Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited

In 2008 Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference Palestine is throwing a party and the whole world is invited. In this book Kareem Rabie examines how the conference and Fayyad's rhetoric represented a wider shift in economic and political practice in ways that oriented state-scale Palestinian politics toward neoliberal globalization rather than a diplomatic two-state solution. Rabie demonstrates that private firms international aid organizations and the Palestinian government in the West Bank focused on large-scale private housing development in an effort toward state-scale economic stability and market building. This approach reflected the belief that a thriving private economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state. Yet as Rabie contends these investment-based policies have maintained the status quo of occupation and Palestine's subordinate and suspended political and economic relationship with Israel.