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2. Colonial Occupation and Development in the West Bank and Gaza Understanding the Palestinian Economy through the Work of Yusif Sayigh Leila Farsakh The Oslo peace process initiated in 1993 brought hopes for the emergence of a vibrant economy in the West Bank and Gaza strip (WBGs), one that would provide a solid foundation for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. yet Palestinian economic growth since 1993 has been marked by major fluctuations and unsustainability. Palestinian real GdP per capita income in the West Bank and Gaza in 2007 was 30 percent lower than in 1999. Poverty touched 49 percent of Gaza and 25 percent of the West Bank in 2007.1 The 2008–2009 Israeli war on Gaza destroyed whatever remained of Palestinian economic activity there, demolishing major social and economic infrastructure at a total estimated cost of $1.4 billion. The siege imposed on it since 2006 further severed its links to the West Bank, putting in jeopardy the unity of the Palestinian economy. although real GdP grew by over 5 percent in the West Bank and by more than 9 percent in the Gaza strip from 2009 to 2012, it was mainly fueled by international assistance , which amounted to over 20 percent of GdP.2 Poverty rates still stood at 33.7 percent in the Gaza strip in 2010, where over 71 percent of the population receives some form of aid.3 The Israeli war on Gaza in november 2012 further proved the unsustainability of growth in the Occupied territories. This chapter analyzes Palestinian economic development over the past twenty years in light of the structural changes that have brought about the 36 leila farsakh unstable and poor state of the Palestinian economy, drawing on the work of the arab economist yusif sayigh. sayigh was born in 1916 in syria to a syrian father and a Palestinian mother. He lived and worked in Palestine from 1925 until the nakba in 1948. He studied and worked in Beirut and Iraq, received his Phd from johns Hopkins University in the United states, and returned to the american University of Beirut, where he was professor of economics from 1958 to 1975. He was also a consultant for a number of economic organizations such as the Organization of arab Petroleum exporting Countries (OaPeC) and the Food and agriculture Organization of the United nations (FaO), and was a visiting scholar at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford Universities . His writings focused on the challenges of development in Third World countries, the arab world in particular. He wrote about the oil economies, the prospects for arab economic integration, and the Lebanese business sector, among other topics. among his most important contributions are The Economies of the Arab World (1978), Arab Oil Policies in the 1970s (1983), and Elusive Development: From Dependence to Self-Reliance in the Arab Region (1991), as well as over forty academic articles. His interest in the Palestinian economy came later in his life when he helped establish the 1992 PLO economic plan, which sought to define the sustainable economic bases for a viable Palestinian state that was supposed to emerge out of the Oslo peace process. He wrote a leading article in 1986 on what he termed the pauperization of the Palestinian economy, which he argued was the result of Israeli colonialism, a characterization few economists in the 1990s or early 2000s adopted. This chapter argues that the economic record since the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 has not been development but, as sayigh argued, pauperization . sayigh’s development thinking and approach to economic analysis is both helpful and necessary to understand the failure of the Palestinian economy. sayigh’s holistic view of what economic development should mean, his concern for sustainable growth, and his awareness of the political foundation and implications of economics provide us with insight into how we can, or he would say should, explain and measure Palestinian economic performance. above all, sayigh’s insistence on the validity of situating the economics of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza within a colonization framework of analysis can prove pertinent. economists and international development agencies often shy away from using this framework when analyzing the pattern of economic growth in the Occupied ter- .181.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 23:52 GMT) Occupation and Development in the West Bank & Gaza 37 ritories, either out of fear of sounding biased or because they want to focus solely on market mechanisms and their failure rather than...

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