De-development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society Since Oslo

De-development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society Since Oslo

Sara Roy returns to the concept she first set out in her study of Gaza: de-development, the deliberate destruction of an economy’s capacity to produce, to change its structure and to reform, so that it cannot develop at all, not even in a distorted way. Writing six years into the Oslo process, she argues that the period since the agreement has brought a marked decline in Palestinian economic life and has sped up the de-development process.

Roy identifies closure, introduced in 1993, as the defining economic feature of the post-Oslo period. Together with the permit regime, restrictions on movement between Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and Israeli control over land, water, borders and trade, it has produced enclavisation, physically separating the West Bank from Gaza. She shows how economic ties with Israel weakened, how the Palestinian labour market split into separate parts and how industry and agriculture increasingly produced only for small local markets, a pattern she calls economic autarky. She also describes how Israeli policy has held back the building of Palestinian institutions.

She concludes that the Oslo arrangements did not bring the promised peace dividend but institutionalised de-development, and that the prospects for sustained economic development are non-existent and will remain so as long as closure continues.

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