination (typically accompanying state formations) are becoming increasingly central features of the PA’s regime. Through interviews and archival research, the paper offers an institutional history of the PA, and looks at it as a productive colonial device, and explains how the PA has served to reproduce and consolidate three colonial patterns, namely, the non-sovereign status of Palestinians, authoritarian forms of domination, and the division of the colonized/occupied population in groups with different legal statuses and antagonistic interests.
Source: Confluences Méditerranée
Author: Emilio Dabed
Language: French
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7141569677
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