Diana B. Greenwald, Mayors in the Middle: Indirect Rule and Local Government in Occupied Palestine (Columbia University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Diana B. Greenwald (DG): I wrote this book for a few reasons. As an academic contribution, I wanted to use the case of Palestine—specifically, the occupied West Bank following the Oslo Accords—to generate a new theory about the effects of indirect rule on indigenous politics at the local level. Indirect rule is a governing strategy used by colonial powers, occupiers, and other kinds of states who seek to impose regimes of ethnic, racial, or religious domination. Indirect rule means that they attempt to rule, in part, via indigenous “intermediaries.” This method has been used by numerous colonial and state actors historically; my book, for example, features illustrative comparisons to colonial India and Apartheid South Africa. Without getting into my theory and findings too much here, my book seeks to bring Palestine into the political science literature not as an exceptional case, but rather as one that can be aptly compared to other settings featuring these regimes of domination. Too often, American political science has neglected Palestine, or, with rare exception, Palestinians have only been studied as part of the Israeli-Palestinian “dyad”.
For more general readers from outside Palestine—particularly those in the United States—I wanted to convey the many ways in which Israeli military rule shapes the nitty-gritty of local government, especially in the smaller towns and cities of the West Bank that I visited for my fieldwork. I also wanted readers to appreciate how Palestinians are not passive recipients of repression. This is how they are often depicted in popular media and even in outlets that aim to be sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. Instead, through interviews with local politicians and municipal employees from across the West Bank, I learned how, on a basic level, Palestinians were sustaining their communities, even within and amidst structures of colonial-style domination. Indirect rule generates complicated political pressures on city mayors and town governments. Through field-based interviews, I sought to elevate the voices of Palestinians living out these realities in their work, day to day.
I learned how, on a basic level, Palestinians were sustaining their communities, even within and amidst structures of colonial-style domination.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
DG: The substantive focus of the book is Palestinian local governance in the West Bank under the Oslo regime—namely, the system of shared authority that includes both Israel, as the occupying power, and the Palestinian Authority (PA). When I refer to local governance, I am looking at small- to medium-sized towns, as well as the major Palestinian cities. The largest cities include places like Hebron (al-Khalil) and Nablus—whose populations range from 175,000 to 230,000—while towns like Silwad, Bruqin, Ya’bad, Beit Furik, Beit Ummar, Attil, etc., might range from five thousand to twenty thousand. Notably, my analysis does not include smaller Palestinian villages.
First, I draw on the work of historians of Palestine to understand how these burgeoning towns of the West Bank were governed under preceding states and empires, from the late Ottoman period on, and to distinguish Israel’s aims and approach from those powers that preceded it. I am not a historian, so my treatment of this vast sweep of Palestine’s history is necessarily incomplete, but chapter two should be useful to readers who want an aerial view of this history with a focus on the lineage of indirect rule in Palestine that preceded Israel’s military-backed settlement project.
After defining how Israel’s colonial project was distinct—in short, it was neither inclusive of the Palestinian population nor overtly temporary—I detail how this approach resulted in the cultivation of a new, highly centralized, coercion-focused intermediary in the form of the PA. This is where I connect to the literature on colonial indirect rule, while acknowledging that labeling any Palestinian institution or set of institutions an “intermediary” in Israel’s regime—not to mention the harsher term of “collaborator,” which I largely avoid—is a complex task and requires nuance. I use “intermediary” to refer primarily to the executive branch of the PA—first under Yasser Arafat, but more notably under Mahmoud Abbas after the al-Aqsa Intifada—and its coercive arm. Post-2005 was a time when Fatah, as the political party most closely associated with the indirect rule regime, was beginning to face a crisis in its legitimacy while, at the same time, Israel was intensifying its investments in the intermediary—particularly its role in policing and repressing Palestinians. My analysis of local government takes place in this context, following, in 2004 to 2005, the first (and last) truly competitive local elections in the occupied territories. During this period, I find that Palestinian mayors and municipal councils faced distinct pressures and opportunities depending on whether they were affiliated with Fatah, the regime “intermediary,” or its opponents, which included Hamas, other smaller parties (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP), and independents. This caused these mayors and councils to govern in distinct ways, depending on their relationship to the regime.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
DG: This is my first solo-authored book. I started to develop the theoretical underpinnings of my argument about indirect rule in the Palestinian case in my chapter “Delegating Domination: Indirect Rule in the West Bank,” in The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?. I have also written elsewhere on regime-based understandings of Israel’s rule and the legitimacy crisis in PA institutions. One interesting angle on the latter was a recent article I co-authored with Mark Tessler in Middle East Law and Governance, where we find that young men who passed through their formative, youth-to-adult transitions during the First Intifada and Oslo Accords later held more negative views toward PA security institutions than other men. I have also written in Jadaliyya about local Palestinian politics and the localization of Palestinian resistance.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
DG: As I mentioned above, I wrote this book for academic audiences, but also for readers seeking to learn more about Palestinian life under occupation. Ultimately, I have come to believe that Israel’s project to control and rule territory without governing the indigenous Palestinians who live there—and, worse, promoting apartheid-style legal systems, Palestinian “de-development,” and even expulsion—is inherently untenable. In this vein, the effort to cultivate Palestinian “intermediaries” who will rule under and, in some sense, on behalf of this project, will be unsustainable as long as Palestinians continue to be denied their freedom. My readers may or may not come away from this book with identical conclusions but, at a minimum, I hope that they will learn something about Palestinian agency, resistance, and, yes, a certain kind of self-governance that Palestinians practice under the most trying of circumstances. Of course, I hope that, ultimately, my interlocutors and other Palestinians living under Israel’s regime—one which becomes more eliminatory and violent each day—see my writing as a valuable depiction of the political realities that they face.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
DG: I am currently grappling with whether or how to continue producing research on Palestine during and/or following the genocide. I am currently working on a couple of Palestine-related papers from afar with co-authors. One extends this theorizing about indirect rule to Mandate-era Palestine and Jordan, using only remotely available historical sources. Another project will be surveying pro-Palestine (and/or pro-ceasefire) protestors in the United States in the wake of October 7. Finally, I am also developing a methodological chapter on whether and how to “generalize” from Palestine for an edited volume in-progress.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 1 to 4)
A FRAMEWORK FOR NATIONAL STRUGGLE
On June 2 1980, a bomb exploded in the car of Bassam Shaka‘a, the mayor of Nablus. Nablus is one of the largest cities in the West Bank, a part of historic Palestine that, by then, Israel had militarily occupied for thirteen years. At the time, the territory was home to more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians and at least seventeen thousand Israeli Jewish settlers. The latter number had been growing rapidly since the inauguration of a hawkish, right-wing Israeli government three years earlier. The attack against Shaka‘a was carried out by members of the Jewish Underground, a hardline offshoot of the fundamentalist settler movement Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”). Gush Emunim embraced the use of violence to promote mass settlement and Jewish sovereignty over what it deemed “the whole land of Israel,” including the West Bank. As a result of the attack, Shaka‘a had both of his legs amputated from the knees down. He was targeted that day along with two others: Karim Khalaf, then mayor of Ramallah, and Ibrahim Tawil of the neighboring city of Al-Bireh. All three survived, but Khalaf was also permanently maimed.
Shaka‘a, born to a prominent family in Nablus, had previously been a member of the Arab nationalist Ba‘ath party. He spent time in Egypt and Syria, returning to Nablus in his thirties as a political independent. Five years after Shaka‘a’s return, Nablus, like the rest of the West Bank, fell under Israeli military rule. The 1967 war (the “Six-Day War” or al-Naksa, “the setback”) displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Many had been rendered refugees following the mass flight and expulsions of the 1948 war (Israel’s War of Independence, or al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”), and thus found themselves uprooted for a second time roughly twenty years later. In the wake of Israel’s capture of the West Bank, Jewish Israelis began settling the land almost immediately, first in the form of military outposts facing toward Jordan, where Palestinian commando bases were stationed, and subsequently as full-fledged residential communities. Settlements were built either on land expropriated from private Palestinian owners or on formerly Ottoman-designated miri lands, most of which Palestinians had lived on, cultivated, and used for generations.
During the first decade of occupation, in what some would describe as a “perplexing” move, Israel allowed Palestinian municipal elections in the West Bank. The year was 1976, and, while a previous set of elections for local councils had taken place four years earlier, Israel had recently—and perhaps shortsightedly—expanded the franchise to include women and propertyless men. By this time, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had been internationally recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and it was politically ascendant. In towns and cities across the West Bank, local politicians like Shaka‘a swept into office. These leaders openly opposed Israeli military rule and sought Palestinian national self-determination rather than, for example, a reattachment of the West Bank to the neighboring state of Jordan. Unlike the mostly pro-Jordanian mayors and municipal council members who had come into office in 1972, the politicians elected in 1976 were, on the whole, younger, less conservative, and better educated; they represented an overt challenge to Israel’s claims over the land. While they did not always identify with specific political factions, they were, in general, ideologically supportive of the PLO. Thus, the local elections resulted in unapologetic Palestinian nationalists gaining formal governing power within historic Palestine for one of the first times in history.
When my research assistant and I reached Shaka‘a’s house in Nablus in December 2014, we were almost an hour late. One of Shaka‘a’s friends and former colleagues greeted us on our arrival. He cautioned us that Shaka‘a, then eighty-four years old, would need to speak slowly with frequent pauses. However, his friend assured us, Shaka‘a’s memory was strong, and he was ready to answer our questions. As our conversation began, Shaka‘a told us that he had initially planned to boycott the elections. Much of Nablus had been without services since the previous council had resigned. When asked what convinced him to run, Shaka‘a responded pragmatically: “Nablus was in need of electricity; it was in need of water; it was in need of many services.” He described how the municipality was in debt for two electricity generators that the previous council had purchased in an effort to avoid connecting the city to the Israeli grid. In the meantime, Nablus’s residents were struggling to pay their bills, creating a budgetary crisis. In fact, electricity had long been a political issue in Nablus. As mayor, Shaka‘a would fend off Israeli pressure to connect the city to Israel’s grid. He would also face regular interference from Israel in his efforts to extend lines to neighboring villages; in a letter he penned to his colleague in the city of Tulkarem, he recounted how occupation authorities arrested Nablus’s municipal engineers and workers on site. In the letter, he described these actions as part of Israel’s broader strategic approach in the West Bank, writing, “all this coincides with the policy to annex the land with the intention to empty it of its population . . . to confront them [other regional and international actors] with a fait accompli.” The nuts and bolts of municipal governance were running up against Israel’s program of gradual, settlement-based annexation.
Despite having been elected to office, Shaka‘a realized that his position—heading a major Palestinian municipal council under Israeli occupation—was potentially sensitive. Shaka‘a recalled how, at the time, he had felt compelled to communicate to both Israeli military authorities and to the people of Nablus that “we,” the newly elected council, “are not part of the occupation.” He was tested on this stance even before taking office. In May 1976, Lina al-Nabulsi, a seventeen-year-old girl, was walking home from school when an Israeli soldier shot and killed her. As the city mourned, the Israeli military governor of the West Bank placed a call to Shaka‘a. Although Shaka‘a had not officially begun his term as mayor, the Israeli official ordered him to task municipal staff with scrubbing political graffiti from the walls and removing posters that Palestinians had hung around the city in the wake of al-Nabulsi’s murder. Shaka‘a refused. He recalled telling the Israeli official, “This is why the last municipal council resigned. We will not do the same things. We are here to represent the people, not oppress them.”
Speaking with Shaka‘a, I began to understand that this earlier generation of mayors—their experiences, and the relationships they had with their occupiers—would shape the ensuing trajectory of Israeli rule in the West Bank. Mayors like Shaka‘a became prominent oppositional actors rather than cooperative intermediaries within Israel’s political regime. Instead of depositing the municipal budget in an Israeli bank, Nablus’s municipal council members stored it in cash dispersed across their own homes. In 1979, after Israel alleged that Shaka‘a made remarks supporting violent Palestinian resistance, he was arrested and threatened with deportation to Jordan. The effort was unsuccessful—Shaka‘a appealed the decision to Israel’s High Court of Justice, and mayors across the occupied territories resigned in protest, convincing the Israeli military to drop the expulsion order. Shaka‘a was released from prison and defiantly returned to Nablus amid popular celebrations. The Israeli Arab journalist Rafik Halabi summarized the moment: “Now that the military government had reversed itself, the mayor of Nablus was more than a local figure, more than a national one: he had become an emblem, a power to be reckoned with in the West Bank.”
Ultimately, the capture of municipal institutions by Palestinian opponents of the occupation was short-lived. Shaka‘a, along with other popularly elected Palestinian nationalists, was removed from office and replaced with an Israeli-appointed mayor in 1982. In addition, Israel banned the National Guidance Committee, an important organization of Palestinian business leaders, union representatives, religious leaders, and nationalist mayors, which included Shaka‘a and Khalaf among its members. Lessons had been learned. In 1986, Meron Benvenisti, a keen Israeli observer and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, wrote, “Israeli authorities still view independent, elected municipalities as a security and political risk. When residents of the town of Dura . . . petitioned the High Court of Justice and demanded municipal elections, the High Court rejected their petition. The court accepted the authorities’ position that municipal elections in the West Bank were a framework for national struggle and an instrument for the PLO to undertake subversive activities. Thus, the Palestinian community remains disenfranchised, even at the local level, and devoid of any autonomous authority.”
Excerpted from Mayors in the Middle: Indirect Rule and Local Government in Occupied Palestine by Diana B. Greenwald Copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
