Since the turn of the century, the Arab states have come to constitute a zone for Western military intervention without parallel in the post-Cold War world—us invasion of Iraq, nato bombardment of Libya, us proxies in Syria, Washington-backed gcc assault on Yemen. What of their traditional enemy? At the time of the second Intifada, an essay in these pages surveyed the balance of forces between the two nationalisms, Zionist and Palestinian, reflected in the naked inequities of the Oslo Accords.footnote¹ Since then, how much has changed? On the West Bank, very little. The first Intifada was the rebellion of a new generation of Palestinians, whose activists came from local universities that were themselves recent creations. Displacing the compliant notables on whom the occupiers had relied, they led a three-year wave of popular demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and punishment of collaborators. The exiled plo in Tunis was caught by surprise, and played little part in it. Driven out of its bases in Lebanon, and defunded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the Gulf War, the organization was rescued from its weakness by the Oslo accords, which returned it in pomp to bits of the homeland.

The Palestinian Authority established in 1994, presented as a milestone in the struggle for national liberation, was in design a co-production of the West and of Israel, whose primary function was not to embody but to contain resistance to Zionism. For the West, a pocket of residual Arab turbulence needed to be tidied up after the triumph of Operation Desert Storm, to round out the New World Order. For Israel, the Palestinian Authority would act as a cost-effective surrogate for the idf in blocking the springs of the first Intifada, which had threatened to jeopardize ongoing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, whose expansion required the more secure environment that an indigenous paramilitary apparatus could provide. From the outset, the Palestinian Authority lacked any autonomous means of subsistence, between 70 and 80 per cent of its revenue coming from Western subsidies and Israeli transfers. Erected was a parasitic miniature of a rentier state, detached from a population on which it did not materially depend and whose needs it could ignore. Far more important, inevitably, were the requirements of its paymasters.

The Arafat regime saw the leadership of the uprising as a potential threat and, once installed in the West Bank, disposed of it. The traditional notables were brought back into a power structure built around the Fatah apparatus, parachuted in from Tunis and expanded with the proceeds of collaboration.footnote² In the last year before Oslo, when the idf was still in full military control, the civil administration in the Occupied Territories numbered 27,000, nearly all Palestinian. By the new century the pay-roll of the Palestinian Authority had risen to over 140,000, of whom some 60,000 composed its security empire. Twelve competing repressive apparatuses—gendarmerie, secret police, presidential guard, military intelligence, special forces, coast guards and more—made the West Bank among the most highly policed populations on earth: one agent per sixteen persons.footnote³ Trained and equipped by the cia and Jordan, this bloated security complex, in which torture is routine, absorbs a third of the budget, costing more than expenditures on education and health combined. Its sights are trained not on the occupiers, for which it is no match, but on its compatriots.

Repression is lacquered with cooption. As in all rentier states, patronage—disbursed or denied—is critical to the system, not least within the security empire itself.footnote⁴ About a fifth of all households depend for their livelihood on jobs or favours distributed by the regime. Corruption permeates all rungs of the administration, from mega-embezzlement at presidential and ministerial levels to petty shake-downs on the street. According to imf estimates, between 1995 and 2000 close to $1 billion ended up in the pockets of Arafat and his circle, with direct Israeli collusion.footnote⁵ Monopoly contracts and trading privileges were handed out to expatriates, officials taking their cut. Floating on foreign funds, ngos became self-service atms for their managers. Protection rackets and extortion by Fatah gangs are commonplace.footnote⁶ The reputation of the judiciary is lower even than that of the police. In villas around Ramallah a layer of bureaucrats and businessmen, enriched by theft or contraband (cement even smuggled from Egypt to help build the Separation Wall for Israel), prospers above a landscape of penniless labourers and unemployed, after Oslo shut out of migrant jobs across the border. By the time of the second Intifada, average incomes in the Occupied Territories had dropped by two-fifths, and the number of the poor had trebled.footnote⁷ The rising of 2001, this time with suicide bombings, was an explosion of frustration and despair at what had become of the pretence of an emancipation.

In 2002 Operation Defensive Shield, the Israeli invasion of the Occupied Territories, rooted out resistance in camps and townships, destroyed local infrastructure, and interned Arafat in his bunker for the duration. The security forces of the Palestinian Authority scarcely budged as the idf smashed its way through Judea and Samaria. Arafat, incapable of either filling or fighting the role cast for him by Israel, expired two years later. Like many an instrument of alien rule before him, who too had thought to use their users, he ended discarded by them.footnote⁸ The first act of his successor was to declare the second Intifada officially over. Having secured the West Bank, in 2005 Sharon turned Gaza into an open-air prison by evacuating its miniscule group of Jewish settlers and redeploying the idf around it—a move designed, as his aide Dov Weisglass explained, to ‘supply the amount of formaldehyde needed to ensure there will be no political process with the Palestinians’ as laid out by the Road Map, the latest us iteration of the Oslo Accords.footnote⁹ So it would be. To Western dismay, when elections were finally—after a decade—held for a Palestinian legislature in 2006, the stench of Fatah’s corruption and submission proved too much for voters. Hamas won a majority of seats, in part as a more principled opponent of Israel, but mainly as a cleaner party, with a better record of social care for the population. Western sanctions were imposed on the ensuing government, and with Western encouragement Abbas readied a coup to restore Fatah to power. Alert to what was impending, Hamas struck first, expelling Fatah from Gaza in the summer of 2007, leaving Abbas in control of the West Bank. To entrench him there, a Donors’ Conference was held in Paris, and an unprecedented flow of Euro-American money cascaded into Ramallah. Pro forma the charade of the peace process could then continue, if only—in the absence of any Palestinian authority with an effective writ across both territories—for purposes of ideological propriety in Washington and Brussels.

Abbas has since extended his presidency indefinitely. His police continue to work hand-in-glove with Shin Bet to hold down popular unrest on the West Bank, in a more extreme version even than Arafat’s of the ‘Scurrier’ system crafted at Oslo.footnote¹⁰ In shape and in substance, his government has done its utmost to comply with American wishes. Under us supervision, the Palestinian Authority instituted a first-past-the-post electoral system designed to warp representation in favour of Fatah, before it boomeranged in 2006. At us insistence, the office of Prime Minister was created for Abbas—not trusting Arafat, Washington wanted a check on him—and, when he stepped into Arafat’s shoes, was filled by a nominee from the imf, Salam Fayyad. At us request, Abbas collaborated in blocking a un report critical of Israeli actions in Gaza. When Olmert, responsible for the onslaught, was temporarily cleared of charges of corruption, Abbas rushed to congratulate him.footnote¹¹

Fayyad, illegally installed as Prime Minister and touted in the us as ‘the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever’ (Thomas Friedman dixit), supplied a veneer of technocratic development for stepped-up repression and ever more brazen collaboration with Israel: over 1,200 joint operations in 2009 alone.footnote¹² ‘To all Palestinians other than the tiny clique who benefit from this arrangement’, writes Saree Makdisi, ‘the sight of Abbas’s us-trained and Israeli-armed pa militiamen cooperating with Israeli forces, raiding West Bank refugee camps, looking for potential sources of resistance to the occupation—if not taking direct orders from the Israelis—is nothing short of grotesque.’footnote¹³ Conducted under the carapace of the special us Security Coordinator, headed by a three-star American general, the clamp-down helped release idf forces to assail Gaza. While cronies of Arafat and Abbas like billionaire Munib al-Masri—the Carlos Slim of the West Bank, fortune estimated at a third of Palestinian gdp—flourish, the lot of the people of the West Bank under the Occupation, where movement is controlled by over five hundred road-blocks and daily life subject to thousands of military regulations, is as wretched as ever. After a dozen years, income per capita had only just regained its level of 1999.footnote¹⁴