Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution (review)

On 8 December 1987 a traffic accident involving an Israeli truck and a car carrying Palestinian workers sparked what was to become known as the Palestinian intifada. In the hours following the crash, in which four Palestinians were killed, reports of the incident among the Arab population took on insidious overtones. It was believed that the trucker was on a mission to avenge the December 6th murder of an Israeli in the Gaza market. Over the course of the ensuing six years the media, experts, academics, and even the Palestinians and Israelis depicted the often violent disturbances as the collective effort of a frustrated population to “throw off” the humiliation of two decades of military occupation. No doubt this portrayal of the intifada is accurate, but Glenn E. Robinson’s excellent book, Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution, offers a more nuanced analysis that contextualizes the uprising not only in terms of Israeli occupation, but also of Palestinian politics. Robinson argues convincingly that the uprising that emerged from an unfortunate car wreck was nothing less than a social revolution pitting a new Palestinian elite against the traditional notable class.

Beginning in the 1950s, a new class of Arab military officers, intellectuals, and nationalists engineered a series of social revolutions that discarded the traditional classes whom this new elite blamed for the rampant corruption and continued colonial penetration of their societies. On the heels of Egypt’s July 1952 revolution that toppled King Farouk and brought Gamel Abd al-Nasser’s Free Officers to power, came Abdul Karim Qasim’s 1958 nationalist revolution ending British-sponsored Hashemite rule in Iraq. Emboldened by the success of their party’s brethren in Iraq (who in 1963 disposed of Qasim), the Syrian Ba’ath assumed power in Damascus during that same year. And who could forget the young, ambitious Libyan lieutenant who ousted an important American and British ally, King Idris, in 1971? The subtext of Robinson’s argument suggests that the intifada was yet another in this line of Middle Eastern social revolutions, albeit delayed and, in the end, incomplete.

In a critical examination of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Robinson identifies significant unintended consequences of Israeli policy that produced structural changes in Palestinian society and nurtured social revolution. Specifically, Israel’s occupation restructured the West Bank and Gazan economies, opened up Palestinian universities, and undermined the Palestinian traditional elite. The transformation of Palestinian society not only contributed to the uprising, but was critical to grassroots mobilization once the intifada began. One of the best sections of the book is Robinson’s detailed analysis of the social and political networks that developed in Bayt Sahur during the intifada. Tucked in between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Bayt Sahur, with a predominantly Christian population, was the scene of fierce resistance to the Israeli occupation. Mirroring the development of popular committees at the national level represented first and foremost by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), Robinson depicts how Bayt Sahur’s new elite fostered the development of neighborhoods and local popular committees that successfully circumvented the authority of the town’s mayor who was widely regarded to be complicit with Israel’s military administration. Bayt Sahur’s civil disobedience included compliance with the UNLU’s call not to pay taxes to Israel, thereby increasing the cost of the occupation.

According to Robinson, Bayt Sahur’s tax revolt was important in two respects. First, it demonstrated to the Palestinian population the power of civil disobedience in the face of overwhelming military force. Second, and critical to Robinson’s argument, the PLO’s response to events in Bayt Sahur and other towns betrayed the Tunis leadership’s concern that events in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were growing beyond the organization’s control. The PLO feared precisely what was happening in the territories — the emergence of autonomous centers of power that posed a threat to the organization’s predominance. Although much of...