Subcontracted Occupation

On Israel and the Palestinian Authority

In January 2006, Palestinians held legislative elections that observers—American, European, and Arab—certified as free and competitive. Hamas won a majority. Washington and the European Union rejected the result, suspending aid and isolating the elected government. Within eighteen months, Palestinian Authority security forces had been trained and armed under the American general Keith Dayton to enforce, from within, the rule of the party Hamas had defeated.

The British had a name for such arrangements: indirect rule. Cromer’s Egypt was the model—a “veiled protectorate” in which a British consul-general ran the country for a quarter century while a nominal Khedive remained on the throne. The French called it administration indirecte. Both understood the logic: rather than pay the full cost of direct administration and bear the international condemnation that comes with it, the colonial power installs a local elite whose interests are bound to 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 simply comply; it collaborates. The arrangement has made compliance and survival identical—willing because dependent, and dependent by design.

This was the logic the Oslo Accords brought to Palestine. Signed in 1993, with the Paris Protocol of 1994 as their economic counterpart, they were celebrated in the West as the foundation of Palestinian statehood. What they produced was a fragmented territory, an economy imprisoned by dependency, and a Palestinian leadership answerable to the occupier and charged with policing its own people on its behalf.

Oslo had been negotiated in secret. From 1987 to 1993, Palestinians had risen against the occupation—through popular committees, mass strikes, sustained collective sacrifice. The First Intifada had forced the United States and the Soviet Union to convene the Madrid Conference of 1991, where Palestinian national rights were addressed for the first time as a political question. The Palestinians who had represented their people at Madrid came from Gaza and the West Bank, not from the exiled PLO leadership in Tunis. They were still negotiating publicly in Washington when Oslo was signed in secret.

Oslo’s negotiators were a handful of Fatah officials within the PLO, none of them lawyers, who had no maps adequate to the territory they were conceding, and who held no democratic mandate from the Palestinian people whose lands and rights they were disposing of. The people who had organized and sustained the Intifada were not consulted. The prisoners who had led it remained in Israeli jails. Yasser Arafat and the Fatah leadership were not negotiating a path to liberation. They were negotiating the terms of their own administration of the occupation. What collective resistance had won, the negotiating table dissolved.

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. Those fundamental questions had been conceded in advance: to defer them indefinitely while Israel consolidated its hold on occupied territory was to predetermine the outcome.

To administer this arrangement, the Accords created the Palestinian Authority as the “Interim Self-Government” for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Whatever its failures, including its lack of internal democratic structure, 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 overnight to municipal administration of enclaves for the occupying authority. Edward Said called the agreement a “Palestinian Versailles.”

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

The Accords divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C. Palestinians received full authority over Area A, 18% of the territory. Israel retained security control over the rest, and full control over Area C—60% of the West Bank, containing the aquifers, the arable land, the resources. Settlement construction continued, and often accelerated. Bypass roads multiplied, severing Palestinian communities from one another and from their land. What was announced as self-governance was Israeli dominion reorganized. The administrative costs went to the Palestinian Authority; the benefits accumulated to Israel.

This fragmentation was material. It was also social, and the social wound may prove the deeper. Movement between Palestinian towns became a gauntlet of checkpoints and permits. The collective space on which national life depends was dismantled. The Authority, bound through “security coordination,” was made to identify, pursue, and suppress anyone who organized resistance. Against this, the denial of a state was the lesser injury. The Palestinian people were administered in ways designed to make the sustained exercise of national will difficult to organize and dangerous to attempt.

The Paris Protocol of 1994 was Oslo’s economic counterpart and bound the Palestinian economy to Israel. Western commentators, eager to celebrate the peace process, passed it over in silence. The Authority was stripped of fiscal sovereignty: customs duties and import taxes were placed under Israeli administration, and revenues transferred to the Palestinians at Israel’s discretion. The grip has only tightened across three decades. Israel has used this discretion to punish Palestinian political decisions—withholding revenues for the duration of the Second Intifada (2000–2005), for sixteen months after the 2006 Hamas victory, again after UNESCO admitted Palestine as a full member in 2011, again after the 2012 vote at the United Nations recognizing Palestine as a non-member observer state—and has continued to do so since the start of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023. These revenues are the bulk of the Authority’s budget. The salaries of teachers, doctors, and civil servants depend on Israeli approval. What was called economic coordination was political discipline. Livelihood became Israel’s instrument of compliance.

By controlling the economic conditions of a dependent population, a colonial administration secures compliance without visible force; by enriching a connected local elite, it creates a constituency invested in the arrangement; by impoverishing the majority, it produces the disorganization and despair that make resistance difficult to sustain. The Paris Protocol achieves all three ends—a compliant elite, an impoverished majority, a disciplined population—through a logic with a long colonial genealogy. In 2024, after Norway, Spain, and Ireland recognized the Palestinian state, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suspended Palestinian tax revenues indefinitely. The Protocol had always granted this power; what was new was that the colonial administrator stopped pretending it hadn’t.

What the PLO leadership traded away in Oslo and Paris, Palestinians would spend the years that followed paying for. Each round of negotiations through the 1990s confirmed what the previous round had revealed: Israel would not concede the settlements, would not concede Jerusalem, would not concede the right of return. By 2000, what the arrangement had been built to do was unmistakable.

The Second Intifada erupted in September 2000 after Ariel Sharon’s deliberate provocation at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It was the answer to seven years of Oslo: continued settlement expansion, deepening territorial fragmentation, a Palestinian Authority that had delivered no liberation. Those seven years had revealed how little the peace process had altered the occupation.

By 2005 Israel had defeated the Intifada militarily in the West Bank—through mass incarceration, targeted assassinations, the construction of the separation wall, the reoccupation of West Bank cities in Operation Defensive Shield, and the killing of approximately 4,300 Palestinians. But in Gaza, the cost of occupation had become unsustainable, forcing Israel’s unilateral withdrawal that same year. Armed resistance had achieved what decades of negotiation had not. The world called it a concession.

The withdrawal removed the direct cost of occupation—soldiers inside Gaza, settlers to defend—while leaving Israel in full control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, and economy. Goods in and out passed through Israeli checkpoints. The population registry stayed under Israeli control. The fence and sea perimeter were patrolled by Israeli forces. The strip became a reservation whose population Israel could punish collectively whenever it chose.

Less than a year after the withdrawal, in January 2006, Palestinians went to the polls. The elections were a political judgment on thirteen years of Oslo’s management. Hamas won because the Authority’s record was indefensible: its corruption documented, its complicity in the occupation visible, its promises exhausted. The electorate had not become more extreme; the alternative—continuing Oslo—had become insupportable.

The result was unacceptable to the colonial order. The international response—sanctions, isolation, training and arming of Fatah-aligned PA security forces against the elected Hamas government under General Dayton—confirmed what the Oslo framework had always implied: Palestinian democratic choice could be tolerated only when it produced acceptable outcomes.

Through the first half of 2007, Fatah and Hamas forces confronted each other in Gaza, culminating in Hamas’s consolidation of control over the strip in June. The resulting split—Gaza under Hamas, the West Bank under an Authority dependent on Israeli and international permission—was what the Dayton plan had been designed to produce. The Western press has called it an accident of Palestinian political culture or a consequence of Hamas’s commitment to violence. The split has, in fact, served the occupation: two factions, each too weak to challenge it; the Authority bound to act against Hamas, Hamas refusing reconciliation on Oslo’s terms. The split is cited by those who produced it—as proof that Palestinians lack the political coherence for self-governance, and as proof that Israel has no negotiating partner.

Palestinians today must contend with an occupation that has never ended and an Authority that serves it. The Authority has accepted managed subjugation and adopted the vocabulary of its patrons—”security coordination,” “confidence-building measures,” “the peace process” that never arrives. Hamas, and all other factions of the Palestinian resistance—whatever the consequences of their methods or the limits of their governing record—have refused the premise that occupation is to be administered rather than resisted. What is offered today as “reconciliation” amounts in practice to a demand that the resistance accept the terms of the collaborator—a demand expressed in the language of Palestinian unity while serving to extend the reach of colonial subcontracting. Subcontracting is not peace, and collaboration is not sovereignty. Subcontracting was meant to end Palestinian politics. It has produced its opposite: the only Palestinian politics that remains is the refusal of the arrangement.

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