During Oslo, a Palestinian industrial estates scheme sponsored by international donors was marketed as a template for the occupied territories' integration into global markets. This article traces the project's significance as an encounter between donor agendas, development discourses, and the nexus of Israeli security prerogatives and Palestinian clientele politics that shaped Oslo's political economy. It argues that in addition to dubious economics, the scheme provided rent-seeking opportunities to Israeli middlemen arbitrating between Israeli security apparatuses and Palestinian economic elites, both rehearsing a wider tendency of development projects to obscure issues of power and control, and ultimately itself reinvesting a local, colonial genealogy of development as control.

This content is only available via PDF.
©© Regents of the University of California
You do not currently have access to this content.