- Introduction
- The ‘State’ and Palestine
- The Fragmentation of Palestine
- Making Plans
- Palestinian Authoritarianism
- The ‘State of Palestine’
- ‘Economic Peace’
- Disaster, Capitalism and Palestine
- Conclusions
Biography
Philip Leech is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and a Visiting Fellow at the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. He has a PhD from Exeter University’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies and is the co-editor of Political Identities and Popular Uprisings in the Middle East (2016).
The State of Palestine’ provides a comprehensive critique of the false messiah of state-building as a strategy for Palestinian emancipation. Based on extensive research in the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in the city of Nablus, Leech critically assesses 20 years of the Palestinian Authority, but with a focus on the post-2006 era. This book is essential reading for those who wish to understand Palestinian politics today and for why the so-called ‘two-state solution’ was - and remains - so fundamentally flawed.
- Dr Mandy Turner, Director of the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem (Council for British Research in the Levant)
The first thorough and scholarly examination of the post-Oslo reality in the West Bank. This careful and forensic study exposes the fallacies surrounding the reality on the ground in the areas under the Palestinian Authority control. A highly important source of information and deconstruction for anyone who wishes genuinely to understand, and change, the dismal reality on the ground in the West Bank and beyond.
- Ilan Pappe, Professor of History at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter University
Drawing upon original fieldwork in the north of the West Bank, Phil Leech provides a meticulous and much-needed critique of the Palestinian Authority’s ‘state building’ project. This is a fascinating and timely account of Palestinian politics that deserves to be widely read.
- Adam Hanieh, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Leech makes a compelling case that the Palestinian Authority's and the international community's statebuilding project in the Occupied Territories never stood a real chance. Extensive engagement with the lived experience of those in cities, villages and refugee camps is married to a grasp of the higher politics and economi
