The Palestinian National Movement Politics of Contention, 1967–2005

This innovative study examines the internal dynamics of the Palestinian political elite and their impact on the struggle to establish a Palestinian state. Amal Jamal demonstrates that the PLO leadership sought to prevent the rise of any alternative in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that could challenge its authority to represent Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. Drawing on Palestinian sources and interviews with Palestinian political leaders, Jamal argues that the Fatah leadership attempted to mobilize new social forces?local secular-nationalist and Islamist movements?while undermining their ability to develop independent power structures. This policy served to radicalize the younger local elites, contributing to the tensions that precipitated the first and second intifadas. At the same time Israel's policies undermined the legitimacy of the national elite, while enhancing the Islamist opposition's ideological legitimacy. In this way, internal elite disunity and growing political differentiation worked against development of a common Palestinian strategy of state-building.
1. The Structural and Historical Context
2. From Dissension to Coordination: The PLO Leadership and the National Elite in the Occupied Territories
3. Mobilization under Control: The Political Economy of Steadfastness
4. Engineering Compliance: New Modes of Political Entrepreneurship and the Co-optation of Contenders
5. Seizing Structural Opportunities: The Islamist Elite and the Framing of Authenticity Discourse
6. The Politics of Symbolic Capital and the Institutionalization of Neopatrimonial Power
7. The Second Intifada and Its Impact on Elite Structures
Conclusion