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.