The U.S. Security Coordinator (USSC) mission in Jerusalem was created in 2005 to help implement security sector reform within the Palestinian Authority (PA). With a single-minded focus on “counterterrorism,” Washington considered the USSC an ancillary mechanism to support U.S. diplomatic and political efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Despite upending long-standing U.S. policy and cutting all other forms of aid to the Palestinians, the Trump administration has maintained the USSC in the run-up to the “Deal of the Century.” This article draws on original interviews with security personnel responsible for enacting USSC interventions. It uses their insights to highlight how the mission tethered Israeli political aims to its remit, and the distorting ramifications that have ensued for Palestine and the Palestinians. In uncovering the full parameters of Washington's securitization policy, this history also points to the ways in which the PA has consequently been woven into the U.S.-led “global War on Terror.”

After the Oslo peace process got underway in the early 1990s, international donors allocated billions of dollars in aid to the occupied Palestinian territories to kick-start the process of economic development deemed necessary to state building. This article argues that although much of the money was directed at democracy enhancement and civic engagement projects, contrary to stated intentions, it actually undermined rather than promoted those outcomes. Donor countries, led by the United States and the European Union, designed and implemented programs with complete disregard for the reality underlying the Palestinian predicament—the almost 50 years of military occupation and the broader context of Israel's settler-colonial project. Besides their entrenchment of a neoliberal agenda, such projects have contributed to the ongoing fracturing of Palestinian politics and the growing authoritarianism of the Ramallah government, leaving the Palestinian economy less viable and more dependent on Israel than ever.

Within the wide range of research and studies about Palestinian development, especially in the past twenty years, a new school of literature has recently emerged, drawing on heterodox economic and social science, settler-colonial studies, and the widening critique of neoliberalism. Studies in this issue of JPS are a selection of the intellectual output of a younger generation of scholars who have challenged the thrust of preceding literature produced by international and donor organizations, academics, and Israeli and Palestinian research projects. This new body of research critiques and proposes alternatives to scholarship that placed study of Palestinian economy and society within the parameters of the peace process, premised upon the supposed benefits of globalization and liberalization and more recently, reform and state-building as a precursor to national liberation.

This article foregrounds how international aid and the Israeli occupation intersect in the historically prosperous West Bank agricultural village of Jayyus; with most of its lands isolated behind the Israeli Wall, Jayyus is now aid-dependent. While material aid plays a larger role in sustaining the village, it is through “advocacy work” (a form of international aid largely unaddressed in the literature) that Jayyusis experience aid on a daily basis. The article examines the paradoxes of dependence and subordination seen from the vantage point of local communities under the jurisdiction of an occupying power and in the absence of a sovereign Palestinian state. Also shown is how the routinization of aid both obscures the ongoing status of occupation and has become an important mechanism that sustains it.