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Control, Dispossession, Exploitation: Understanding the Political Economy of the Colonialism-Neoliberalism Nexus in West Bank Agriculture
Abstract
Over the past decades, the share of agriculture in the Palestinian occupied West Bank (oWB) – once at the core of its economy – has declined dramatically. This shift has increased the territory's dependency on Israel and foreign aid for food imports and threatened Palestinian farmers' rural communities and rural identity tied to farming the land. Using Palestinian agriculture – arguably the most political sector – as a case study, this paper examines the sector's decline from the Oslo Accords until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (1993-2020). It employs primary and secondary data in English and Arabic (including policy strategy papers by the World Bank, various United Nations agencies and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) as indicators for their intentions for agricultural (de-)development, as well as economic indicators) in order to demonstrate how Israeli settler colonialism and neoliberalism, championed by the Western international donor community and the PNA, have altered the sector. Thus far, studies on the political economy of agriculture in the oWB have focused on Israel's land grabs or neoliberal development efforts in general, failing to point out the processes' mutual reinforcement in agriculture. Instead, this paper argues that both sets of actors have deliberately 'de-developed' Palestinian agriculture because it did not align with their political agendas and respective visions for the occupied West Bank. The paper demonstrates this by using a Marxist political economy framework, showcasing how settler colonialism and neoliberalism revolve around accumulation by dispossession, subsequently resulting in 1) small-holder farmers' proletarianization, 2) the territory's dependency on Israel and foreign aid for food imports, and 3) threatening Palestinian farmers' rural communities and rural identity tied to farming the land. In showcasing the impact of this “colonialism-neoliberalism nexus” on agriculture that has also been at play elsewhere, the paper challenges notions of Palestinian 'exceptionalism' often employed to justify Israel's violence and ineffective development efforts in the oWB. In addition, its results allow reflections on decolonizing international development efforts in Palestine and elsewhere by strengthening bottom-up initiatives, rural communities through cooperatives and transnational developments such as La Vía Campesina. They also point towards the role of Palestinian-led cooperatives in resisting the neoliberalism-colonialism nexus as an avenue for future field research.
Discipline
International Relations/Affairs
Political Science
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Israel
Palestine
The Levant
West Bank
Sub Area
None