Development as Struggle: Confronting the Reality of Power in Palestine

Abstract

The occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) are a major recipient of global aid flows, ostensibly aimed at improving development outcomes for the Palestinian population. This article presents a critical analysis of the ways that development is being conceived and practiced by major actors in the oPt. By analyzing different conceptions of power, the article examines how dominant approaches to development hide the ongoing reality of Israeli settler colonialism by dehistoricizing Zionism and its project; incorporating the structures of Israeli occupation into official Palestinian development strategy; and promoting an economic perspective that views development as an objective and disinterested process operating above (and outside) power relations. After considering some of the ramifications of current approaches to development, the article concludes with brief remarks on how this critique can help to reframe and articulate an alternative strategy. Israel's effective control over the Palestinian population and not to an appreciable lessening of Israeli suzerainty despite the establishment of the PA and the vast amount of foreign technical and financial support allocated for its institution-building. Thus, both the intense amounts of aid and attention to development that have been directed at the oPt have resulted in a failure of development, a circumstance better described by Sara Roy as " de-development." 7 This article contends that the concept of development as understood by key actors in the oPt is a major reason for that failure. International organizations-and many local Palestinian NGOsproject a view of development divorced from the power relations at play under Israeli settler colonialism. Advocates of this view conceive development as a neutral technocratic process whose success hinges on the right technical and financial support from donors, a negotiated reduction in Israeli-imposed restrictions, and the implementation of appropriate state-building policies on the part of the PA. This mainstream perspective considers development in a vacuum, unaffected by power relations, as a positive-sum game. In this regard, it is the lack of coordination between stakeholders, and not the power relations completely structured around Israel's ongoing colonization of the area, that stands as a major obstacle to development. As a result, the dominant development framework obfuscates, and thereby strengthens, the reality of Israeli settler colonialism in the oPt. Palestinian Aid Dependency and Israeli Settler ColonialismIn exploring the ideas outlined above, this article begins by tracing different conceptions of power in the settler-colonial context and counterposing these to the notion of empowerment prevalent in Palestinian development discourse. The article then examines how development approaches hide the ongoing reality of Israeli settler-colonial power by: dehistoricizing Zionism and its project; incorporating the structures of occupation into official Palestinian development strategy; and foisting economic neol...

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