Whose autonomy? Conceptualising ‘colonial extraterritorial autonomy’ in the occupied Palestinian territories

Introduction

In recent years, the settler-colonial turn in the studies of the ‘Palestinian–Israeli conflict’ has defied the conventional analytical frameworks that portray the conflict from the lens of symmetrical power relations. Israel is identified as a settler-colonial formation, in ideology and practice, because it combines policies of territorial expansion and the elimination of the natives. This is evidenced in Israel’s founding myth of the ‘land without the people’ that guided the Zionist movement in the pre-1948 era as well as its operational logic of ‘maximum land with minimum Palestinians’ that dominated Israel’s post-1967 strategies towards the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). Yet, these studies acknowledge the distinctive features of Israel’s settler-colonial formation, largely attributable to the belated nature of Zionism – the ideological underpinning of the Israeli state – which was launched in the late 19th century and was institutionalised in the form of the Israeli state in 1948 that continued the colonisation of Palestine to date (Bishara, 2022; Shafir, 2016). Embarking on settler-colonial ventures in the age of decolonisation and international law has restricted the eliminative logic; the core policy of classical settler-colonialism. Under these temporal pressures, Israel had to replace traditional settler-colonial strategies with alternative techniques to accomplish its goals.

The interplay of territory and demography has consistently shaped Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians. From a Zionist perspective, the Palestinian population living in the areas from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea constitutes a demographic threat to the Jewish ethnoreligious character of the Israeli state. For this reason, Israel has systemically sought to neutralise its demographic burden and to secure Jewish hegemony over these territories. This process has undergone two key phases. In its first phase, Zionist colonisation established itself through the violent depopulation of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages in 1948, transforming the remaining Palestinian people into an involuntary minority subjugated to Israel’s discriminatory legal regime. The second phase was marked by the colonisation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem after the Arab–Israeli War in 1967. In addition to international opposition to the occupation, Israel’s hasty takeover of these territories was not part of a pre-orchestrated plan to replicate the 1948 elimination scenario (Dana and Jarbawi, 2017). As a result, Israel encountered a Palestinian population density that rendered its settler-colonial project incomplete and trouble-ridden.

To counter this dilemma, Israeli strategists embarked on a variety of complex methods to create a legal and physical distinction between the land and the Palestinians living on it; that is to include the land and exclude the population (Zureik, 2016). Chief among these methods was the notion of ‘Palestinian autonomy’ which developed over time and became a keyword in Israel’s perception of ‘peace’ to settle the Palestinian question (Dana, 2021).

Far predating the Oslo process and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994, the vision of Palestinian autonomy has predominated Israeli political thought, since the aftermath of the 1967 occupation, enjoying quasi-consensus across its political spectrum, albeit with competing views regarding secondary details. Common to all the different perspectives on Palestinian autonomy are a number of conditions: it should be spatially limited, demographically dense, institutionally fragile, and able to administer the life conditions imposed by Israel.

However, this autonomy vision does not resemble any other existing models of autonomy implemented around the world today. Although a small number of studies have cast doubt on the relevancy of autonomy in the Palestinian context, most studies have taken the notion of autonomy for granted. As such, the notion remains understudied, and lacks a proper comparative explanation despite its centrality to Israel’s settler-colonial planning. The dearth of research in this area could be attributed to the political and legal ‘grey zone’ created by the 1993 Oslo Accords, which did not only legitimise a repressive autonomy framework under the banner of peacebuilding, but also ‘perfectly coincided with the long-term Israeli goal of controlling as much territory as possible without having to assert full sovereignty over it’ (Levine, 2016: 15).

This article challenges three widespread misconceptions concerning the notion of Palestinian autonomy. First, the conventional wisdom that the Palestinian autonomy is a relatively recent construct initiated by the Oslo process and exemplified by the creation of the PA in 1994. Such an understanding is ahistorical because it disregards decades of Israeli plans to settle the Palestinian question on the basis of limited autonomy. Second are the rare attempts to question the relevancy of political autonomy in the context of ongoing Israeli colonisation of the oPt. While a great deal has been written on the question of autonomy, mostly from a pro-Israeli perspective, such an account remained largely unchallenged. Third is the colonial manipulation of the very meaning of the contemporary political autonomy, which, despite its practical varieties, essentially implies rejection of paternalism and coercion and the accommodation of rights within a national polity.

To bridge this conceptual gap, this study argues that existing theories of political autonomy cannot sufficiently and accurately describe the Palestinian context. It therefore proposes a new term, Colonial Extraterritorial Autonomy (CETA), to properly address the Palestinian experience of political autonomy under the Israeli rule. We then go on to draw a connection between Israeli strategies that either implicitly or explicitly used the autonomy solution, focussing on the Alon Plan, the Open Bridges, Begin’s autonomy plan, the Villages Leagues, and the Civil Administration. Finally, we discuss how Israel reproduced these autonomy formulas under the pretext of ‘peace’ as evidenced in the creation of the PA autonomy and the complicity of Palestinian leadership in this arrangement.

The limitations of existing interpretations of political autonomy

Political autonomy can be broadly defined as the capacity of an entity or group to enjoy a degree of self-rule within a national polity. However, academic debates have generally pointed to the complexity of political autonomy in theory and practice. As Pickerill and Chatterton (2006: 732) note, political autonomy has been ‘moveable, historically specific, highly contextual and contested and used to pursue a variety of ends and ideologies’. This allows for reinterpreting political autonomy, its trajectories, and its manifestations across different temporal and spatial contexts.

We identify two main contradictory interpretations of political autonomy. The first is based on ‘internal self-determination’ and is largely associated with the minority question within the nation-state (Moore, 2003). In this context, autonomy is proposed as a means of conflict resolution to secure a compromise between the minority community’s claims to self-determination and the nation-state’s territorial integrity through power-sharing arrangements (Gagnon and Keating, 2012; Heraclides, 1990; Welhengama, 2017).

Internal self-determination is often applied in two standard forms:

The second interpretation of political autonomy is associated with colonial/settler-colonial legacies, which evolved from the system of indirect colonial rule as a practice of governing the indigenous population. This colonial-sponsored autonomy constitutes a pillar of settler-colonial state formation (Ford and Rowse, 2013). Overall, this autonomy serves as a glass ceiling for indigenous ambitions for self-determination, either by utilising local leaders and institutions to deter anti-colonial rebellion, or by excluding the colonised subjects from meaningful political representation in the settler-dominated state’s institutions.

Based on Patrick Wolfe’s (1999: 163) conclusion that settler colonialism is ‘a structure and not an event’, debates over the question of indigenous self-determination within a historically settler-colonial context have yet to be resolved. This is particularly evident in the indigenous communities in European settler states in North America, Australia, and New Zeeland, where processes of recognition and reconciliation between the state and the indigenous collectives produced broader indigenous autonomous spaces. Some scholars argue that indigenous self-governance came to terms with settler sovereignty, and that indigenous communities struggle to articulate their indigeneity through a combination of settler citizenship and the demand for greater autonomy (Ford and Rowse, 2013). Others contend that in the absence of a decolonisation framework, indigenous autonomous spaces tend to promote ‘the domestication of indigenous sovereignties for the benefit of the settler state’ (Veracini, 2011: 8).

In apartheid South Africa, for example, autonomy was enforced in the form of black self-rule, or what became known as Bantustans. Bantustans served as a mechanism to accommodate white settlers’ ideological supremacy of ‘separateness’ from the indigenous black population along racial, legal, economic, and political lines. Whereas Bantustans varied in legal and governance status between different degrees of autonomy and fully ‘independent states’, all were ruled by a subservient local elite who collaborated with the apartheid regime on matters of security and taxation. To exclude Bantustans’ residents from the white-dominated political system, the apartheid regime stripped the indigenous black population of their South African citizenship in the 1970s and forced them to acquire the Bantustans’ nationality. Nevertheless, with the end of apartheid in 1994, the Bantustans were dissolved, and the indigenous black population regained their South African citizenship.

What both interpretations of political autonomy share is that the implementation of autonomy occurs within the existing state’s territorial jurisdiction, and the target populations are typically citizens. Nonetheless, there are sharp contradictions between the two. Whereas the first is inclusionary and tends to empower the minority through autonomous institutions, the second is a settler-colonial design that aims to exclude the colonised subjects and deny them the right to self-determination. Moreover, the first is implemented voluntarily and largely based on a consensual framework, while the second is coercively enforced, though it relies on the acquiescent local elite to rule on behalf of the colonial authorities. Ultimately, however, neither interpretation can be applied to the oPt.

Defining CETA

Scholars have increasingly come to acknowledge the structural similarities between Israeli policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Similarities include issues such as settler-colonial state formation, the Bantustanization of the West Bank and Gaza, and the institutionalised segregation between the settlers (white Afrikaners/Israeli Jews) and the indigenous population (black Africans/Palestinian Arabs) (Pappé, 2015). However, there are key differences that must be addressed in this comparison concerning the colonial state’s legal sovereignty over the territories and the citizenship of the colonised subjects.

Bantustans, either independent or autonomous entities, were originally integral regions to South Africa’s sovereignty, and its black population were citizens under state law before they were deprived of nationality rights on the basis of race. By contrast, the oPt, comprising the West Bank and Gaza, is classified by international law as occupied territory that has not been formally annexed by Israel. Moreover, unlike South Africa, the Israeli state has not conferred citizenship on the Palestinian population, and in fact, has denaturalised and revoked the residency rights of thousands of Palestinians.

As affirmed by several UN resolutions and the official position of the international community, Israel is an occupying power that has illegally occupied the oPt since 1967. Although some literature tends to use the term ‘sovereignty’ in reference to Israel’s exclusive control over the oPt, it is in all but name and not indicative of the legality of Israeli authority over the oPt. In other words, the reality that Israel does not hold internationally recognised sovereignty over the oPt, coupled with the exclusion of the Palestinians from Israeli citizenship, is a key component to the peculiarity of the Palestinian autonomy status. It is because of these fundamental reasons that understanding Palestinian autonomy under Israeli rule must be reconceptualised.

To better address the unique case of Palestinian autonomy, we propose the term CETA to denote a peculiar form of colonial-sponsored self-governance that is exercised by the settler-colonial state outside its internationally recognised jurisdiction. It denotes a form of colonial governmentality imposed on a colonised population that has never been part of the settler-colonial state, and ‘in which power comes to be directed at the destruction and reconstruction of colonial space so as to produce . . . governing-effects on colonial conduct’ (Scott, 1999: 40). The inherent violent nature of CETA as a mode of colonial governmentality tends to pursue the settler-colonial logic of elimination by other means. These means include, for example, what Hanafi (2009: 107) terms ‘spacio-cide’; a process that ‘targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the “voluntary” transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live’. And further by eradicating the political national existence of the Palestinians, dubbed by Kimmerling as ‘politicide’ (Kimmerling, 2006).

Since 1967, Israel championed this form of governmentality as the most efficient strategy for achieving Jewish separation from Palestinians in what can be described as a ‘them there and us here’ approach (Shafir, 2017: 48). The approach has been accompanied by legal separation, one civil for Israeli settlers and the other military for the Palestinians. Despite separation and exclusion, Palestinian autonomy is designed to be structurally dependent on Israel while not being part of it. Such dependency serves as a form of disciplinary power and political control, whereby the local ruling elite’s privileges, its institutions, and the associated patron–client networks develop vested interests in perpetuating the status quo. CETA is therefore carefully designed to obscure the struggle for decolonisation and self-determination.

Israeli policy makers developed CETA through two fundamental processes:

While it may be interpreted as an indirect form of colonial rule, CETA represents a unique state of affairs in modern history, one that is epistemologically based on reorganising the mode of colonial violence and domination along demographic, territorial, legal, and administrative lines, underpinned by several features:

It is worth mentioning that Israel excluded East Jerusalem from the autonomy plan and treated it differently. Immediately after the 1967 occupation, Israel annexed the city and adjoining territories, enforced Israeli civil laws on discriminatory basis, expanded Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries to include the eastern section of the city, and besieged Palestinian neighbourhoods with Jewish-only settlements. Israel affirmed the annexation by passing a law in 1980 declaring ‘United Jerusalem’ the capital of Israel. Despite international Opposition to the illegality of the move, Israel went as far as to Judaise the city, transforming its socio-economic, demographic, and physical realities in favour of the Jewish exclusivity. Palestinian Jerusalemites were neither granted Israeli citizenship nor treated as the rest of the 1967 occupied territories’ population. Rather, Israel classified them as ‘residents’ whose lives is defined by a matrix of discriminatory laws, including the revocation of residency status which results in the forcible transfer of individuals and families to areas under CETA’s jurisdiction

The evolution and development of CETA (1967–1993)

Israel’s victory in its ‘war of choice’ in 1967, and the subsequent occupation of the oPt was marked by the rapid predominance of the maximalist claim of a ‘Greater Israel’ across the Israeli political spectrum (Masalha, 2000). This ideological stance was expressed under different pretexts. Where the Labour Party and the Zionist left subscribed to security considerations to justify their tightening grip on the oPt, the rising right-wing movements such as the Movement for Greater Israel and the Likud Party embraced a religious-messianic narrative for their annexation of the area. Both the Zionist left and right implemented their visions simultaneously, combining the Judaisation of the territories through the construction of Jewish settlements with fully fledged military occupation and restrictive security conditions. Either way, both approaches were mutually inclusive and led to dual separations. The first was the judicial and legal separation between the Palestinians and their land, and the second was the racial and institutional separation between Palestinians and Jews (Lentin, 2020; Lloyd, 2012).

Central to the dual separation process is the idea of Palestinian autonomy, which emerged immediately after the 1967 occupation, and characterised two major plans that informed Israel’s policy during the first decade (1967–1977). The first is represented by the Allon Plan, designed by the then Minister of Labour Yigal Allon, and originally titled ‘The Future of the Territories and of the Refugees’. The Allon Plan left a substantial imprint on Israel’s strategic planning in terms of security, borders, Jewish settlements, overall territorial divisions, and the remapping of the oPt. Although the Allon Plan was not officially approved by the government at the time, its logic has influenced subsequent Israeli policies, including the Oslo-induced territorial division of the oPt (Achcar, 2011; Anziska, 2018).

The Allon Plan drew heavily on the long-held Zionist doctrine of ‘maximum territory for Israel with a minimum number of Arabs’, as expressed in Allon’s own words (quoted in Gordon, 2008: 49). Elsewhere, Allon affirmed that his plan was designed ‘to ensure the fusion of the vision of Greater Israel from the strategic viewpoint with a Jewish state from a demographic viewpoint’ (quoted in Kemp, 1999: 86).

Allon’s strategic viewpoint primarily projected an extensive geographical reordering of the oPt, which encouraged the annexation of 40% of the West Bank considered to be of strategic significance, in terms of both security (e.g. defensible borders) and economy (arable lands with abundant natural resources). These areas included the Jordan Valley along the borders with Jordan and the Dead Sea, large areas around Jerusalem, and within and around Hebron, leaving the town of Jericho as the only corridor for Palestinians to interact with the outside world through Jordan (Shlaim, 2015: 758-759). These areas would be Judaised through the ‘irreversible’ facts on the ground: Jewish settlements, military bases, and economic projects.

This geographical division complemented Allon’s demographic viewpoint. First, the areas to be annexed were thinly populated. To dispossess as many people as possible, Israel ethnically cleansed many villages along the eastern borders, the Jordan Valley, and several villages in Hebron after the 1967 War (Note by the UN Secretary-General, 1970). Second, densely populated towns were left enclaved, disconnected, and encircled by Israeli settlements and military structures. This would equip Israel with the legal justification to exclude Palestinians from Israeli citizenship to prevent Israel from turning into a binational polity (Shlaim, 2015: 756).

The initial version of the plan favoured granting the inhabitants semi-autonomous status under direct Israeli control. This option, however, was short-lived. In 1969, Allon proposed amendments to the plan to promote the ‘Jordanian Option’; it envisaged limited Palestinian autonomy under the monarchy’s sovereignty as the basis for a comprehensive peace agreement (Khalifa, 1981). Nevertheless, Allon promised to institute deep-seated Israeli control over the autonomy. In 1976, he affirmed that the autonomy would be conditioned by ‘absolute Israeli control’ and ‘effective demilitarization’. By adopting the ‘Jordanian option’, Allon intended to negate the Palestinian national identity, which he referred to as a ‘problem’ that should ‘find its expression in a single Jordanian-Palestinian state’ (Allon, 1976).

The second plan, known as ‘Open Bridges’, was spearheaded by Moshe Dayan, the then Israeli Minister of Defense during the 1967 War. It acted as a counterinsurgency strategy that aimed to promote pacification and encourage self-management. Although Dayan did not explicitly use the term ‘autonomy’, his plan was primarily designed to institute the infrastructure of self-rule. Dayan’s plan intended ‘to leave the Arabs alone as much as possible while sustaining a Jewish presence and military control in the area’ (Sicherman, 2019: 102). Bishara notes that the implicit objective of Open Bridges was to impose a ‘functional compromise’ wherein the limited autonomy administered by the traditional elite would satisfy the Israeli need for security and population management (Bishara, 2022).

Open Bridges operated on two fundamental levels: the economy and local governance. The economic level was reflected in a set of policies with dual objectives. On one hand, it aimed to pacify the population by supporting limited economic projects directly linked to the Israeli economy. On the other hand, the policy planted the seeds of Palestinian economic dependency by the capture of its natural resources, transforming the Palestinian peasants into an unskilled labour force in the Israeli marketplace and turning Palestinian businesses into subcontractors of Israeli companies (Abed, 1988). In terms of governance, Open Bridges promoted the local authority of the traditional elite and institutions that governed Palestinian society during the Jordanian rule (1948–1967) (Shafir, 2017: 85). First, this elite would facilitate the ‘Jordanian Option’, by fostering a Jordanian influence on the Palestinian society. Second, the traditional elite was politically moderate and would accommodate much of the Israeli requirements for population management and stability (Yehuda, 1999: 141). Third, the traditional elite was positioned as a central force in Israel’s effort to deter the rising power of the nationalist leadership affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

By the end of the first decade of Israel’s occupation, Open Bridges had resulted in two contrasting outcomes. It had created a dependency on the Israeli economy and consolidated control over the Palestinian way of life; however, the accompanying social and class changes significantly weakened the traditional elite that Israel had hoped to empower vis-à-vis the PLO leadership. The erosion of the traditional elite power base is attributable to Israel’s policy of land confiscation. It turned a large segment of the elite’s constituents, mainly the peasants, into proletariats within the Israeli marketplace (Hilal, 1977). As a result, the power over the population shifted in favour of the PLO nationalists.

The failure of Open Bridges to counterbalance the PLO was evidenced in the results of the 1976 municipal elections held in the oPt. Israel hoped that the elections would empower the traditional elite through whom Israel could legitimise the autonomy solution either within the framework of the ‘Jordanian Option’ or under direct Israeli rule (Giacaman, 2014: 14). However, the victory of the pro-PLO representatives in most municipal councils constituted a source of concern to Israeli policymakers. The elected mayors were faced with a series of repressive measures such as expulsion, imprisonment, and removal from office. By 1982, Israel had replaced all elected mayors with military officers.

With the Likud’s victory in the 1977 public elections, the autonomy vision had become a cornerstone policy for political settlement. In a speech to the Knesset in December 1977, the then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin proposed the idea of an ‘administrative autonomy’ that would oversee civil matters in the Palestinian-populated areas. Begin’s proposal signalled the maturity of the autonomy vision and was presented as a part of the ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’ during the Camp David talks between Israel and Egypt in 1978. Unlike the previous ideas of Palestinian autonomy, Begin’s vision included concrete details about how it would be organised, function, and relate to Israel and its neighbouring countries. Overall, Begin’s autonomy plan was conditioned by three non-negotiable principles: first, it would assert the Jewish claim to sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza; second, enforce a ‘judicial separation of the people from the land’; and third, abolish any possibility for Palestinian sovereignty (Jensehaugen, 2020: 53).

Practically, the implementation of the autonomy plan was based on establishing a ‘self-governing administrative council’ comprising 11 elected members to administer social, cultural, and civil affairs without any executive and legislative powers. This council would undergo a transitional period of 5 years during which

negotiations [were to be] conducted among Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the elected representatives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza . . . to determine the final status of the West Bank and Gaza and its relationship with its neighbors and to conclude a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. (Framework for Peace in the Middle East, 1978)

The plan stipulated that Israel would be responsible for security and public order but called for the establishment of ‘a strong local police force . . ., which may include Jordanian citizens’. Israel would redeploy its military to the settlements and in other strategic positions around Palestinian towns. In essence, Israel would maintain control over the lands and the borders, while the Palestinians were to administer to their own civil and cultural affairs (Jensehaugen, 2020). Despite the seemingly gradual transfer of power to Palestinian autonomy in the context of the ‘Jordanian Option’, this autonomy would, in effect, be regulated by the Israeli Military Governorate. As revealed by the Washington Post in 1979, the Palestinian administrative council would ‘derive its authority solely from the Israeli government (. . .) and could be dissolved by Israel if it failed to adhere to the principles laid down in its charter’ (Claiborne, 1979).

In response, the PLO leadership rejected the autonomy plan because ‘it [was] carefully designed to serve Israel’s national interests and not satisfy the aspirations or realize the rights of the Palestinian people’ (Sayegh, 1979: 4). The non-collaborationist stance of the Palestinians drove Israel to embark on a policy change to handle the increasingly radicalised population. The policy change implied a hybrid form of direct and indirect governance approaches to redefine the leadership and socio-political order. This also had coincided with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which aimed to undercut the PLO relations with its constituents in the oPt to enable the imposition of autonomy upon the Palestinians (Levine, 2009: 48).

First, Israel sought to enforce compliance by appointing a new Palestinian leadership entrusted with certain civil and security matters. In 1979, Israel set up the federation of ‘Village Leagues’, comprising a network of local collaborationists who operated under the direction of the Military Governorate and later the Civil Administration. According to the Country United States Department of State (1983: 1165–1166), the Village Leagues aimed ‘to transfer patronage and authority from elected and established Palestinian nationalist leaders whom Israel objects to as being supporters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’. Moreover, by empowering the Village Leagues, Israel sought to legitimise its colonialism through a proxy governance that would set the foundation for a negotiated settlement based on Begin’s autonomy plan.

The Leagues networks originated in remote rural areas predominated by social conservativism, tribal and semi-feudal organisation of social power, and the prevalence of illiteracy and patronage (Tamari, 1983). To enforce the local authority of the Village Leagues, Israel exerted pressure on the heads of villages to collaborate with them; those who declined were forcefully removed and replaced by members of the Leagues (Litani, 1981: 175). Israel equipped the Village Leagues with extra-legal powers, provided them with arms, vehicles, means of communication, and licenced the publication of a newspaper that often reflected an Israeli viewpoint (Tamari, 1983). The Village Leagues primarily resorted to coercive means to enforce its authority on the population and, as documented by human rights groups waged frequent attacks against civilians and their properties (Al-Haq, 1983). Alongside the violent approach, the Leagues attempted to expand its patron–client system to incorporate the largest possible segment of the population into its network of beneficiaries. Israel supported this process by delegating basic social provisions to the Leagues, such as permits concerning travel, family reunions, construction, trade, and driving licences. The Leagues’ distributive power of social services was used to punish and reward the population based on their resistance or compliance.

In conjunction with the Village Leagues, Israel replaced the Military Governorate with the Israeli Civil Administration in 1981, which was tasked with ‘executing the autonomy plan’ (Gordon, 2008: 107). The idea of establishing the Civil Administration stemmed from what the Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon, perceived as a convenient way to transfer civil responsibilities to the Palestinian autonomy upon establishment. Although the characterisation of this governing body as ‘civil’ was meant to conceal the military nature of the Israeli occupation, the Civil Administration was in effect directed by the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the internal intelligence service, the Shen Bet. The Civil Administration was an attempt to ‘alter some of the methods of control in order to make them more effective’ (Gordon, 2008: 107). The new methods were defined by a set of coercive policies to regulate vital aspects of daily Palestinian life. In particular, the services provided by the Civil Administration were utilised as collective punishment measures against communities deemed non-compliant and involved in anti-colonial politics (Hunter, 1991: 146).

The First Palestinian Intifada (1987–1993) problematised the approach that Israel had taken to the oPt in the 1980s. The federation of the Village Leagues was formally dissolved in 1987 and the Civil Administration was delegitimised by the popular resistance tactics and civil disobedience. This accelerated the Israeli quest for a political compromise that would make a separation with the Palestinians realisable. By the early 1990s, new regional and global conditions drove Israel to reassess its approach to autonomy, especially by involving the PLO – its long-standing foe – as the main partner in the arrangement in what became known as the Oslo ‘peace’ process.

CETA under the ‘peace’ pretext

The Oslo Accords of 1993 signed between Israel and the PLO, contained clear guidelines for implementing the ‘Self-Government Authority’ or Palestinian autonomy. In this sense, the very substance of the Accords stipulated well-defined mechanisms to implement Israel’s long-standing vision of CETA in a way that had been inconceivable in previous decades. CETA was legitimised by the international community and international organisations and, most importantly, by the contractual involvement of the PLO in the arrangement. In doing so, the occupying power could devise autonomous structures in illegally conquered territories that do not fall under its sovereignty, while simultaneously legitimising the legal exclusion of the population from its citizenship system. Such legitimacy is further boosted by depicting the autonomy arrangement as a ‘peace process’, thus nurturing the illusion of PA autonomy as a vehicle for Palestinian statehood (Khalidi, 2020). Instead, ‘for the Jewish State, Palestinians came into existence through the peace process and could only exist within its ideological confines’ (Khoury, 2021: 62). With the colonisation proceeded apace, the ‘ideological confines’ facilitated Israeli territorial expansion and a contained Palestinian population in segregated, fragmented, and de-territorialised enclaves.

The Oslo Accords repackaged and combined key aspects of previous Israeli plans, intersecting perfectly with Israel’s logic of colonial governance, and transformed the direct military rule of Palestinian lives into an indirect rule system. This immediate and lasting outcome of the Oslo Accords was the establishment of the PA in 1994, which served as the institutional pillar of the autonomy. The Oslo Accords framework entailed the gradual transfer of certain administrative powers from the occupied authorities to the PA institutions in densely populated cities and towns.

A closer look into the Oslo Accords provisions suggests that it is merely a modified version of Begin’s autonomy plan. This conclusion has been affirmed by both Palestinian and Israeli figures who participated in the negotiations. According to Joel Singer, a key Israeli member in both the Camp David and the Oslo negotiating teams, the ‘arrangements contained in the Oslo Agreement are based on “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East”, a part of the 1978 Camp David Accords’ (Singer, 2019). This includes, for example, the establishment of an administrative council in Camp David replaced by the PA after Oslo, the 5-year transitional period, the formation of a local police force, and Israeli control of the borders. This comparison was also validated by the former PA Foreign Affairs Minister, Nasser Al-Kidwa, who further admitted that ‘the provisions of the accords fell short, even in comparison to the Framework for Peace in the Middle East which stipulated full autonomy, and not arrangements for self-government’ (Al-Kidwa, 2019).

If one aim of Begin’s autonomy plan was to undermine the Palestinian claim to sovereignty, the Oslo Accords actualised this intention by not only creating a fragile autonomy as an endgame to the Palestinian question, but also by subordinating the leaders of the Palestinian national movement to serve this purpose. This latter point makes the Oslo autonomy much more sophisticated and stable than what Begin envisaged. Where Begin proposed to form an ‘administrative council’ run by alternative leadership to exclude PLO affiliates – a matter that would be challenged by the lack of popular backing – the engagement of the PLO leadership has legitimised Israel’s CETA as a Palestinian ‘national project’.

By considering the central elements of the previous plans, it is possible to comprehend the subtle roots of the Oslo autonomy. The spatial aspect of the Oslo autonomy was informed by the Alon Plan’s territorial division of the West Bank. The Oslo Accords institutionalised the extensive reterritorialisation of the oPt along the very logic of ‘maximum land and minimum Palestinians’, thereby causing the deterritorialisation of the Palestinian space within which the autonomy was permitted while conceding the lion’s share of the land to Israel. This was made possible by the division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C. Israel was granted full control of over 60% of the land – known as Area C – where most of the settlements and natural resources are located. The PA autonomous zones constitute only 18% of the West Bank, mainly in densely populated areas, where it is allowed to exercise limited powers over civil and security affairs in coordination with the Israeli authorities. The Israeli militarily control Area B, or 22% of the territories encompassing Palestinian rural areas, leaving the PA with some administrative powers to manage the population’s civil affairs. Where the Alon Plan kept Israeli control of around 40% of the West Bank areas considered strategically significant for security and economic purposes, the Oslo territorial division provided Israel with legal and military control of Areas C and B, estimated to comprise 80% of the West Bank.

The Oslo territorial division accomplished two fundamental objectives of the Alon Plan. First, it facilitated the large-scale colonisation of the oPt. For instance, the number of settlers rose from 110,000, at the time of signing the Oslo Accords in 1993, to approximately 678, 000 across 170 settlement blocs and 146 outposts in the West Bank by 2021, including East Jerusalem (European Union, 2021). In the meantime, Israel institutionalised racial segregation where it applies its civil laws on Jewish settlers while governing the Palestinians directly through military orders and indirectly through the PA. This legal–racial segregation is bolstered by the physical separation between the Palestinian and Jewish settlers through myriad barriers such as bypass roads, checkpoints, the separation wall, and closed military zones. Moreover, this process is accompanied by the swallowing up of large swaths of the land, the incorporation of occupied East Jerusalem into the greater Jerusalem project, the division of Hebron, and the full colonisation of the Jordan Valley with its abundant natural resources. Second, the Oslo Accords enforced the ‘bantustanization’ of autonomous Palestinian cities and towns, rendering an independent polity impossible (Bishara, 2022). As both Areas C and B completely encircle the PA autonomous zones, Israel ensured a fragmented and de-terrorised Palestinian autonomy over isolated and scattered enclaves spatially detached from one another.

No less important are the mechanisms of control that were incorporated into the very fabric of the Oslo autonomy. This was particularly inspired by the pacification approach utilised by Open Bridges. However, unlike Open Bridges’ reliance on the Israeli state’s financial resources, the Oslo Accords secured significant resources through donors’ commitments to support the PA under the banner of peacebuilding. International aid has been instrumental to the pacification process in crucial ways: it mitigates the harmful consequences of Israel’s colonisation; it sustains the PA institutions; it provides salaries, social services, and humanitarian assistance to the population; and it supports the PA elite and its authoritarian and neo-patrimonial politics. Therefore, donors’ policies, whether intentional or not, have been consistent with the Israeli position of keeping in place weak institutions and a dependent economy in its perpetuation of the Oslo status quo. The complicity of donor in this arrangement is as being a form of counterinsurgency, whose goal is to support compliant actors who have vested interests in the stability of the autonomy arrangement (Turner, 2015).

The logic that directed the Civil Administration and the Village Leagues has also been reproduced to underpin the Oslo autonomy model. In this sense, the PA was designed to institutionalise the Israeli conditions in the civil and security sphere. Regarding the former, because the Civil Administration reflected Israel’s willingness to delegate day-to-day administrative and civil affairs to a locally entrusted entity, the PA has absorbed most of these functions. For example, the PA is structured on a steadily growing public sector to administer areas that have burdened the occupation’s budget, such as the health, education, social services, and employment. The cost of all these civilian matters has been transferred to international donors and the Israeli-controlled tax revenue, which subsequently structured the PA on a system of rentierism and rent-seeking (Tartir et al., 2021). This has doubled the pressure on the PA which in turn undercut its autonomous power to design and implement social and economic policies in accordance with national perceptions (Fraihat, 2022). In the field of education, for example, the Palestinian curriculum became subject to both the direct and indirect influence of Israel and international donors. Where Israel vetoes topics that focus on Palestinian identity and history and accuses them of inciting hatred or violence against Israel, the donors’ conditionality has forced the PA to adopt a liberal education curriculum as a prerequisite for further funding (Naser-Najjab, 2020).

In the security sphere, the Oslo Accords stipulated the formation of a ‘strong police force’ to enforce public order in PA zones. Indeed, the security dimension of the PA autonomy is a crucial pillar to the perpetuation of the status quo, without which the Israeli’s CETA in the oPt would inevitably encounter serious repercussion. As a key part of Begin’s autonomy plan, multiple PA security forces were formed and trained to monopolise violence, maintain the status quo, and ensure stability (Tartir, 2019). This stability is secured on both internal and external levels. On the internal level, the PA security system is the main guardian of the PA elite and its institutions. Given the authoritarian character of the PA, security forces play a major role in the suppression of dissent and protests in the PA controlled areas (El Kurd, 2019). Externally, the PA security force supplies Israel with an array of services that tend to accommodate Israeli security demands. This includes, for example, the exchange of information, detecting potential threats, arresting Palestinian militants, and disbanding armed forces. Despite the active role of the PA security in internal repression, Israeli forces routinely invade the PA ‘autonomous’ areas to conduct military operations, arresting and killing Palestinians, and demolishing homes and properties.

Conclusion

This article reconceptualised the meaning of Palestinian autonomy in the context of Israeli settler-colonialism. It shows how CETA is inherently aggressive, violent, and exclusionary mode of colonial governmentality. As it runs counter to the very meaning and expected functions of contemporary political autonomy, CETA serves as a glass ceiling to settler-colonial practices and policies while depriving the Palestinians of the basic rights to self-determination, let alone for their aspiration of national independence. In truth, the Israeli-designed CETA is arguably one of the most sophisticated methods of control ever invented by a colonial power. Accordingly, CETA must be employed in legal and policy circles to address the unique experience of Palestinians with political autonomy under Israeli colonial domination.

Even after instituting Palestinian autonomy after Oslo, competition among Israeli politicians to reproduce the Palestinian enclaves has never ceased. Recent years have seen new articulations on the Palestinian autonomy, from Netanyahu’s ‘autonomy-plus’ to Bennett’s ‘autonomy on steroids’, which invariably means old wine in a new bottle. Since Israeli planners believe that such an investment can secure sufficient levels to stabilise the colonisation process, especially because it serves as a deterring mechanism to organised and effective resistance, the unbearable humanitarian and political conditions it creates on the ground makes this form of governance unsustainable in the long run – a matter that might lead to a serious backlash against this oppressive system.