Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine (review)

Modern Palestine receives much attention from scholars and journalists. However, most studies, especially analyses of the final decade of the twentieth century, concentrate on the crises with Israel. Little attention is given to the development of domestic political structures following the Oslo Accords, negotiated between 1993 and 1995. Brown makes an important contribution toward filling this gap by presenting a thorough discussion of Palestinian government and state within the framework of the Oslo Accords and the heritage of the past century of Palestinian political life. Although Brown is aware that some might think his study premature, he argues that understanding "Palestinian politics . . . solely as a creature of the conflict with Israel not only does a disservice to those involved in working for change but also risks seriously miscasting the issues" (5).

The basic theme of this book is that the institutions and associations that were emerging in the late 1990s were not simply new creations. The struggle to define Palestine during this period, in Brown's view, "concerns not how Palestinian politics should begin but . . . how it should be resumed" (5). In this framework, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and associated structures were shaped by more than a century of developments, not just relations with Israel.

After an introduction defining this basic framework, Brown begins his detailed analysis with a discussion of the legal framework and court system. The basic conclusion is that the "legal enactments of the PNA present a picture of an emerging sovereign body, assuming control over a continuous and preexisting legal entity" (45). The third chapter presents the various efforts to define a constitutional framework. An important theme concerns the issues involved in the transition of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) "from revolutionary organization to statehood" (86). In the fourth chapter, Brown discusses the establishment of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) as a parliament. In contrast to the other institutions, the PLC has no structural antecedents, since "its origins lie in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations" (96).

Brown goes beyond the formal political institutions to examine nongovernmental organizations and Palestinian civil society in the fifth chapter. Again, he emphasizes the continuity of Palestinian experience, noting the important developments before the Oslo era in the shaping of NGOs and professional associations. In the next chapter, Brown discusses the "much-contested terrain" of the Palestinian educational system and its curricula. He concentrates on debates within the system, identifying an important "progressive alternative" to the old-fashioned approaches to education that had been dominant. He includes a separate appendix to deal with "the oft-repeated claims that Palestinian textbooks instill hatred of Israel and Jews," despite the fact that, in Brown's view, the issue "is at most tangential to this inquiry, which focuses on internal Palestinian politics and portrays textbooks more as outcomes of domestic struggle than as producers of international conflict" (235). Brown rejects the claims of textbook incitement.

In his conclusion, Brown views the outbreak of the second intifadah in 2000 as bringing a halt, or at least a pause, to many of the developments that he examined. In his words, the "resumption of Arab Palestine was based on a wishful reading of the past and an optimistic reading of the future. It has been punctuated by failure, violence, and frustration, but it will be difficult to reverse" (254).

Brown's major contribution in this book is the careful and remarkably comprehensive description and analysis of the emerging political system of Palestine in the context created by the Oslo Accords. Although Brown takes some theoretical issues into account, he explicitly avoids testing "theoretical ideas in any formal way. The approach . . . is aimed not at building theory but at understanding Palestinian politics" (17). In this light, the book represents an important resource for scholars working in interdisciplinary studies, but it is not a major contribution to interdisciplinary conceptualizations of the processes involved in the resumption, rather than the creation, of a political system. [End Page 135...