While the Oslo Accords did not lead to Palestinian independence, the establishment in 1994 of a Palestinian National Authority generated social processes that transformed Palestinian society in the OPT. In the absence of sovereignty and territorial continuity, and in the face of the perpetuation of Israeli military control and critical dependence on international donor assistance, the PNA could not have possibly turned the economic structure that persisted throughout the preceding epoch over its head. However, the formation of a government public sector and its emergence as prime employer, and the massive investment in the development of secondary and higher education considerably altered educational and occupational attributes of the population within a short time and opened channels for upper social mobility, which were hitherto denied to the residents of the OPT. The formation of a public sector created a new category of government employees, comprising members of the security forces, professionals, bureaucrats, and clerks. They were recruited from two major pools: graduates of the fast-growing system of higher education and leaders from the OPT-based wing of the national movement, predominantly former political prisoners. These employees became the backbone of a nascent middle class. Indeed, the focus is on a new middle class because the conditions necessary for the realization of such class transformation did not exist in the first 27 years of the Israeli occupation, when a systematic policy of dispossession, non-development of infrastructure and social services, and denial of civil and political rights all but blocked possibilities for upper mobility. However, the consolidation and further expansion of the emergent middle class were critically affected in the wake of Israel’s total retreat – ever since the collapse of the Oslo scheme in 2000 - from its onetime commitment to end the occupation, and the array of measures it implemented to thwart the feasibility of Palestinian statehood. My paper examines the contribution of the PNA to the emergence of a new middle class by focusing on major channels for upper mobility it advanced and assessing its changing capacity to maintain them over two distinct political eras: the Oslo years and the post-Oslo era up to 2017. It is based on findings from two research projects that engaged me over the past 15 years: a study of the expansion of higher education and the employment situation of university graduates in the OPT, and a socio-historical study on the movement of Palestinian political prisoners.