New book shows how the PA enriched an elite and normalized occupation

Mayssun Sukarieh
The Electronic Intifada
28 March 2012

"Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-Out of a Homeland explores the rise of a new Palestinian elite that works together with international organizations against the will of the majority of its compatriots.

The book’s author, Khalil Nakhleh, worked in the development sector as director of the Welfare Association (a Palestinian organization) for more than a decade, as well as a consultant on the expenditure of European Union aid. He witnessed first-hand the marriage of the business class and the international aid organizations in Palestine.

Thus, the book is a participant’s observation of how the coalition of Palestinian capitalists (the political and economic elite which benefited from the Oslo accords), the newly-emerging Palestinian nongovernmental organizations and the transnational aid agencies work together — while under occupation — for the myth of “economic development.”

Nakhleh suggests that this coalition is not consciously pre-planned, but that “the longer the current status quo — which is built on the internalized and marketed premise that there is no contradiction between being under occupation and economic development — is accepted and internalized, the more the tripartite coalition becomes purposeful and intentional”(xxi)......"