Political Parties In Palestine

Party Politics in Palestine is an up-to-date elucidation of the fractious Palestinian political scene, providing for the first time a lively and comprehensive discussion of the ideological outlook, historical development, and political objectives of all of Palestine's major political actors.

This comprehensive collection addresses the important question of political parties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Written by historians, political scientists, and sociologists of the region, the book provides a pertinent analytical framework to understand the often complex and turbulent histories of these political parties, their role within the region, and their prospects in the wake of the post-2011 Arab Uprisings. The authors explore a rich and varied range of case studies including Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco. This book examines where political parties and organizations have been crucial to shaping contemporary historical events and political contestation, but also highlights their shortcomings and failures to deliver on the ambitions and hopes they had often evoked amongst their supporters. Furthermore, it looks at how political parties and their activities have intersected with important issues and themes such as gender, human rights, international solidarity, revolution and social transformation, and sectarian identity. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of political science, particularly within the MENA region. It was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

The 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the first in which both Fatah and Hamas fielded candidates, resulted in a resounding victory for Hamas. Winning 74 out of the 132 seats (compared to Fatah s 45), Hamas election strategy had proved effective against Fatah s ineffectual campaign and failure to properly consider public opinion. Erika Schwarze offers here an in-depth examination of these two separate campaigns, and how Fatah s lack of responsiveness to the popular mood in the run-up to elections following Arafat s death and beyond, led to its defeat in spite of its considerable experience of electioneering. She analyses the conduct of Palestinian leadership during this critical period, exploring the reasons for Fatah s inability to prioritise responsiveness to public opinion, and providing insights into the movement s electoral prospects in the future and its chances of survival and revival."

Throughout the Arab world, Islamist political movements are joining the electoral process. This change alarms some observers and excites other. In recent years, electoral opportunities have opened, and Islamist movements have seized them. But those opportunities, while real, have also been sharply circumscribed. Elections may be freer, but they are not fair. The opposition can run but it generally cannot win. Semiauthoritarian conditions prevail in much of the Arab world, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. How do Islamist movements change when they plunge into freer but unfair elections? How do their organizations (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) and structures evolve? What happens to their core ideological principles? And how might their increased involvement affect the political system? In When Victory Is Not an Option, Nathan J. Brown addresses these questions by focusing on Islamist movements in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Palestine. He shows that uncertain benefits lead to uncertain changes. Islamists do adapt their organizations and their ideologies do bend—some. But leaders almost always preserve a line of retreat in case the political opening fizzles or fails to deliver what they wish. The result is a cat-and-mouse game between dominant regimes and wily movements. There are possibilities for more significant changes, but to date they remain only possibilities.

This book explores the political economy of Palestine through critical, interdisciplinary, and decolonial perspectives, underscoring that an approach to economics that does not consider the political—a de-politicized economics—is inadequate to understanding the situation in occupied Palestine. A critical interdisciplinary approach to political economy challenges prevailing neoliberal logics and structures that reproduce racial capitalism, and explores how the political economy of occupied Palestine is shaped by processes of accumulation by exploitation and dispossession from both Israel and global business, as well as from Palestinian elites. A decolonial approach to Palestinian political economy foregrounds struggles against neoliberal and settler colonial policies and institutions, and aids in the de-fragmentation of Palestinian life, land, and political economy that the Oslo Accords perpetuated, but whose histories of de-development over all of Palestine can be traced back for over a century. The chapters in this book offer an in-depth contextualization of the Palestinian political economy, analyze the political economy of integration, fragmentation, and inequality, and explore and problematize multiple sectors and themes of political economy in the absence of sovereignty.