Building a Palestinian state

by Glenn E. Robinson

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 that it launched during the Intifada. Local self-help organizations forged in this period - student groups, labor unions, women's committees, agricultural and medical-relief associations, and other voluntary works organizations - took power away from traditional landowners and began building popular institutions which organized Palestinian society and which Israel found impossible to eliminate. After the Intifada, however, power in the polity was captured by an outside political force: Yasir Arafat and the PLO. Robinson focuses on the resulting disjunction between the grassroots popular authority of the new institutions, the centralizing, authoritarian tendencies of the PLO, and the diminishing prospects for building a stable Palestinian state.