Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution

...provides a unique analysis of the various facets of grassroots organizations and their interaction with the emerging state institutions...a major and very timely contribution. - Ann Lesch. In this well-informed and accessibly written book, Glenn E. Robinson traces the emergence of a new political elite in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1980s and the grassroots political and social revolution it launched during the Intifada. Local self-help organizations forged in this period - student groups, labor unions, women's committees, agricultural relief committees, medical relief associations, and voluntary works organizations - took power away from the notables (the traditional landowning elite) and began building popular institutions which organized Palestinian society and which Israel found impossible to eliminate. Yet, in the post-Oslo period, power in the post-intifada polity was captured by an outside political force: Yasir Arafat and the PLO. The resulting disjunction between the grassroots popular authority of the new institutions and the centralizing, authoritarian tendencies of the PLO undermines the prospects for building a stable Palestinian state.