Shall we fight?
What matters?
Since the Arab revolution
remains preserved in anthems,
in flags, at the bank, and in the Parliament.

1 Since the creation of Confluences Méditerranée, 30 years ago, this issue is the sixth dedicated to Palestine and it reflects on the concept of Power. Why interrogate the concept of power in Palestine today? And why did we name this special issue “Power (s) in Palestine” rather than simply using the singular “Power”? We had four main reasons:

2 First of all, recent events in Palestine have made these questions more urgent than ever: Israel’s recent attempts to expel Palestinians from Jerusalem neighborhoods such as Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, to demolish the remains of the village of Lifta, as well as the May 2021 assault on Gaza, resulted in a more unified Palestinian reaction from Jerusalem to Haifa, to Ramallah, to Gaza, and neighboring Arab countries. Palestinian civil society has efficiently organized massive acts of resistance and mastered the use of social media to overcome the silencing of Palestinian voices in mainstream media. These movements, however, also contest the role of the PA, prompting the Palestinian leadership to reinforce its authoritarianism, repressing all forms of contestation to Israel, the PA and the Oslo status quo, as well as the continuing arrest and torture of Palestinian dissidents. Moreover, the cancellation of the first Palestinian elections in 15 years deepened the huge gap already existing between Palestinians and their leadership, and the political assassination, on June 24^th 2021, of the longstanding critic of the PA Nizar Banat became the catalyst for heightened protests against Mahmoud Abbas and his political regime. However, these recent developments also highlight major changes of power relations on the Palestinian internal political scene and remind us that the scope of Palestinian power goes well beyond Palestine and Palestinians: the asymmetrical power relations between Israel and the Palestinians have allowed the Israeli colonial project to expand almost unabated; the intervention of the Trump administration resulted in normalization agreements between a number of Arab countries and Israel without any conditions concerning the settlement of the Palestinian question; and the International Criminal Court finally decided to open an investigation for war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, portending new fields of struggle. At the same time, the inaction of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) leadership led to the increasing involvement of Palestinian civil society organizations in different forms of resistance to colonial oppression. The violent repression of these demonstrations by Palestinian security forces, the actions of Palestinian civil society, and all the other factors mentioned above, remind us of the urgency of re-interrogating power in Palestine today.

3 Second, because the Palestinian political elite is more fragmented than ever. Over the past two decades a great deal of research on the question of Palestine has pointed to divisions in the political scene, [2] exacerbated by the Oslo Accords. [3] The ensuing establishment of the PA, in particular, fostered both the emergence of new political dynamics and new sources of power and legitimacy, embodied in the conflict between Fatah and Hamas that has dominated Palestinian politics since 2007, and a process of capital accumulation and a progressive restructuring of social classes after 1993. [4] Moreover, the dispersion of Palestinians across the world, the superposition of national and international legal realities, and the limited but increasing incorporation of Palestine into circuits of global capital have contributed to the multiplication of actors in the conflict. This complex set of factors has prompted questions regarding new centers, mechanisms, and flows of power in Palestine that require urgent attention.

4 Third, because these new dynamics brought about by Oslo have produced confounding, bewildering results which have not yet been sufficiently explored. The most perplexing of them, perhaps -though certainly not the only one- is the role played by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority. While this minority enjoys the privileges offered by Oslo’s structural opportunities for corruption and is widely seen as instrumental to Palestinian dispossession, the majority of Palestinians are not only subjected to Israeli colonial expansion and oppression but to the violence of their own authority as well. In the last 28 years, it has become clear that the regime inaugurated by the Oslo accords is nothing but the latest version of the schemes of domination of Palestinians and, therefore, the Palestinian Authority –the very product of Oslo- including its political, social, economic, and legal practices should be central to our understanding of Palestine and Palestinians today.

5 Finally, and beyond the PA, the Oslo accords – seen not only as a text containing rules but rather as a framework, as a set of mechanisms – had a defining impact on Palestinian life at large, producing multiple and complex forms of power that are not limited to a central authority or to the question of sovereignty. Oslo’s structures were not just the silent and passive products of social and political forces; they also had a performative quality, that is, the power to create reality. On the one hand, Oslo not only produced institutions, it also facilitated and consolidated the emergence of new social groups, hierarchies, divisions, categories of social and political meaning, and hence power dynamics that seem to be progressively reorganizing and reshaping life in Palestine. On the other hand, Oslo promoted particular discursive practices that reinforced these changes. It emphasized, for example, the concepts of ‘peace process’, ’partners for peace’, ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’, ‘security cooperation’, ‘institution-building’, ‘statehood’, economic development and the language of rights and rule of law. That set of discourses thus came to reify and legitimize various social and political transformations.

Oslo and the Production of an Ever-Lasting Colonial Present

6 Against the opinion declaring the agreements simply a dead initiative, a barren process, many of the works presented in this volume look at Oslo rather as a productive political framework. They explore Oslo’s real, effective, concrete mechanisms and their impact, and show how, from this perspective, Oslo is alive and well, Palestinians are surrounded by it, and are still resisting it. This volume is thus intended to explain what it means to conceive Oslo as a productive framework constituted –as Michel Foucault would put it in relation to power- by “… continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject [Palestinian] bodies, govern [Palestinian political] gestures, [and] dictate [Palestinian Authority] behaviors”. [5]

7 The feelings of failure and frustration elicited by Oslo are not surprising given the nature of its promises compared to its disastrous effects. But if we truly want to understand what is happening today in Palestine, we need to avoid dismissing Oslo only as dead promises, a failed process that we can put behind us. Oslo is not just a set of institutional and legal structures that were imposed on Palestinians, but a complex assemblage of indefinite mechanisms capable of producing new subjects and docile Palestinian institutions. To grasp the full impact that Oslo has on the Palestinian body politic, we need to expose all its capabilities as a ruling device, as a set of disciplinary tools. We need to comprehend their role, not only in producing macro-institutional political and economic dynamics, but also in redefining our understanding of Palestinian national objectives, liberation, resistance, individual and collective subjectivities, political responsibility and loyalties, citizenship, freedoms, duties, and rights. We need to know how they have helped to produce a new social imaginary which delineates the contours of the most intimate affects and practices, networks of solidarity, family organization, personal strategies, processes of self-definition and identity construction, and how Oslo mechanisms are deeply involved in these processes. Serious attention to these new forms of power and the forms of resistance that they produce is vital not only to understanding the continuous expansion of the Israeli colonial project, the state of division dominating the Palestinian national movement and the increasing concentration of power and authoritarianism, but also in order to imagine new emancipatory strategies.

8 Almost immediately after the agreements, the scholarship on Palestine started to pay attention to those -then emerging- complex new power dynamics brought about by Oslo, and some research continued with this work over the years. [6] However, when analyzing power in Palestine, researchers have tended to look at it, or to look for it, mainly in the PA and its political regime, [7] political parties, [8] economic institutions, [9] international relations, [10] and international law. [11] The focus on the central authority and its relations with other sovereigns, and the analysis of power according to concepts such as rule of law, separation of powers, popular sovereignty, and the dominant binary of democracy versus authoritarianism, are markedly visible in this literature. These works have thus by and large neglected those new and more diffuse, less visible, but equally concrete forms of discursive power, processes of subjection, and mechanisms of dispossession and violence, which were produced by Oslo and are thus in a real and a lived sense, progressively shifting the terms, means, and aspirational horizons of Palestinian subjects and politics.

9 Perhaps this is due to the dominant influence of liberal theory which conceives political and social institutions as the central locus of power intended to give expression to a fair and legitimate political system arising from a transactional or contractual operation between free individuals. One can easily identify at least two important limitations to the capacity of this theory to offer an appropriate understanding of the new forms of power emerging in Palestine and which are at the center of the concerns of this volume. First, liberal theory tends to limit the analysis of power to the sovereign, to state institutions, and the legal edifice of society. This was the case, for instance, between 2000 and 2003 in Palestine when international and internal pressures were exerted on Yasser Arafat to put an end to his authoritarian regime. The initiatives that these actors advanced basically addressed PA institutions and constitutional amendments. Eventually, PA institutions and the political regime were reformed but authoritarianism continued to haunt Palestinian politics, and it is today more consolidated than ever. Second, liberal theory does not constitute a descriptive account of the sources, functions, and operations of power, but a normative meta-theory whose aim is to reconstruct the conditions in which we would call a political regime “just” and “legitimate”. It does not describe society or power, but rather, serves to evaluate them normatively. An important part of the literature on Palestinian politics concentrates on the organization and functioning of the PA through concepts such as democratic governance, rules of law, and human rights, but without paying real attention to how power arises and is exercised.

An Alternative Perspective: The Concrete Mechanisms of Power and Resistance

10 This volume constitutes an attempt to overcome these limitations of liberal thought: it looks at power beyond the Palestinian political regime and its institutions, and describes the new forms of power and resistance observable in contemporary Palestine. The papers in this volume, each one in its own way, reflect the fact that power and resistance to political domination (in Palestine and elsewhere) are never confined to the elites, institutional structures, or elections, but rather, that they are enacted in complex and multiple fields and forms. The perspectives that we advance here do not suggest that one should disregard political, economic, and social institutions – the volume actually includes research on these topics. Instead, they propose certain concepts and tools allowing us also to look at power elsewhere, in less centralized, less institutional forms: neoliberal forms of subjection, new forms of colonial dispossession, public infrastructure, identity formation, discursive practices, new forms of political action, prisoners and their resistance, but of course also the Palestinian Authority’s legal practices, Palestinian political parties, and international law and diplomacy.

11 The works presented here thus follow Michel Foucault’s invitation to “cut off the head of the king” in political theory, that is, the attempt to study power as not uniquely localized in the state and the legal edifice but, rather, in its different non-sovereign forms. Consequently, the analyses offered here look at power as circulating in various fields, explore power through the different forms in which it is exercised, and suggest the idea that individuals are not only the objects of power but also its vehicles and, more fundamentally, its very product. Three fundamental points are highlighted in the writings of this volume: first, that the important question is no longer who has power and what the individual does with it. The question rather is what are the mechanisms by which these relations are expressed and consolidated. Second, that power cannot be exercised and legitimized without the production of knowledge and discourses. Third, that these relations of power can also be aptly analyzed by looking at them from the perspective of the forms of resistance that they produce.

12 Accordingly, this volume puts at the center of the analysis the notions of “domination” and “resistance” rather than popular sovereignty and freedoms; colonial studies and its power/knowledge relations rather than self-determination, constituent power, and democracy; ideas about the socio-political constitution of discursive formations rather than legitimacy; and an analysis of the performative power of law and the production of “truth” rather than legal contradiction and indeterminacy. We believe that these perspectives are required for a critical exploration of the new realities that Oslo produced and that continue to shape life in Palestine today.

13 This issue of Confluences Méditerranée seeks to understand the new sources, practices, and mechanisms of power (s) and their symbolic role and dimensions through eleven contributions. It starts with a historical contextualization of Palestinian political dynamics and the notion of power, in an interview with Rashid Khalidi and Henry Laurens. This interview is a dialogue between the present and the past and intends to lend historical depth to this question of power in order to avoid the pitfalls of a unidimensional research. In this issue, we also examine the most recent events in Palestine and analyze the aftermath of the Gaza war and the ongoing May 2021 uprising, all of which highlight the fragmentation of the Palestinian political scene. Between necessary reform of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the renewal of the Palestinian leadership through elections and inter-Palestinian reconciliation, the Palestinian national movement remains divided, and the May 2021 uprising has yet to yield all its fruits (Dot-Pouillard).

14 The volume likewise examines Israel’s relationship to Palestinian peoplehood before and after the negotiations process; a relationship that was driven by a logic of elimination (1948-1967), then augmented by a logic of separation (1967-1993) and, finally, expanded by a logic of constitution, as Palestinian peoplehood was allowed to exist only through the ideological confines of the negotiation process (Khoury). The volume offers a reading of power, domination, and resistance in Palestine in the post-Oslo era, through the writings of Palestinian political prisoners. One of the contributions sheds light on the histories and aspirations of Palestinian political prisoners who fought with the PLO, and then were left to their own fate with no political guardian after the arrival of the PA. These writings bring to light the concept of “parallel consciousness”, a powerful tool that helps interrogate political realities in Palestine today (Al-Shaikh).

15 The contributions also highlight the re-articulation of power dynamics after the signing of the Oslo Accords: In particular, they show the new forms of dispossession and domination implemented by Israel through the control of land. The precarious position of Palestinian Bedouin communities in East Jerusalem and relentless Israeli attempts to transfer them forcibly is one of the many examples of this phenomenon (Amara et al). The control of infrastructure development is also examined. This field is characterized by a certain indifference towards human life which translates into a “politics of neglect” implemented by Israel two decades before the second Intifada and maintained until today as a less visible but no less concrete new form of power (Stamatopoulou-Robbins). The volume also explores how, during the Oslo period, the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle was partly influenced by ideological tensions resulting from the contradictions between the requirements of struggle and the neoliberal incentives that arose with Oslo (Garrault).

16 In response to the failure of the negotiation process, Palestinians are developing strategies that aim to modify the dominant relations of power existing since the inception of Oslo. On the international scene, Palestinians are progressively abandoning the bilateral framework imposed by the agreements to push for a multilateralization of the process, systematically referring to international law and organizations as a basis for diplomatic action. One of the contributions reflects on this shift and questions whether the PLO is ready to fight its own inertia and get out of the “bilateral trap” (Deas). And the decision of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to formally open an investigation into alleged war crimes by Israel in the Palestinian territories marks a turning point in the internationalization of the Palestinian question, thereby creating new sites of struggle (Rémond-Tiedrez).

17 At the domestic level and in light of the most recent events in Palestine and the increasingly repressive policies of the PA, the volume proposes to revisit the role of the authority and leftist political parties. One of the contributions argues that, even if the PA is not a state, it has been a productive device capable of rearticulating familiar colonial patterns, namely, the Palestinian non-sovereign status, authoritarian forms of domination, and the division of the colonized people (Dabed). The volume finally discusses the subordination of the Palestinian Left and its decline. It analyzes how this decline resulted, among other internal and external factors, from the acceptance of Fatah’s brand of Palestinian nationalism as the predominant political framework within the PLO. It argues that the Left’s condition in the post-Oslo era is stuck between Fatah’s dominant position and its emerging Islamist challenger (Leopardi).

18 From a geographic, disciplinary, and intellectual point of view, this volume brings together a group of authors from different backgrounds. However, they all share a genuine concern for a critical approach to Palestinian reality, and the ambition to deepen existing knowledge on Palestine.