Introduction to the Symposium on Political Economy of Occupation,Colonialism,and Conflict in Palestine

The discipline of economics and the subdiscipline of political economy have managed to, for the most part, distance themselves from studying the issue of occupation, colonialism, and conflict in Palestine. This engagement is aimed to remedy that. We consider such an engagement crucial for two reasons.

On one hand, by way of this intervention, we are adding a speck to the brave and varied voices of resistance in the academic community to Israel’s violent onslaught on Palestine. ¹ The response has ranged from students occupying university spaces in asserting their right to protest and resist and calling for their universities to divest from the Israeli institutions complicit in genocide, to unions organizing and calling for action against scholasticide in Palestine, to students and academics organizing teach-outs to educate those around us about the historic forms of colonialism and the ongoing system of apartheid in Palestine. This has also led to a reckoning for many academics about how our own social positions might be implicated within global imperialism and continuing forms of colonial domination. It is not surprising that as radical political economists we consider this reckoning seriously. In the first issue of this journal, Weeks (1969) argues that economists are very much implicated within the status quo and are a part of the elite that gain from the way the system is structured, which makes it unsurprising that few utilize their tools to challenge it. In contrast, the mandate of radical political economics is to utilize and construct frameworks and tools geared toward systematically questioning and critiquing the contemporary economic structure, whose very dynamics are inherent with conditions for generating economic and social inequalities (Resnick and Wolff 1987). A failure to intervene in this current moment—which is probably the most destabilizing and politically charged one in the last few decades—would be a failure of the radical political economy project.

On the other hand, this intervention is directed internally towards our academy in order to chisel space for engaging with some crucial questions about processes of racialization, colonialism, and dispossession that have underpinned capitalism’s expansion—dimensions that many political economy frameworks based on Western imaginations of capitalism have often considered peripheral. This is not a new critique levied against such frameworks. Over time, many debates have emerged to expand or reformulate the frameworks to include these “peripheral” dimensions. These include incorporating forms of structural domination, such as processes of identity, including gender and race, as mutually co-constitutive of capitalist class exploitation (see, e.g., interventions from Marxist-feminist scholars such as Matthaei 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996; Federici 2004). Another important dimension has been to incorporate colonialism as a central feature of development of global capitalism, along with the contemporary role of imperialism in shaping economies today (Luxemburg (1913) 1951; Lenin 1937; Rodney [1972] 2018; Amin 1974; Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Recent calls have pushed this forward to identify the specific dynamics of postcolonial economies, marked by dispossession without proletarianization, that cannot simply be analyzed as underdeveloped versions of advanced capitalist economies of today, but rather characterize the very dynamics of postcolonial capitalism (Sanyal 2013). These debates have challenged the Western-centric approaches to political economy and have, in response, reformulated and further developed the radical political economy frameworks. This project takes on new urgency in the wake of this moment.

Not only is studying the political economy of Palestine and Israel in the context of global capitalism today crucial in its own right, global capitalism today also cannot be understood without locating Palestine centrally as a lens. From a theoretical perspective, it brings to focus some of the most important, both old and new, questions of radical political economy. Are imperial domination and colonialism, both their historic and new forms, as in Palestine, economically functional to the needs of capitalist expansion? What role do processes of racialization play for capitalism’s systematic reproduction and how is it restructured in different contexts? In a global economy where labor is in surplus, to what extent does capitalist expansion rely on cheap—here, Palestinian—labor, and to what extent is that labor redundant? To what extent are dispossession and exclusion of people from resources for capital’s access, as starkly evident in the recent violent onslaught on Gaza, embedded in capitalism’s expansionary dynamics? What are the new forms that imperialism and neo-colonialism are likely to take on in this global conjuncture? The Palestine moment raises several critical questions for the tenets underpinning other disciplines as well, for example, International Law; here we restrict ourselves to those of political economy.

In light of this, we posit this intervention as a step toward studying the political economy of Palestine and identify dimensions, specifically those emergent from postcolonial contexts and brought to a sharp condensation by the Palestine moment, that need to be part of our frameworks in order to make sense of contemporary capitalism. Until our perspectives can incorporate these realities, our theory will be weak and our praxis ill-informed, unaware of the key contradictions that mark our times. Radical political economics and other critical disciplines have generated some, although far from enough, analyses and debates on the political economy of the long Israeli occupation of Palestine and Israel’s imposition of a violent system of apartheid on Palestinians (Said 1979; Pappé 2007; Roy 2016; Khalidi 2020; see also the Nir and Wainwright [2018] special issue of Rethinking Marxism). We wish to take this analysis forward. The symposium includes invited contributions from scholars who can shed analytical light on the political economy of Palestine and the current state of affairs, within a broad understanding of the settler colonial project of Israel backed by the Western imperial powers.

Toward this aim, the first two articles focus on how the internal political economy of Palestine is shaped by the Israeli occupations and imperialist domination, backed by the United States. The symposium opens with Jennifer Olmsted’s contribution, “US Militarism and Sisyphian ‘Aid’ to Israel/Palestine,” which uses the Greek myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor for US aid policy towards Israel and Palestine, arguing that aid perpetuates rather than resolves structural inequalities. The article highlights two main contradictions embedded in US aid policy. On one hand, Israel, a militarized high-income country, is one of the largest recipients of US military aid. This aid benefits Israel disproportionately, with its military industry and US defense contractors profiting the most. These funds are often utilized to continue Israel’s violent onslaught on Palestine. On the other hand, the aid to Palestine is largely, ironically reactive, seeking to mitigate the damage caused by Israeli military aggression rather than fostering genuine economic development. Olmsted finds that US aid to Palestine is strongly correlated with Israeli attacks—when destruction increases, aid spikes in response. However, this aid does not address structural economic issues in Palestine. Additionally, much of this aid is “tied,” benefiting US contractors and Israeli companies rather than Palestinian development. Unlike US tied aid, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is a funding organization that directly benefits Palestinians, and plays a key role in Gaza, employing thirty thousand and providing essential services. The US defunding of UNRWA has weakened Palestinian institutions, increasing aid dependency while failing to address long-term needs. Olmsted argues that US aid to Israel and Palestine—like Sisyphus, who is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down—perpetuates a cycle of violence rather than resolving it. The article concludes with a call for a shift toward reparations instead of aid to address the historical and ongoing injustices suffered by Palestinians.

In the second contribution, Ibrahim Shikaki explores the complex nature of settler colonialism in “Functional Distribution of Income in Palestine: Relevance, Measurement, and Political Economy Implications.” He asks the important question of how Palestinian labor is situated in relation to Palestinian capital, but more critically in relation to Israeli capital, and how its bargaining power is shaped given that a significant portion of Palestinian labor is in a relationship of exploitation and dependency with Israeli capital (see also Shikaki 2021). As such, the exploration can be seen as a macroeconomic, big-picture continuation of earlier work that examines the role that cheap (and cheapened) Palestinian labor plays in benefiting Israeli enterprise through its participation in construction, services, subcontracting, and other “low-skilled” work (see for instance Samour 2020; Farsakh 2005). Given the absence of reliable national accounts data, Shikaki uses existing Economic Survey Series to estimate a compensation share, and the Labor Force Surveys to estimate a labor share using data on the number of wageworkers, average wage, and average working days per month. To account for the significant presence of the informal sector and self-employment, he imputes wage income for the self-employed using data on average wages. Extending Larudee’s (2012) key result that the disproportionate beneficiaries of Palestinian growth between 2006 and 2010 were not wage earners, Shikaki demonstrates over a longer period of time that the share of labor (critically including the self-employed and the income of workers in Israel) remains modest, while the share of income attributable to property increases.

Turning our attention from Palestine’s internal political economy to the Zionist settler-colonial project in which Palestine is located, the next two contributions unpack how the Zionist project is intertwined with the settler-colonial project. While Sachin Peddada in his contribution “Imperialist Intervention and the Invention of Israel” provides a rich literature review of the argument that Zionism and the Zionist project of Israel must be understood within a context of colonial ambition and imperialism, Amir Locker-Biletzki in “Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920–1956,” argues that ongoing colonization and expansionism were not incidental to Zionism, but rather a core part of its strategic ideology from its initiation.

Drawing on a wide variety of historical accounts and analyses, Peddada traces the manner in which Zionism emerged, as a direct consequence of both antisemitism—originating from a Napoleonic idea to forcibly relocate European Jews—but also due to the systematic interventions of the imperial powers of the Global North. He documents how, rather than simply being a culmination of Jewish aspirations, the Zionist project is, in fact, a product of a protracted and continued effort by western capital to expand its domain, which to this day survives with the continued backing of imperial powers. Viewed in this light, Peddada urges a reconsideration of the occupation of Palestinian territory as not simply a land dispute between two peoples but as a project of imperialist and capitalist expansion.

Reflecting on the intrinsically settler-colonial nature of the Zionist project of Israel, Amir Locker-Biletzki analyzes key writings of two early Zionist leaders, viewed through the lenses of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and of the settler-colonialism framework. Locker-Biletzki argues that Lenin’s placement of capital transfer to colonized nations at the center of his theory can provide a foundation for understanding Israel’s pre- and early-statehood development: It was a settler project, but one based on external finance capital, from both individual and institutional investors. The expansionism inherent in this was proposed quite straightforwardly by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion, couched first in terms of British sponsorship and later in the language of national security. Also explicitly inherent were the ongoing expulsion and/or subjugation of the Palestinians. Thus were the seeds of the Gaza and West Bank tragedies sown.

Traversing the initiation and evolution of the Zionist project, the final contribution, by Shir Hever, argues that this moment marks a beginning of its end. In “Shutdown Nation: The Political Economy of Self-Destruction,” he traces the transformation of Israel’s political economy from collectivist Zionism to neoliberal individualism. This transformation, he argues, has weakened its resilience. Israel’s initial strategic approach to colonialism has given way to right-wing populism, making it vulnerable to external shocks like the October 7th, 2023, attacks. The author describes how neoliberal reforms eroded social cohesion, leading to a shift from collectivist settler colonialism to an unsustainable neoliberal economy and a transition from strategic military planning to reckless populist policies, increasing Israel’s vulnerability. The article argues that Israel’s economic and military strategies are now short-termist, focused on military aggression, surveillance capitalism, and security exports rather than sustainable growth. The article suggests that Israel’s current trajectory is unsustainable, drawing comparisons to historical collapses of settler-colonial states like apartheid South Africa.

With these five contributions, our attempt is to open academic space for a generative conversation on the political economy of Palestine and Israel and global capitalism today. For long, it was uncritically accepted by much of the Global North, including the academia, that the Western powers have successfully established a rules-based international order, and that Israel was a brave and successful survival project for world Jewry, somehow exempt from the harsh realities of imperialism, apartheid, and racism that underpinned it. For much of the Global South, which has endured the brutal realities of legally-sanctioned slavery and colonialism, this perspective was never truly believable, even if reluctantly accepted by some. Today, however, this view is undergoing a widespread and turbulent reappraisal, even in the Global North. But a more sober assessment, to have any chance of leading to just, decolonized, long-term solutions, must incorporate a clear-headed and analytically-grounded understanding of the political-economic roots and realities of the long-unfolding Palestine-Israel tragedy. With this symposium, we hope to contribute in some small way to exactly that reckoning.