What Is the Palestinian Economy?

Khalidi here expands the concept of de-development introduced by Roy (1999) to analyse Palestine’s political economy introducing the notion of dependency economy to further understand its relation with Israel and the restrictions imposed under the Paris Protocol and the Oslo agreement. His claim is that understanding Palestine’s economy under the framework of dependency economy, shines light on the economics of settler colonialism and capitalism not only active in Palestine but also in other areas of the world. The notion of dependency economy in fact entails a central economy the wealth of which fastly spread to the periphery and pushes advanced forms of consumption in an economy not able to receive it without impact. The central economy pushes it exceedances to the periphery, extracts labour force and uses the latter for the environmental and economic waste. For the division of Palestine in Area A, B, C, Khalidi outlines that there developed 5 different economies: the Ramallah one, the one in the rest of the West Bank, the one in East Jerusalem, the one in Gaza and the one in the Arab regions in Israel, remnants of the indigenous economy of Palestine. all these economies are peripheral to the Israeli one and the fact that this relation is becoming more and more structural, has increasingly problematic consequences as it risks to lock in structural deformation and fragmentation, facilitating Israeli, Arab and international extraction from the Palestinian Arab economy. For an accurate political economic analysis and to imagine the future of the Palestinian economy it is important to take into account the intertwinement of the Israeli and Palestinian economy, the structural power relationship and positioning among the two and the process of incorporation without integration Israel had been pushing forward for 25b years. This relationship follows the lines of the Zionist colonisation of the land, with a progressive Judaization of the land.