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.

Kareem Rabie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Introduction  1
1. The Site  37
2. Developers and Designers  54
3. Image, Process, and Precedent  67
4. Public Urban Planning  81
5. Housing Shortage and National Priority  93
6. Public-Private Partnership  105
7. Buyers and Villagers  131
8. Critique, Capital, and the Landscape  149
9. Settlers and the Land  163
10. The Law, Mirroring, and the State  183
Conclusion  199
Acknowledgments  213
Notes  217
References  235
Index  255