Creating Partners for Peace : The Palestinian Authority and the International Statebuilding Agenda

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1 JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING VOLUME 5 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2011) Creating Partners for Peace : The Palestinian Authority and the International Statebuilding Agenda Mandy Turner The Palestinian Authority (PA) offers an interesting case study of statebuilding in a conflict-country context. Created as an interim administration in the West Bank and Gaza in 1994, the PA has been hampered by the statebuilding framework enshrined in the Oslo Accords, its lack of sovereignty, the lack of final status negotiations, and the partners for peace paradigm which is an attempt by donors and international organisations to support who they regard as the right type of elite*that is, those willing to make peace with Israel (as defined by Israel). This article explores the impacts of this paradigm and argues that it has paralysed the formal political process in Palestine and has securitised democracy. Keywords Israel Palestine; statebuilding; partners for peace; Palestinian Authority; Introduction In October 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas a credible partner for peace (Jerusalem Post 2009). This praise came after Abbas, under heavy US and Israeli pressure, withdrew PA support for a resolution that the UN Human Rights Council adopt the Goldstone Report into war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas in the 2008/09 Israeli war on Gaza. The report was regarded by the US as unhelpful to the peace process, while Israel argued that the report ignored its right to selfdefence. But while Abbas basked in praise from the US and UN, his decision had destabilising impacts within the occupied Palestinian territory (opt). There were demonstrations against the decision, posters of Abbas face with the word traitor emblazoned across it appeared on walls, Palestinian NGOs launched campaigns, and the Minister for National Economy, Bassem Khoury, resigned in protest, as did the PA s ambassador to Egypt, Nabil Amr. Abbas reputation was severely dented, leading to his announcement one month later that he would not stand in the next presidential elections. This is an illustration of the contradictions within and created by the partners for peace paradigm*a paradigm that has dominated the discourse and practice of the asymmetric conflict and ISSN print/ online/11/ Taylor & Francis DOI: /

2 2 TURNER asymmetric peace between Israel and the Palestinians. All parties to the conflict*palestinian, Israeli, donors and international organisations (IOs)* have used this phrase, but what does it mean, and how has it guided policy and actions? This article focuses on these questions and argues that the partners for peace paradigm has three key elements: firstly, it is an attempt by donors and IOs to support and/or impose who they regard as the right type of Palestinian political elite; secondly, that the right type of Palestinian political elite are defined as those who are willing to make peace with Israel (as defined by Israel); and thirdly, that those who are not deemed the right type of political elite have to be marginalised and/or removed. In essence, the partners for peace paradigm is the result of an internalisation and repackaging of the powerful security discourse emanating from Israel which is rarely questioned; and its implementation has meant that the building of a democratic and legitimate Palestinian state and a just solution to the Israel Palestine conflict has been regarded as less important than the project of supporting the peace process, which has, itself, become an empty signifier. The following analysis is split into five sections. The first section briefly outlines the creation of the PA as an interim administration in 1994 and the statebuilding framework instituted by the 1993 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self- Government Arrangements and subsequent agreements (otherwise known as the Oslo Accords). The PA offers an interesting case study of statebuilding in a conflictcountry context, therefore section two reviews four different analyses of the role and rationale for the PA. Section three places the creation and experience of the PA within an analysis of the international statebuilding agenda since the end of the Cold War. It is clear that without international assistance, the PA would not have been able to withstand the destabilising impacts of de-development and military actions so this section charts the involvement of donors and IOs in the Palestinian statebuilding process. Section four analyses this involvement through the partners for peace paradigm and argues that donor strategies to support the right type of elite has had destabilising impacts on Palestinian politics, firstly by making it possible for certain Palestinian political actors to manipulate international support to marginalise opponents, and secondly by provoking resistance from other Palestinian elites and Palestinian society in general. The fifth and final section concludes by arguing that the partners for peace paradigm has meant schizophrenic donor policies justified as being about supporting a non-existent peace process, but which have actually served to securitise democracy and helped to make Palestinian statebuilding a failure. Statebuilding in Palestine In 1994, the PA was created in the West Bank and Gaza as an interim administration under the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords and subsequent agreements.

3 CREATING PARTNERS FOR PEACE 3 This followed 27 years of Israeli occupation, military rule and a quasi customs union that tied Palestinian economic development to that of Israel to the detriment of Palestinian industry and trade*a process that Sara Roy (2007) has labelled de-development. Peacebuilding and statebuilding in the opt was supposed to take place in the context of the phased withdrawal of the occupying power, Israel, as the peace process neared final status negotiations. The PA was thus to involve itself in the task of statebuilding and creating a viable economy in preparation for sovereignty, with assistance from international donors. But if the professed goal of statebuilding is to build a Weberian state*that is, a state that enjoys international recognition and exercises control over people and territory through formal and strong, preferably democratic, institutions (Ottaway 2003, p. 247)*then there were severe obstacles to this goal in the Palestinian context. These obstacles, divided into security, economic and political spheres, are reviewed below. In terms of security, the PA was not given full jurisdiction over the opt. Under Oslo and subsequent agreements the West Bank was divided into Area A (urban areas under PA civilian and security control), Area B (rural areas under PA civilian control and Israeli military control) and Area C (Israeli settlements, the Jordan Valley and the settler-only roads under Israeli control); areas H1 (akin to Area A) and H2 (akin to Area C) in Hebron, and (until the 2005 Israeli withdrawal) Yellow and White areas in Gaza. The PA was given authority over only 29 per cent of the West Bank, initially 70 per cent of Gaza, and none over East Jerusalem (UNCTAD 2006, p. 17). These divisions created internal borders in the opt thus creating huge problems for economic and political interchange. Israel was given territorial rights, on ostensibly security grounds, which allowed it to expand settlements and control the movement of goods and people. The settler population in the West Bank rose from 116,300 in 1993 to 289,600 by 2009 (Khalidi and Taghdisi-Rad 2009, p. 21); and in East Jerusalem, there were an estimated 193,000 settlers by 2008 (Dumper and Pullan 2010, p. 5). Settlers are subject to Israeli law and are protected by the Israeli military*a situation that allows them to harass Palestinians with impunity, as documented by human rights organisations such as al-haq and B Tselem (B Tselem 2008, al-haq 2009). In a survey of Palestinian civil society views on security, lack of protection against the occupiers and limited oversight of the PA s security services were identified as key concerns (DCAF and SHAMS 2009). However, neither of these concerns have been addressed in the donor-sponsored SSR programmes. The EU has sponsored reform of the civil police since 2006, while since 2005 a US team has led on the development of a Palestinian security force for state security and counterterrorism*both conducted within strict limits set by Israel. Such high levels of external control raises questions about the ownership of national security, but in the Palestinian case this is compounded by Israel s occupation and the Oslo Accords which, in effect, removed the state security forces from any resistance strategy (Agha and Khalidi 2006). According to the national security doctrine, Palestinians should not under any circumstances challenge or open fire upon Israeli soldiers or settlers even if they have

4 4 TURNER breached existing agreements and are operating in Area A (i.e. the area supposedly under the control of the PA). But in only one month*july 2009* the Israel army carried out 773 military raids into Palestinian residential locales, opening fire on 66 occasions and imposing curfews when the raids were being carried out (World Bank 2009, p. 21). Civil oversight over the security sector has been limited because the Palestinian parliament (the Palestinian Legislative Council or PLC) has been paralysed since the 2006 elections due to the detention by Israel of one-third of its members, and due to the Hamas coup in June 2007 which led to a split in the PA between a Fatah-controlled administration in the West Bank (PA-WB) and a Hamas-controlled administration in Gaza (PA-G). This has made it difficult to hold the executive and its security forces accountable*a situation that has allowed both the PA-WB and the PA-G to arrest, torture and imprison its opponents with impunity (HRW 2009, Rose 2009). The PA, therefore, does not have control over external borders (as none have been agreed upon) and does not have control over expanding internal borders (between Israeli-controlled and PA-controlled areas) that have fragmented the West Bank into three cantons (north, central and south), splitting the West Bank off from East Jerusalem, and solidifying the geographical division between the West Bank and Gaza because of the lack of a kissing point that would have given the PA territorial contiguity. Furthermore, the fragmentation of the opt has made the development of a viable economy difficult. 1 After an initial period of stability (199499), the practice of closing off Palestinian areas became more systematic thus severely disrupting economic activity (Zagha and Zumlot 2004, pp ). The closure regime, which includes checkpoints, roadblocks, settler-only roads and the Separation Barrier, expanded in the aftermath of the second (al-aqsa) intifada and remained extensive*in 2009, for instance, there were 578 closure obstacles inside the West Bank i.e. not Green Line crossings between the West Bank and Israel (OCHA 2009). Delays at checkpoints have been estimated to cost Palestinian businesses 15,000 NIS ( 2,674) per day making Palestinian goods too expensive and forcing companies into bankruptcy (O Callaghan et al. 2009, p. 19). The impact of the closure regime was supplemented by the PA s lack of control over economic policy and finances. Upon its creation, the PA was dependent on external actors until financial governance mechanisms could be developed that could facilitate the independent collection of revenues. In the PA s case, however, the development of these mechanisms was blocked under the Paris Economic Protocol (PEP) of The PEP limited the PA s power over its economic policy (no instruments were created for setting exchange rates, fiscal, monetary, or trade policies) and over its finances (it instituted a tax transfer system where Israel collected and passed to the PA the taxes and custom duties imposed on Palestinian imports from or via Israel, and income taxes collected from Palestinian workers inside Israel) (Zagha and Zumlot 2004, p. 122). So while one-third of the PA s budget revenues came from foreign aid, the other two-thirds came from these revenues collected by Israel (World Bank 2006, p. 22). This plus

5 CREATING PARTNERS FOR PEACE 5 control over borders and movement meant that Israel had a huge amount of control over Palestinian economic well-being*a powerful weapon that has been used on many occasions to ensure PA compliance. 2 The restrictions that the PEP placed on PA development cannot be overstated*this would have been akin to the UN creating structures to allow Serbia to control the revenues of Kosovo or tying East Timor to Indonesia. Politically, the PA was initially dominated by Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and first president of the PA, and the PLO exiles from Tunis. The opposition of organisations against the Oslo Accords, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Islamic Jihad and Hamas, challenged the legitimacy of the PA; and their boycotting of the 1996 elections kept them out of the formal political process and helped facilitate oneparty rule. Despite the institution of the formal attributes of democracy, i.e. a presidential system with an active parliament all eventually elected by popular vote, there was an uneven balance between the president and the PLC. It was not long before the PA gained a reputation for clientelism and corruption. Given that the PA was created as an interim administration for a transition period supposed to last no more than five years, some of these issues might have been resolved through final status negotiations and full sovereignty. However there is widespread disagreement over whether the PA was ever designed to be the forerunner of a sovereign Palestinian state or not, an issue to which the next section turns. Alternative Perspectives on the PA There are a number of different perspectives about the role and rationale for the PA, four of which will be briefly reviewed here. The first approach, here labelled as the occupation subcontractor thesis and associated with the work of Sara Roy and Neve Gordon, posits that the PA was never designed to be a viable entity promoting and building Palestinian statehood. On the contrary, it was created to be a subcontractor to Israel s occupation (Roy 2007, Gordon 2008). For these writers, the Oslo Accords were largely a capitulation to the needs and wants of Israel. Until Oslo, the international consensus supported a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the right of the Palestinians to an independent state in these areas. But Oslo meant that borders, settlements, East Jerusalem and the refugee issue were up for negotiation. Under Oslo, the PA was only granted limited autonomy over the municipal affairs of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel retained territorial rights which gave it control over key factors of production (including land, labour, water and capital) and external borders; in addition, Israeli military law still ruled supreme (Roy 2007, p. 81). The West Bank and Gaza, under Oslo, therefore became disputed territories, allowing Israel to negotiate about withdrawal.

6 6 TURNER According to Roy (2007), the Oslo Accords, in effect, allowed Israel to continue colonising Palestinian land and were an extension of the 1967 Allon Plan and the 1978 Drobless Plan. The Allon Plan, proposed by the Labor government Cabinet member, Yigal Allon, in 1967 directly after the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, called for Israel s annexation of half of the West Bank with the Palestinians confined to two unconnected cantons in the north and south governed by Jordan. What is remarkable is how similar the map of the Allon Plan looks to the map of the West Bank in 2009; although, in practice, the suggested two cantons have evolved into three: north, central and south, and the PA has taken the place of Jordan. The Drobless Plan, penned by Matitiyahou Drobless, head of the World Zionist Organization Settlement Division, proposed a framework for settlement expansion in the West Bank and Gaza that would ensure Israeli geographic and demographic control, and make separation and thus the emergence of a Palestinian state extremely difficult (Roy 2007, p. 324). The Drobless Plan also appears to be coming to fruition, thus aiding the demise of the potential for a two-state solution. For Roy, this meant [t]he Oslo process, therefore, did not represent the end of Israeli occupation but its continuation, albeit in a less direct form. The structural relationship between occupier and occupied, and the gross asymmetries in power that attend it, were not dismantled by the accords but reinforced and strengthened (Roy 2007, p. 236). Outsourcing responsibility for the population to the PA was, according to Gordon (2008, p. 169), an ingenious idea that allowed real power to be reorganised, sustained and concealed. The second perspective, here labelled the transitional client quasi-state approach and associated with Jamil Hilal and Mushtaq Khan, focuses on the external limitations placed on Palestinian statebuilding (Hilal and Khan 2004). While this looks similar to the first perspective, there are important differences. First of all, this perspective characterises the PA as being an interim institution stuck in an indefinite transition period not a subcontractor to a different phase of Israel s occupation. And second, the main problem was the Oslo Accords and the PEP, which gave Israel control over key Palestinian statebuilding resources including fiscal revenue and trade (Khan 2004, p. 5). According to Khan (2004, p. 47) [s]ince Israel believed that it was unlikely that a sovereign Palestinian state would put the security of Israel at the top of its agenda, it insisted on controlling a range of rents that were critical for the survival of the emerging Palestinian state. The Palestinian leadership, argued Khan, accepted the necessity of a temporary form of client status and compromises on sovereignty, yet this could only remain politically viable if the emerging state could provide the PA s internal constituency with substantial new economic opportunities (Khan 2004, p. 53). But Israel s policy of asymmetric containment, particularly restrictions on the movement of goods and people, meant that, despite an initial stable period between 1994 and 1999, the PA was set for economic stagnation and political crisis. Hilal and Khan (2004, pp ) argue that client status and asymmetric containment create contradictory conditions for state formation.

7 CREATING PARTNERS FOR PEACE 7 Khan (2004, p. 16) criticises the good governance agenda of the Roadmap 3 as being deeply problematic not only because it was based on an abstract neoliberal model of how a democratic state is supposed to work, but because the direction of causation*that anti-corruption, democracy and liberalisation leads to economic prosperity*is highly questionable and contradicts the historical record of statebuilding. In the case of the PA, this was triply problematic: firstly, in that the Oslo Accords deliberately created anti-democratic structures to push through a peace process that had substantial internal opposition; secondly, because Israel colluded in the corruption by agreeing to pay a part of the PA s money into special accounts directly controlled by Arafat; and thirdly, some of the PA s rent-seeking activities, such as trading monopolies, were created in an attempt to work around the constraints imposed by the PEP and Israel s closure regime (Hilal and Khan 2004, pp ). The PA, within this perspective, is therefore stuck in an indefinite transition period characterised by deep de-development (Khan 2009). The third perspective, here labelled as the elite disunity approach and associated with Amal Jamal and Khalil Shikaki, focuses on internal competition for power and disunity between the Palestinian elite as the primary reason for the impasse in progress towards independence and statehood (Shikaki 2002, Jamal 2005). These divisions are categorised as being between an Old Guard (i.e. the PLO exiles who returned in 1994 and who took the main positions in the PA) and a Young Guard (which has variously included local leaders who played key roles in the first intifada, Fatah Tamzin activists and the Islamist opposition). Jamal (2005, p. xv) argues that [e]lite disunity and factionalism in the Palestinian national movement since 1967 have impacted the patterns of political institutionalization and the chances of democratic Palestinian politics in general. The return of the PLO exiles from Tunis did not break down the division between insiders (leaders inside the opt) and outsiders (PLO returnees); the latter s dominance in the governing structures has been regarded as one of the reasons for the widening disconnect between the PA and the population. The lack of sovereignty and Israel s occupation made the task of statebuilding more difficult, but the way in which the PA developed was akin to other postcolonial states*and this needs to be explained, argues Jamal, by Palestinian politics itself. Jamal charts the centralisation of power in the Office of the President, the development of neopatrimonial politics, the dominance of Fatah, the misuse of public money and corruption, and tensions between the secular elite and the Islamic elite, particularly Hamas. The fragmentation of the elite and the competition for power has caused the Palestinian leadership to miss important opportunities to move towards independence in a sovereign Palestinian state (Jamal 2005, p. 177). According to Shikaki (2002), the power and legitimacy of the Old Guard (which includes Mahmoud Abbas) has been undermined by public anger at corruption, nepotism and the failure of the peace process. The outbreak of the second intifada marked the shift in the balance of power towards the Young Guard and the rise in popular support for the Islamic

8 8 TURNER parties and violent resistance (Shikaki 2002). The Old Guard was also dependent on the presence and support of Arafat, thus his death in 2004 has also contributed to its demise. While recognising the adverse conditions restricting the statebuilding activities of the PA, Shikaki (with Yezid Sayigh) argued, in a 1999 Council on Foreign Relations report, that there were reforms that could be introduced that would strengthen good governance, democracy and pluralism, and possibly help to reverse the erosion of political legitimacy (Sayigh and Shikaki 1999, p. 16). While the other perspectives reviewed here do not completely ignore problems in the development of the PA and shortcomings in building democracy, the difference with Jamal and Shikaki s analyses is that, despite major shortcomings in the Oslo framework, they see the establishment of the PA as having offered real hope and space for statebuilding. International assistance has been seen to be crucial in this regard, despite the problems created by bilateral relations between donors and PA departments, quangos and NGOs, particularly rivalry for funds (Sayigh and Shikaki 1999, pp , Jamal 2005, pp ). Within the elite disunity approach donors and IOs are seen as neutrally playing a crucial supportive role in Palestinian statebuilding; there is little acknowledgement that they themselves may have an agenda or be a factor contributing to the problems facing statebuilding in Palestine, unlike the fourth, and final, perspective reviewed here. The fourth perspective, here labelled as the chequebook diplomacy approach and associated with Anne Le More (2005, 2008) and Rex Brynen (2000, 2005), focuses on the role of external actors and international aid in the fragmentation of the PA. International aid has amounted to roughly US$1 billion a year in grants, given by international donors, to the PA, although the figures are likely to be higher given the incomplete tracking of aid to Palestine (Le More 2008, p. 1). While this perspective shares some similarities with the first two perspectives in its analysis of the restrictions placed on statebuilding in Palestine by the asymmetric peace enshrined in the Oslo Accords, crucially, blame is also placed at the door of international actors, which includes the involvement of 42 donor countries and 30 UN and other multilateral agencies. Problematically, the use of chequebook diplomacy came to replace the search for a political solution, meaning that: the Israeli Palestinian conflict had become normalized and the Palestinian state-building effort depoliticized by a decade of international concentration on assuaging the socio-economic and humanitarian symptoms of the crisis, rather than tackling the root causes and diplomatic challenges and obstacles impeding upon the resolution of the conflict. (Le More 2008, p. 110) Le More analyses the complex dynamics between the four main third-party actors: the US, the EU, the UN and the World Bank and characterises their involvement as: the US decides, the World Bank leads, the EU pays, the UN feeds (Le More 2005, p. 995). She argues that the EU has tried to use the aid agenda ( low politics) to exert influence on the diplomatic process ( high politics), but with little success because of Israeli and US domination of the latter. Furthermore, the role of the UN and the World Bank, due to the peculiarity of their involvement,

9 CREATING PARTNERS FOR PEACE 9 particularly the atypical structures and mandates created, underlines the extreme degree of politicization of aid to the Palestinians (Le More 2008, p. 85). The donor community has assumed, problematically, that, by pumping money into development and statebuilding in Palestine, they could support the peace process. Brynen (2005, p. 133) points out that while there has been growing disquiet amongst the donor community that they have been subsidising Israel s occupation, morally they feel they have no choice as Israel would be unlikely to shoulder the burden if international aid flows demised. Even when sanctions were imposed on the Hamas administration after 2006, in reality just as much aid flowed into Palestine although it bypassed the Hamas administration and reinstituted practices used by the PA under Arafat that good governance reforms had tried to eradicate (i.e. channelling money through ministries and the Office of the President rather than through the single treasury account). It was the withholding of revenue transfers by Israel that brought the PA to the brink of collapse (IMF 2006). While ending aid for the Palestinians is regarded as controversial by the donor community, using aid leverage or economic pressure against Israel is completely off the agenda due to Washington s perception of the conflict and the dynamics of US domestic politics (Brynen 2005, p. 133). Or, in other words, a combination of what Ilan Pappe calls the strategic relationship and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt refer to as the Israel lobby (Mearsheimer and Walt 2006, Pappe 2007). While successful Palestinian statebuilding is regarded by Le More and Brynen as unlikely under conditions of occupation, they also see donor assumptions and peacebuilding policies as having contributed to the problems facing the PA and the Palestinian people as a whole. For example, by defining Palestine as a postconflict society, donors made development plans on the basis of seeing the opt as akin to a poor, sovereign developing country. Such a designation does not take into account the peculiarity of the PA s context, particularly the closure regime and the division of the opt into Areas A, B and C, which restricts development projects to Areas A and B and prevents large-scale infrastructural projects (Le More 2008, p. 39). By accepting these, and other, restrictions (what some internationals in Palestine refer to as working around the occupation ), donors, argue Brynen and Le More, have helped to entrench the fragmentation of the opt. The role of external actors in the Palestinian statebuilding process has, therefore, within this perspective, been regarded as being neither neutral nor always positive. This is a key theme of the following section, which places an analysis of the PA within the international statebuilding agenda. The International Statebuilding Agenda External involvement in statebuilding has a long pedigree; its ideological roots lie in the distinction between the developed and the undeveloped world, or between those regarded as capable of governing themselves and those believed

10 10 TURNER to lack the capacity, political will or standard of civilisation necessary to govern. 4 Its re-emergence as a key concern for donors and IOs in the post-cold War world has been no different in this regard*and applies with even more force to war-torn societies. Between 1989 and 2007, there were 20 major multilateral peacebuilding missions deployed to post-conflict societies, all of which involved statebuilding and governance components (Paris and Sisk 2009, p. 1). Nevertheless, statebuilding as a component of the international peacebuilding industry was under-analysed by the academic and policy community until the mid-2000s (Fukuyama 2004, Krasner 2004, Chesterman 2005) due to the ideological dominance of the Washington Consensus which extolled the virtues of the minimalist state. Despite the initial relative blindness and silence in the academic and policy community towards statebuilding as a sibling to peacebuilding, three main forms of external assistance have generally been available to war-torn societies to help (re)build state institutions: international administration, governance assistance through external aid, and aid to civil society/ngo actors. International administration, where a foreign power or IO takes responsibility for governing a newly-created or war-torn territory, was implemented in Kosovo, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor and Eastern Slavonia. Supporters, such as Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner (1992), argue that international administrations allow embryonic or post-conflict states to develop and grow under the realm of international tutelage (see also Caplan 2005). Such a case has, on occasion, been made for the creation of an international administration over Palestine to guide it into independent statehood. Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel, proposed a US-led international administration for Palestine. Indyk argued that Israel should withdraw from Gaza (which it did in 2005) and most of the West Bank while a US-led international force established security and an interim administration until final-status negotiations were completed and power could be handed over to a Palestinian government (Indyk 2003). Parties on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides expressed some interest in the idea. But there are a number of key aspects to the conflict that would ensure problems for an international administration. Firstly, Israel is unlikely to agree to a UN-led international administration but might agree to one under US leadership as proposed by Indyk (2003). But given US unconditional support for Israel, one central pillar of international administration, the necessity (or at least the perception) of neutrality, would be thrown into doubt. It is also important to ask if neutrality is a viable or just policy in a situation of asymmetric conflict. Secondly, while Israel might favour a US-led administration, it would likely prompt intense opposition from some Palestinian factions and could exacerbate divisions in the nationalist movement, particularly if Ramallah-based technocrats and Fatah continue to be singled out for international support. While Palestinians are keen on more UN involvement, this has, in the past, proved to be difficult. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, whenever a vote came before the UN to replace Israeli forces with an

11 CREATING PARTNERS FOR PEACE 11 international battalion of UN peacekeepers, the US blocked it. And while there have been frequent UN condemnations of Israel s occupation and violations of international law, including UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), which call for Israel s withdrawal from the opt, the UNSC has taken no action because the US has generally managed to keep the issue off its agenda by repeatedly using its veto (Stephan 2004). The UN was also sidelined in the peace process: in the run-up to the 1991 Madrid talks, the US Israeli Memorandum of Understanding stated explicitly that the UN would not be allowed a role in the peace process; in the 1993 Oslo Accords, the UN was ignored; and in the US-brokered Road Map, its role was limited to the Secretary General s special envoys and its membership of the Quartet (along with the US, the EU and Russia). However, it could be said that perceptions that the UN could perform the role of neutral peacemaker have been damaged by its participation in the Quartet s boycott of the PA after the election of Hamas in January 2006*a decision that was condemned by Alvaro De Soto, the UN Secretary General s Special Envoy to the Middle East Peace Process (20057) (De Soto 2007). Given the criticisms levelled against international administrations, namely that they fail to build local capacity and they deny populations self-rule (Chopra 2003, Chandler 2006, Zaum 2006), governance assistance through external aid has come to be regarded as being a less expensive and less problematic method of promoting statebuilding as witnessed in Palestine as well as other war-torn societies such as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Under these arrangements, donors have still had a high level of involvement and influence in the recipient government through the inclusion of key personnel in each of the ministries and committees monitoring the use of aid. While some writers have been critical of these developments, others have welcomed or even argued for this modality of control. Robert Keohane (2003) and Stephen D. Krasner (2004) welcome it as a form of shared or pooled sovereignty that provides donors with a high degree of control over the recipient state, allowing the former to coax good governance measures from the latter. Mark Duffield (2007) and David Chandler (2006), on the other hand, are critical of these developments; utilising Graham Harrison s (2004) theory of the governance state they argue that these arrangements create contingent sovereignty and are a liberal form of neocolonialism. Such organisational arrangements were set up to support and monitor the PA. The formal aid structures, created in by the donors after Oslo, were made up of a steering committee and multilateral working groups. To coordinate and channel funds, bodies were created at the capital level (the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee and the Consultative Group) and at the local level (Joint Liaison Committee, the Task Force on Project Implementation, and the Local Aid Coordination Committee) (Le More 2008, pp ). From January 1995, the LACC, co-chaired by Norway, the World Bank and the UN, met at least once a month with around 30 local donor representatives. It established 12 working groups, each with one or more Palestinian ministries, a donor, and a UN agency (Brynen 2000). This ensured that right from the start the PA had a far more open

12 12 TURNER economy than any of its Arab neighbours. The Palestinian Investment Law, for instance, placed no restrictions on foreign ownership or the transfer of net profits. These structures and the PA s dependency on external actors meant that the IMF and World Bank could put pressure on the PA to restructure public investment through privatisation (Hilal and Khan 2004, pp ). While these Oslo coordination structures were initially conceived as bilateral between donors and the Palestinians, they quickly became trilateral: involving donors, the PA and Israel (Le More 2008, p. 34). At first glance, these structures appear to offer an example of Krasner s concept of shared sovereignty, Harrison s concept of the governance state, or even a form of supervised quasi-statehood akin to that which initially existed in Kosovo after its declaration of independence in February 2008, and yet the inclusion of Israel (the other more powerful party to the conflict and peace process) in this coordination structure was unprecedented. Analyses of external involvement has been a key element in the recent surge of interest in statebuilding. Two opposing perspectives can be usefully reviewed, here labelled as the unintended consequences approach proposed by Roland Paris and Timothy D. Sisk (2009) and the governance state approach associated with Chandler (2006) and Duffield (2007). The analysis proposed by Paris and Sisk situates problems with the international statebuilding agenda as the outcome of unintended and under-analysed consequences. They posit that undertaking a dilemma analysis of the following paradoxes in each circumstance would inform the process of devising more nuanced and effective statebuilding strategies (Paris and Sisk 2009, p. 311). These paradoxes include: a) the footprint dilemma (i.e. the degree of intrusiveness in the domestic affairs of the host state); b) the duration dilemma (i.e. how long should external actors be involved); c) the participation dilemma (i.e. determining who the local owners should be); d) the dependency dilemma (i.e. how to foster self-government in the context of large-scale external assistance); and e) the coherence dilemma at both the practical level (i.e. coordination) and the normative level (i.e. inconsistencies between values espoused and policies followed) (Paris and Sisk 2009, pp ). This perspective works from the assumption that the goal of the international statebuilding agenda is the construction or strengthening of legitimate government institutions in countries emerging from civil conflict (Paris and Sisk 2009, p. 1). All of these dilemmas are evident in the Palestinian case; however the problem lies not in unintended consequences but in the type of institution created and the peacebuilding framework enshrined in the Oslo Accords, which was not unpredicted. Right from the signing of the Oslo Accords, critics such as Edward Said (1995) argued that it would not lead to an independent Palestinian state and that the PA would remain a weak, dependent institution because it was designed as such. Chandler and Duffield agree with Paris and Sisk s conclusion that outside intervention creates weak, dependent states, but see this not as the outcome of unintended consequences or tensions and dilemmas between donors and local elites, but the result of the discourse and aims of the international statebuilding

13 CREATING PARTNERS FOR PEACE 13 agenda itself (Chandler 2006, Duffield 2007). In this sense, their perspectives concur with Said s critique of the experience of statebuilding in Palestine. Chandler criticises the reconceptualisation of sovereignty away from its definition as a natural right of statehood towards a focus on state capacity *as posited by writers such as Francis Deng (1996), Robert H. Jackson (1990) and the authors of the Responsibility to Protect report (ICISS 2001). Chandler argues that the privileging of governance over government is based on the assumption that the political process in non-western states can be externally influenced through the promotion of institutional changes introduced at the state level and pays less attention to how societal pressures and demands are constitutive of stable and legitimate institutional mechanisms (Chandler 2006, p. 48). Developing Palestinian state capacity has been a dominant discourse amongst donors and IOs*defined as either the ability to deliver security to Israel by reining in those opposed to the peace process, or in terms of good governance. This discourse continues to dominate, as indicated by the West Bank First strategy (more of which later) as well as the beliefs that underpinned the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan and the Programme of the 13th Government of the PA: Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State, that by creating a well-governed state the PA-WB would remove the excuse that Palestinians cannot run their own affairs, and thus put the spotlight back on Israel as obstructing Palestinian statehood. 5 It is clear that without international assistance the PA would not have been able to withstand the destabilising impacts of de-development nor would it have been able to rebuild itself after it was destroyed by Israeli military actions in It is also clear that the centrality of US unconditional support for Israel has meant that building the basis for a Palestinian state (democratic or otherwise) has been sacrificed to the demands of a powerful security discourse emanating from Israel*a discourse that has been repackaged as creating partners for peace. The Partners for Peace Paradigm In his analysis of the fragile states discourse, Duffield (2007, p. 176) argues that donors distinguish between friend and enemy in terms of the willingness to accept external aid and guidance. He then briefly analyses the international community s cultivation of a pro-reform elite in Tanzania from the 1980s* which, he argues, is a key aspect of the governance state: the centrality of proreform elites to the development process trumps both detailed social analysis and technically robust prescriptions; without the right type of interlocutor, nothing is going to happen (Duffield 2007, p. 177). While Duffield is critical of this development, other theorists working within the liberal peace perspective, such as Roland Paris (2004), argue that supporting moderate elites is necessary for successful peacebuilding as it is central to undermining and isolating the bad

14 14 TURNER elite*i.e. ultra-nationalist, terrorist leaders and movements that preach hatred and violence. This can be done, Paris suggests, by ensuring that peacebuilders should deliberately design electoral institutions to elicit moderation and cross-factional compromise from the parties vying for election and from governments seeking re-election (Paris 2004, p. 192). But while both opponents and proponents identify this as a key issue, Duffield does not offer an analysis of its impact on the internal politics of the country in question, while Paris sees the impact as being overwhelmingly positive. This section argues that in the Palestinian case such policies have not aided peace, in fact, quite the opposite* they have contributed to political polarisation and violent confrontation. In the Palestinian context, championing certain elites over others has been guided by the powerful security discourse emanating from Israel but repackaged as being about ensuring and supporting partners for peace. Donors have, therefore, tried to support and/or impose those they regard as the right type of elite*ready to make peace with Israel despite the lack of final status negotiations and the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A clear example of this paradigm is donor and IO championing of Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas over Hamas and Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas leader elected PA prime minister in January 2006, now head of the PA-G). But the road of persuasion is not only one-way: Palestinian actors, by claiming they are partners for peace, have been able to manipulate international support in order to marginalise opponents. This was clearly the case in 2006 when US support for Fatah gave it strength against its opponents, Hamas, despite having suffered an electoral defeat. What Palestine shows, and what is missing from other analyses, is that the impact of donor strategies to support the right type of Palestinian elite has provoked resistance from other Palestinian political elites and Palestinian society in general, and has accelerated political confrontation, elite fragmentation and a decline in legitimacy for the PA. The way in which the partners for peace discourse has played itself out illustrates this. In the first instance, Arafat and the PLO exiles were regarded as partners for peace. Using a variety of techniques, the external Fatah-led PLO managed to marginalise the internal United National Leadership of the first intifada and outmanoeuvre the non-plo Palestinian negotiation team in Washington DC in 1993, so ensuring the acceptance of the PLO as the Palestinian partner for peace (Jamal 2005, pp ). The return of the PLO exiles from Tunis to staff the new PA and associated bodies sparked some resentment particularly from the shebab (young Palestinian fighters) (Bucaille 2006). However, the way in which Arafat was revered as father of the nation was the glue that initially held them together and gave the PA legitimacy. In this period, Israel and the donors ignored the mounting problems of corruption and authoritarianism within the PA and the increasing problem of internal dissent while they believed that Arafat could rein in the opposition groups. Arafat was thus given support to build a strong executive and security institutions in order to push through a peace process in the face of violent, internal opposition. But with the collapse of the talks at Camp David in July 2000 and the outbreak of the

15 CREATING PARTNERS FOR PEACE 15 second intifada in September, Arafat was no longer deemed a partner for peace. The reform programme endorsed in the 2002 Roadmap was, for the US, about removing Arafat from power*albeit by a gentler method than tried by Israeli military forces in 2002 when they laid siege to his compound in Ramallah. There was an assumption that reform would produce a more moderate leadership ready to make peace with Israel, particularly given that Arafat had been pressurised to appoint Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank economist and the former IMF representative to the PA, as finance minister in But the problem was, firstly, that this assumption was rather naïve in that democratic elections in the Middle East have long been predicted as likely to bring in regimes and leaders critical of US foreign policy and Israel (Carothers and Ottaway 2005); and, secondly, that the donor reform programme diverged from what Palestinians wanted. While Palestinian reformers differed in their demands, three common themes united the vast majority of them: a critique of Arafat for being too responsive to US and Israeli demands; recognition that the PA had been weak in the face of Israeli attack and unable to defend its people; and a desire to create space for other voices (ICG 2002, p. 2). While donors rejected the first two of these critiques, they supported the development of other voices through funds for civil society development. But, according to Karma Nabulsi (2005), this has aided de-democratisation because donor preference for working with NGOs firstly led to a huge expansion in their numbers and, secondly, created a powerful incentive towards their professionalisation and projectisation and a disconnect from their constituencies (see also Brown 2007, p. 9). While there are many NGOs in the opt that do extraordinary work under extremely difficult conditions, some, argues Jad (2007), due to their privileged access to donor money, have also helped to undermine community associations and networks in Palestine and aided a concentration of political activity in Ramallah. Access to donor money has also de-radicalised some of them: NGOs were expected, because of their funding and terms of reference, to promote peace and compromise. Moderate voices, as defined by donors and IOs, therefore become those who did not speak out against Israeli closures, curfews and military actions (Hanafi and Tabari 2005, Nabulsi 2005). This added to the political vacuum already created by the decline in support for left-wing secular parties such as the PFLP after the collapse of the Soviet Union and benefited organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A growing number of Palestinian youth from lower social classes (particularly from refugee camps) were drawn to these organisations, which were deeply embedded in Palestinian society, were well-known for their extensive local networks and social services, and advocated radical opposition (Jamal 2005, pp ). These organisations benefited from disenchantment with the PA and the peace process, the professionalisation of civil society, and the decline of the secular left. These socio-political changes were the backdrop to the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006 when the majority of seats were won by Hamas.

16 16 TURNER Western reaction to Hamas election win offers another example of the operation of the partners for peace paradigm as well as being a stark reminder of the disjuncture between the needs and desires of donors and those of local populations. This disjuncture was eloquently summarised by Nathan J. Brown (2007, p. 14): For Palestinians, political reform was a means of obtaining a more functional government and creating a leadership that was both more capable and more effective in defending Palestinian interests internally and externally. For the international supporters of Palestinian reform, the primary (and sometimes only) purpose of reforming Palestinian institutions was to support a peace settlement with Israel. The Quartet demanded that the new Hamas-led government renounce violence, accept all previous agreements and recognise Israel. Hamas believed that the result gave it a mandate to change the PA to reflect the needs of Palestinians in the post-oslo era and to renegotiate previous agreements. Hamas refusal to accede to the Quartet s demands led to the imposition of economic and political sanctions which were enforced by the US Treasury using anti-terrorist legislation (ICG 2006, pp ). Israel also withheld the transfer funds it collected on behalf of the PA, an action clearly in violation of the PEP. 7 Hamas was not regarded as a partner for peace so, in order to remove it from office, a deliberate policy of impoverishing an occupied people was followed based on an assumption that if times got tough the majority of Palestinians would vote, or help to overthrow Hamas, in favour of a more moderate leadership. In order to support the right type of Palestinian elite, donors resorted to crude measures, particularly in the security arena, to topple Hamas and support Abbas and Fatah who capitalised on international condemnation of Hamas in their quest to regain control of the PA. A civil war ensued between Fatah and Hamas that culminated in the Gaza coup in June 2007 that split the PA in two. As far as the donors were concerned, democracy had failed in Palestine because of Hamas, therefore isolating and removing it, and supporting Abbas and Fayyad as partners for peace, would put the reform process and negotiations for peace back on track. The boycott was thus lifted on the PA-WB but the blockade continued on the PA-G; this policy has been labelled the West Bank first strategy (Samhouri 2007)*and is again about showing the world (or at least the Palestinians) that moderation would be rewarded. Both administrations claim legitimacy and constitutional legality, but after January 2010 both were operating outside of the constitution (the Basic Law), which fixes the term of the PLC at four years. Palestinian institutions were therefore left without legal legitimacy, which means, amongst other things, no progress towards the rule of law and democratic oversight of the security services. The solution would appear to be an election, but there are severe obstacles to this. In addition, it is important to ask: what would happen if the Palestinian people again voted for political elites the donors do not want?