Subcontracted Occupation

Israel and the Palestinian Authority

The Palestinian elections of January 2006 were free, competitive, and immediately punished. Certified by international observers—American, European, and Arab alike—they produced a Hamas majority. The response was rapid and systematic: aid suspended, the elected government isolated, and within eighteen months Palestinian Authority security forces trained and armed under the American general Keith Dayton to enforce, from within, the political configuration the ballot had not delivered. The operation was conducted in the language of democratic norms and institutional capacity-building. For a clarifying moment, the Oslo architecture showed what it had always been.

The British called it indirect rule; the French, administration indirecte. Both understood its essential economy: rather than bearing the full cost and international condemnation of direct administration, the colonial power installs a local elite whose interests become inseparable from the perpetuation of the colonial order. The colonized are made responsible for administering their own subjugation; the language of self-governance is deployed to legitimize the occupation it claims to be dissolving; and the occupier acquires, in the oppressed, an instrument of its own authority. The local elite does not merely comply; it collaborates, because the arrangement has made compliance and survival identical—willing because dependent, and dependent by design.

What was celebrated in the West as the foundation of Palestinian statehood—the Oslo Accords of 1993 and their economic counterpart, the Paris Protocol of 1994—produced statehood’s precise opposite: a fragmented territory, an economy imprisoned by dependency, and a Palestinian leadership answerable to the occupier and charged with policing its own people on the occupier’s behalf. Each of these conditions was structural by design. Together they constitute a successful attempt at something other than peace.

The Accords were negotiated in secret by a handful of PLO officials who were not lawyers, who had no maps adequate to the task, and who carried no democratic mandate from the Palestinian people whose future they were disposing of. In bypassing both the Palestinian delegation then negotiating in Washington and the entire collective achievement of the First Intifada, Yasser Arafat and the Fatah leadership revealed the character of what they were producing. The uprising, organized from within the Occupied Territories between 1987 and 1993 through popular committees and sustained collective sacrifice—not from the exile headquarters in Tunis—had accomplished something of genuine political value: it had extracted from the international community a recognition that Palestinian rights were not merely humanitarian concerns but political ones demanding a political resolution. It had established, in other words, the minimal precondition for any genuine negotiation. What Oslo did with this achievement was dissolve it.

In exchange for Israel’s recognition of the PLO—a recognition that cost Israel nothing and committed it to even less—the Palestinian side received the promise of “limited self-administration.” Sovereignty was not mentioned. Statehood was deferred. The negotiators consigned the central questions—the fate of the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, the right of return for the millions displaced in 1948—to a category of “final status” issues to be addressed at some unspecified future point, which is to say they conceded them in advance. To defer the fundamental questions indefinitely while the stronger party continues to consolidate its hold on the disputed territory is to predetermine the outcome, regardless of what subsequent exchanges may appear to offer.

To administer this arrangement, the Accords created the Palestinian Authority as the governing body of the Occupied Territories. Oslo transformed the PLO overnight into a municipal administration operating under occupation. Whatever its failures, the PLO had been a national liberation movement with the capacity to speak for Palestinians across Lebanon, the Gulf, the Americas, and the camps of Jordan and Syria; Oslo reduced it to administering enclaves for the authority that occupied them. Edward Said called the agreement at the time a “Palestinian Versailles,” and nothing in the three decades since has provided cause to revise that judgment. The arrangement exchanged the struggle for liberation for the privileges of limited authority under continued subjugation.

Arafat, returning from exile to what was presented as a triumph, was in practical terms succeeding the Israeli military governor—a fact that General Danny Rothschild, then head of Israeli civil administration in the territories, stated without embarrassment: “We have retained power in the Occupied Territories, despite the transfer of authority that recently took place.”

The Accords carved the West Bank into three designated zones—Areas A, B, and C—whose combined effect was to confine Palestinian “self-rule” to isolated enclaves comprising 18% of the territory. Israel retained security control over Area B and complete control over Area C, which constitutes 60% of the West Bank and contains nearly all of its aquifers, its arable land, and its extractable resources. Settlement construction continued, and often accelerated. Bypass roads multiplied, severing Palestinian communities from one another and from their agricultural land. What was announced to the world as a transfer of self-governance was Israeli dominion reorganized—a system that redistributed the administrative costs of occupation to the Palestinian Authority while its territorial and economic benefits continued to accumulate to Israel. The arrangement distributed territory; it also prepared the ground on which a Palestinian electorate would eventually render its judgment on what had been built.

This fragmentation was not only a material fact but a social one, and the social wound may prove the deeper. By reducing movement between Palestinian towns to a gauntlet of checkpoints and permits, and by binding the Authority through “security coordination” to identify, pursue, and suppress those who organized resistance, the Oslo architecture systematically dismantled the collective space on which national consciousness depends. The Palestinian people were not merely denied a state; they were administered in ways designed to make the sustained exercise of national will difficult to organize and dangerous to attempt.

If Oslo constructed the political architecture of this arrangement, the Paris Protocol of 1994 erected its economic foundations—a dimension that Western commentators, eager to celebrate the promise of the peace process, passed over in silence. The Protocol bound the Palestinian economy to Israel with structural constraints whose grip has only tightened across three decades. It stripped the Authority of meaningful fiscal sovereignty: customs duties and value-added taxes on goods entering Palestinian markets were placed entirely under Israeli administration, with revenues transferred to the Palestinians at Israel’s discretion. These revenues constitute the bulk of the PA’s operating budget, which means that the Authority’s capacity to pay teachers, doctors, and civil servants remains subject to Israeli approval by deliberate design. What was presented as economic coordination has functioned in practice as a mechanism of political discipline, transforming livelihood into an instrument of compliance.

By controlling the economic conditions of a dependent population, a colonial administration secures compliance without the visible deployment of force; by enriching a connected local elite, it creates a constituency with material interests in the continuation of the arrangement; by impoverishing the majority, it reproduces, as a structural condition, the disorganization and despair that make sustained resistance difficult to maintain. The Paris Protocol achieves all three ends—a compliant elite, an impoverished majority, a disciplined population—through the application of a logic with a long colonial genealogy. In 2024, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich deducted twenty-six million dollars from Palestinian tax revenues, triggering a fiscal crisis that left thousands of public-sector workers without salaries. The episode was notable less for its novelty than for its candor: it made visible in a single administrative act the power the Protocol had always granted and had always been available to exercise. Taken together—the political architecture of the PA, the territorial logic of the zone system, the economic discipline of the Protocol—Oslo constructed a mechanism for managing Palestinian political life within limits set by those with no interest in seeing it expressed.

To trace the full arc of this system—from the 1991 Madrid Conference, through Oslo and Paris, to the elections of 2006—is to see both its design and the degree to which it has functioned according to that design. Madrid was the political fruit of the First Intifada, a moment at which Palestinian popular mobilization had demonstrated that the occupation could not proceed without international cost, and at which the assembled powers had, however grudgingly, to address Palestinian national rights. Two years later in Oslo, the PLO leadership surrendered those rights in secret. The people who had organized and sustained the Intifada from within the territories were not consulted. The prisoners who had led it remained in Israeli jails. What had been won through collective resistance—the acknowledgment that Palestinian rights were political, not merely humanitarian—was dissolved through the exhaustion and self-interest of a leadership that had spent years in exile and wished to return. What the exile leadership traded away in Oslo, the Palestinian people would spend the next decade paying for—and in January 2006, they said so.

The Second Intifada, which erupted in September 2000 after Ariel Sharon’s deliberate provocation on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, expressed in its violence the accumulated weight of what seven years of Oslo had produced: continued settlement expansion, deepening territorial fragmentation, and a Palestinian Authority whose accommodation had delivered nothing that could honestly be described as movement toward liberation. Israel’s response—the destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass incarceration, targeted assassination—revealed how little the peace process had altered the occupation’s essential character. By 2005 the uprising had been suppressed. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza—presented to the world as a concession—converted a costly occupation liability into a sealed enclosure whose population could henceforth be subjected to collective punishment whenever the political moment seemed to require it.

The 2006 elections must be understood as what they were—a political judgment, reached through democratic means, on thirteen years of Oslo’s management. Hamas won because the Authority’s record was indefensible: its corruption documented, its complicity in the continuation of occupation visible, its promises exhausted. The electorate had not become more extreme; the alternative had become insupportable. The international response—sanctions, isolation, the training and arming of Fatah security forces against their Hamas counterparts under General Dayton—formalized what the Oslo framework had always implied: that Palestinian democratic choice was permissible only within the limits set by those who benefited from the existing arrangement, and that Palestinian Authority security forces existed to enforce those limits from within.

The territorial and political split of 2007—Gaza under Hamas, the West Bank under an Authority dependent on Israeli and international tolerance—was the predictable outcome of a policy designed to produce it. The Western press has described it as an accident of Palestinian political culture or a consequence of Hamas intransigence; the description inverts cause and effect. It has served the occupation’s purposes with a consistency that requires no elaboration: two administrations, each too weak to challenge the occupation effectively, each available to be deployed against the other, and the division between them continuously invoked—by those who produced it—as evidence that Palestinians lack the political coherence for self-governance.

Palestinians carry today a double burden that the subcontracting arrangement was designed to impose. They must contend with an occupation that has never ended while navigating an authority that functions, in structural terms, as that occupation’s instrument. The Authority, having accommodated itself to managed subjugation, has adopted the vocabulary of its patrons—speaking of “security coordination,” “confidence-building measures,” and the permanent imminence of the peace process, when what the situation requires is an honest accounting of what Oslo produced and what it continues to produce. Hamas, whatever the consequences of its methods or the limits of its governing record, has at least refused the premise that occupation is to be administered rather than resisted. The divisions between them—real, politically consequential, at times deadly—are a symptom of Palestinian political weakness, and a symptom the system’s designers anticipated. What is offered under present conditions as “reconciliation” amounts in practice to a demand that the resistant faction accept the terms of the collaborating one—a demand expressed in the language of Palestinian unity while serving to extend the reach of subcontraction. The Authority has endured by accepting those terms. Gaza has survived by refusing them, at a cost borne almost entirely by a civilian population that has had no meaningful say in the strategic choices made on its behalf. Neither condition constitutes freedom, and only one deserves the name of resistance.

What the 2006 elections revealed, and what three decades of Oslo’s management had been constructed to prevent from becoming fully visible, is this: no arrangement within the framework of subcontracted occupation can accommodate genuine Palestinian political will. Every exercise of that will—through the First Intifada, through the legislative ballot, through the refusal of armed organizations to disarm in the absence of the liberation that disarmament was promised to accompany—has been met with the same instruments: punishment, isolation, and the renewed demand that Palestinians conform to terms their occupiers set. Before any honest question about Palestinian political life can be addressed, the system that structures it must be named for what it is—a colonial architecture of administered subjugation, refined across thirty years into something more efficient, more deniable, and more durable than the direct occupation it replaced.

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