Colonial and settler-colonial studies broadly agree that colonialism, anti-colonialism, decolonization and postcolonialism form a path-dependent chain. However, can the conditions of anti-colonialism and postcolonialism coexist in an ongoing context of settler-colonialism? Somdeep Sen answers this puzzling question by interrogating the nature of Hamas’ presence in Gaza. He concludes that while Hamas is a militant movement engaged in anti-colonial struggle, it has also built governance structures and institutions, resembling postcolonial statecraft. Nevertheless, for Sen, it is not either/or: he cautiously frames the coexistence between anticolonialism and postcolonialism within the long and complex path toward liberation.

Such an argument is unusual. Postcolonialism is known to be, if not irrelevant then at least peripheral, to the field of Palestine studies, and Palestine continues to be insignificant to postcolonial studies. Postcolonialism, according to Sen, is associated with the lasting legacy of the Oslo Accords which “triggered the Palestinian long moment of liberation in the era of settler colonial rule.” But what Sen seems to be calling “postcolonialism” means the contrary for others; that is, the Oslo-led emergence of governance structures in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has rather been instrumental to the reorganization of the Israeli settler-colonial order. In other words, these governance structures have indeed deepened the colonization of Palestine by other means: it offered Israel indirect and effective mechanisms to outsource its colonial rule while instituting the fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement, thus pushing the Palestinians further away from the postcolonial moment. My intervention is concerned with the main legacy of Oslo: the Ramallah-based PA. It is somewhat complementary to that of Sen’s examination of the legacy of the Oslo accords, while also problematizing the postcolonial conception that accompanied the process. Rather, what ostensibly appears as postcolonial is in fact deep-rooted in Israel’s strategic design for the Palestinians.

My background as a Palestinian who experienced the deepening of Israeli settler-colonialism after Oslo, and through my research on the transformation of Palestinian national movement, have equipped me with a highly critical stance toward Oslo-induced conceptual traps such as “peace process” and “state-building.” My contribution to the forum starts from the conviction that the Oslo process and its associated institutions, regardless of the nationalist rhetoric, hold no trace of postcolonialism. Instead, these institutions serve as a pillar for stabilizing the Israeli colonial regime.

Oslo as a recipe for surrender

The PA’s relationship with Israel, which was widely marketed as “partnership for peace,” has gone beyond diplomacy and pragmatism to become an effective extension of Israel’s colonial apparatus of control. Indeed, Palestinians have increasingly come to despise the Fatah-led PA for its forfeiture of the Palestinian liberation struggle: It has brought the Palestinian quest for self-determination into disrepute; it has reduced the once vigorous national liberation movement to corrupt and authoritarian rule in the service of Israeli hegemony; it has inflicted deep divisions in Palestinian politics and society; it has marginalized and cast significant doubt on the question of Palestine on the regional and global stages; and it continues to actively collaborate with Israel in various security operations, with no sign of abating.

As Sen’s work confirms, the reality on the ground thus invalidates the conventional story that the Oslo Accords were intended to produce a two-state solution to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Instead, the accords affirm the long-held critique among Palestinians that the Oslo framework constitutes an advanced stage of Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise, one that has manipulated peace to restructure its apparatus of control and domination. In fact, the PA was formed precisely to facilitate this process, especially in the spheres of security and population control. In other words, the Oslo framework has instituted the asymmetric power dynamic between the PA and Israel in the form of an indefinite status quo where Israeli colonization continues unabated, and where the PA serves to suppress any meaningful sociopolitical change in occupied Palestinian territories.

In light of this understanding, there is a need to re-examine the PA and reconceptualize its very existence outside of the misleading “state-building” and “peace-building” frameworks. Contrary to Som’s postcolonial depiction of the Hamas-led governance structures in Gaza, but also complementary in its focus on the Ramallah-based PA, this essay argues that the PA should be understood as a form of indirect colonial rule, whereby a governing body is created and given certain administrative and legal powers while being dominated by another. That is, the PA’s structures and functions are specifically designed to stabilize Israel’s settler-colonial status quo. Within this framework, it argues further that a group of Palestinians, those mainly associated with the PA and its patron-client regime, were transformed into colonial subcontractors. The term “colonial subcontractor” denotes local agents who contractually accept to undertake certain tasks, primarily in the domains of population control and security, in the interest of perpetuating the dominant colonial agenda. Far predating the Oslo accords, Israeli ambitions for a local subcontractor to facilitate its colonial governmentality lies at the core of its strategic and long-term planning toward the 1967 occupied territories.

Israel’s search for a subcontractor

Since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel adopted a policy of “maximum land with minimum Palestinians” as the guiding principle for its colonial expansion. This would come to mark a shift from the state’s foundational myth of a “land without a people,” which the Zionists used as justification for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, for the purpose of securing Jewish demographic dominance over the land and its resources. However, the post-1967 reality differed in one fundamental equation: the interplay of demography and territory. Israel’s inability to duplicate the 1948 scenario in ethnically cleansing territories it occupied in 1967, primarily because of international and regional constraints, has obstructed its settler-colonial ambition, rendering it incomplete. This led Israel to implement complex methods of military occupation, including through a massive system of illegal settlement blocs, military checkpoints, and a concrete apartheid wall, to enforce legal and physical distinctions between the Palestinians and their lands.

Central to this logic was devising a governing entity, ostensibly enjoying a measure of autonomy or self-rule, that would be administered by a local subcontractor who manages and polices the population under Israeli supervision. Despite some minor differences, almost all Israeli plans that emerged since 1967 contained a set of common principles that informed its indirect rule strategy: (1) it would keep the Palestinians confined within fragmented and de-territorialized enclaves; (2) these enclaves would be deprived of basic conditions to form meaningful polities; (3) they would be dependent on Israel for socioeconomic survival; and (4) they would be governed by compliant leaders whose limited responsibilities would be delegated by Israel.

In the immediate aftermath of 1967, the Israeli government discussed two plans that aimed to define the future trajectory of the lands it occupied and their inhabitants. These are the Allon Plan, designed by Israeli Minister of Agriculture in 1967, Yigal Allon, and the Open Bridges policy, presented by Moshe Dayan, Israeli Minister of Defense at the time. While the plans seemed to offer different visions, they agreed on two things: the strategic objective of including the land and excluding the Palestinian population and the use of intermediaries to oversee the Palestinians and police them.

In Allon’s view, the plan was specifically designed “to ensure the fusion of the vision of Greater Israel from the strategic viewpoint with a Jewish state from a demographic viewpoint” (as quoted in Tsur, 1982, 85). Allon provided the practical grounds for consolidating Israel’s settler-colonial governance in the occupied Palestinian territory, one whose effects and ramifications would endure throughout the subsequent decades. His plan proposed granting autonomous status to three separate enclaves in populous areas in the West Bank. The rest of the West Bank, accounting for over 40% of the Palestinian territory, would be used for building settlements and military facilities under Israel’s sovereignty. Allon denied the existence of a distinctive Palestinian national identity and opposed promoting self-rule by a Palestinian subcontractor. Rather, he introduced the so-called “Jordanian Option,” which would entrust Jordan with the role of subcontractor in overseeing Palestinian civil affairs and policing the enclaves.

Dayan’s Open Bridges policy was intended to achieve the same objective: “to leave the Arabs alone as much as possible while sustaining a Jewish presence and military control in the area” (Harvey Sicherman 2019, 102). However, the Open Bridges policy differed, as a strategy of counterinsurgency that sought to penetrate Palestinian civil society and reorient the structure of local power for Israeli ends. Unlike the Allon Plan, which sought to directly involve Jordan in the colonial arrangement, Dayan’s approach focused on promoting the local power of traditional Palestinian leadership whose authority and legitimacy had been confirmed during the period of Jordanian rule in the West Bank (1948–1967). Dayan’s preference did not only stem from the pragmatism of the traditional leadership, which often maintained cooperative relations with the Israeli regime, but also because it was opposed to the emergent Palestinian national leadership at the time: the PLO. In conformity with the Open Bridges policy, the Israeli Military Governate initiated a series of secret talks with traditional Palestinian leaders for a potential political settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory. However, Dayan’s attempt to deploy these leaders as subcontractors largely failed, mainly because of the rising influence of PLO nationalists, who ultimately managed to build a solid narrative of national struggle and overturned the traditional leadership.

Another plan to devise a compliant Palestinian authority administered by local subcontractors emerged as part of the “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” during the 1978 Camp David talks between Israel and Egypt. Former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, proposed the formation of a “self-governing administrative council” comprised of 11 local subcontractors who would implement the instructions of the Military Governorate. The Israeli government moved to impose the autonomy infrastructure by recruiting local subcontractors through the establishment of the Village Leagues, a network of local collaborators in remote Palestinian rural areas that were home to conservative and reactionary residents steeped in the tribal patronage system (Tamari 1983). Israel provided members of the leagues with arms, financial support, means of communications, and extra-legal powers to enforce the leagues’ authority. However, Israel’s investment in these counter-insurgent interventions had ultimately failed in the face of Palestinian resistance.

Yet, in 1993, the Oslo accords delivered to Israel a highly sophisticated form of indirect rule, one that fundamentally relies on a prominent segment of what was once anti-colonial liberation movement.

The Ironies of Oslo

In late December 2021, PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, visited the house of Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz. The significance of the meeting stems from two reasons. First, the meeting was held after a decade of the Israeli government’s refusal to directly engage with the PA presidency despite the latter’s praised efforts at accommodating Israeli security needs. The Israeli government does not perceive PA officials as counterparts worth dealing with on an equal footing, but as functionaries running an administrative body tasked with limited security and civilian roles. Israeli authorities thus limit communication with the PA to the Israeli military coordinator in the West Bank, whose headquarters are located a few kilometers from Abbas’ presidential complex in Ramallah. Second, the meeting took place against the backdrop of deepening financial and political crises in the PA’s leadership, which is most clearly manifested in ongoing popular Palestinian mobilization against the PA, a matter that alarms Israel given its security priorities in the West Bank. Moreover, the PA’s legitimacy has been in question ever since its establishment, and it faces internal challenges with its increased violent repression of activists and critical voices, as well as its intensified security coordination with Israel. The PA’s financial deficit also limits its ability to pay salaries to civil and security employees, which may hinder its internal stability and security performance. Accordingly, Gantz announced a series of measures that aimed at empowering the PA, including the payment of NIS 100 million and providing hundreds of VIP passes to PA officials and associated businesspeople to enter Israel and facilitate their business operations.

Three ironies stem from the engagement of the PLO, and then the PA, in the 1993 Oslo Accords. The first is that Oslo allowed Israel to repackage and combine central facets of its strategies for indirect rule since it occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza in 1967. The second irony is that Israel’s success in devising a sophisticated system of indirect rule was achieved neither through local collaborators nor the traditional elite, but rather through the consent and complicity of the dominant PLO leadership, which was meant to be anti-colonial and revolutionary. The third irony is that, while this leadership had for decades mobilized its constituents against previous Israeli plans, it ultimately accepted an arrangement that is inferior to what it had previously been offered. As former PLO negotiator and PA Foreign Affairs Minister, Nasser AlKidwa, admitted: “the provisions of the [Oslo] accords fell short, even in comparison with the Framework for Peace in the Middle East which stipulated full autonomy, and not arrangements for self-government” (Al-Kidwa 2019).

The Oslo compromise thus signaled a seemingly unprecedented event in the history of anti-colonial struggle. The decision of the PLO leadership to embark on the illusion of peace and state-building under ongoing settler colonialism precluded critical stages in the national liberation trajectory, most notably decolonization. In Sen’s (2020) words, this effectively introduced “postcoloniality into a settler colonial condition” (p. 114), a peculiar reality that has no historical precedence. Obscured by the prospects of what is advertised as a “peace process,” the PLO leadership provided substantial concessions to affirm the transition from an anti-colonial struggle to a state-building imperative, most importantly by delegitimizing armed struggle as a means for Palestinian liberation (Sen 2020, 117). This was accompanied by the formation of the PA as the only legitimate reference to Palestinian politics, which subsequently excluded the PLO as the organizational umbrella of the Palestinian national movement (Bishara 2022).

As the PA abandoned essential tasks integral to the liberation struggle and embraced the Oslo arrangement in the context of ongoing colonization, it achieved neither. Instead, the PA found itself entangled in an indefinite status quo characterized by the absence of preconditions for a meaningful Palestinian polity, highly fragmented territorial and social bases that are completely besieged by Israel, and the lack of critical economic resources. Instead of resisting such a suffocating reality, not least by breaking with the Oslo trajectory, the PA continues to maintain solid collaboration channels with the Israeli authorities, including in the political, economic, security, and civil realms, all of which are subjected to Israeli conditions. In effect, the PA became the structural and institutional pillar for Israel’s long-desired subcontracting regime.

While the idea behind the creation of the PA resembles the colonial logic of indirect rule, it also differs in two important aspects. First, indirect rule in the Palestinian context is not intended as a final settlement to Israel’s colonial order. Rather, it is devised as a slow and eliminatory mechanism to seize land and resources, while simultaneously creating the conditions for the gradual and complete transfer of Palestinians out of historical Palestine. A cornerstone of Israeli policy, transfer implies complex measures that aim to overwhelm Palestinians with unbearable political, socioeconomic, legal, and psychological pressures to drive them off their lands, whether forcibly or voluntarily (Masalha 1992). Certainly, Israel does not publicize its transfer agenda, but through its coordination with the PA, the latter has effectively incorporated many of these mechanisms in its rule, including repressive security practices, exclusion from political participation, and the creation of unlivable socioeconomic conditions. While the PA is not invested in transferring the Palestinians from Palestine, as Israel’s subcontractor, its repressive practices effectively fulfill Israel’s transfer agenda. Second, whereas past forms of indirect rule were primarily facilitated by the consent of the traditional elite (tribal or religious authorities) (Mamdani 2012), the PA is distinct in that the ruling elite was once part of the liberation movement. This major difference has hampered our understanding of the PA as a colonial subcontractor, and its analogies to earlier forms of indirect colonial rule. Paradoxically, it has also resulted in a more powerfully, pervasive system. It legitimized the PA by portraying it as a continuation of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle through diplomacy and negotiations (Abdel Razek 2021).

Third, the PA’s institutional set-up is structured on modern legal and bureaucratic apparatuses and neo-patrimonial networks. This was made possible by the involvement of the international peacebuilding industry and by the flow of international aid and technical assistance by donor agencies and international organizations (Dana 2020). Israel benefited largely from this arrangement because the financial burden of its settler-colonial enterprise was transferred to external parties who have a vested interest in maintaining the very “stability” from which Israel profits. Accordingly, the PA pursued policies that coexisted with, rather than opposed to, Israel’s settler-colonial order.

Ultimately, the PA’s role as Israel’s subcontractor contradicts the basic prerequisite for anti-colonial struggle and decolonization, let alone postcolonialism. The primary mission of the PA, as legitimized by the Oslo framework, is to fulfill a contractual obligation to stabilize Israel’s settler-colonial order, including by violently repressing any movement seeking decolonization and national liberation. Postcolonialism in the Palestinian context is, in effect, non-existent.