Ezra's Bookshelf

Mayors in the Middle

by Diana B. Greenwald · 283 pages · ~5 hrs

Foreign PolicyPolitics & GovernmentHistory

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Diana B. Greenwald, a political scientist at the City College of New York, develops a theory of indirect rule by examining the daily practice of local government in the occupied West Bank. After the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israel formally transferred limited civil functions in Palestinian population centers to the new Palestinian Authority, while retaining ultimate military and security control. The result is a complex hybrid regime in which Palestinian municipalities deliver services to their residents but operate within constraints set by an Israeli occupation that has not ended. Greenwald uses an original dataset of municipal performance across West Bank towns, combined with extensive fieldwork and interviews with Palestinian mayors, council members, and activists, to ask which kinds of local governments deliver more for their residents under these conditions. Her surprising finding is that municipalities led by Hamas-affiliated officials, despite—and partly because of—their fraught relationship with both the PA and Israel, often deliver more responsive local governance than Fatah-affiliated ones, in part because they cannot rely on patronage from the central authority and must instead build legitimacy through service. The book is a contribution both to the comparative literature on colonial and post-colonial governance and to the empirical study of contemporary Palestinian politics, written with care for the difficulty of doing rigorous social science under occupation.

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