8 - First ‘International Terrorists’ or Local Non-recognised Government? Palestinians and Hybrid Sovereignty

Summary

Introduction

This chapter makes the case for conceptualising the Palestinian national movement through the prism of hybrid sovereignty. Building on works that have shown that the ideal of sovereignty as full control over territory and wielding legitimate violence does not do justice to the multiplicity of observed structures and practices of governance, power and authority, I argue that revisiting episodes within the Palestinian national movement in the 1960s and the 1970s can demonstrate how seemingly disparate actions converge to give rise to sovereign claims. The point of departure of the present analysis is the fragmentation of the movement in the 1960s and the 1970s along various lines – ideological, geographical, strategic and tactical, among others. While some scholars and commentators have characterised this as hindering Palestinian political goals (for example, Krause, 2017; Pearlman, 2012; Hilal, 2018), in this chapter I provide a different perspective on the practices that different Palestinian factions adopted during this period. Using a Deleuzian conceptual framework, I argue that the diffraction of the Palestinian groups’ political activities should be read within a unitary frame of hybrid sovereignty: that is, one in which claims to represent a body politic-in-the-making are expressed through spatially dispersed practices.

The decades following Nakba witnessed a gradual fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement as various groups adopted highly divergent political outlooks (from pan-Arabism to communism to Palestine-centred nationalism) and approaches to accomplishing their goals. It is not possible to do justice to the complexity of this history here, though others have eloquently done so (Y. Sayigh, 2004; R. Sayigh, 2007; Kimmerling and Migdal, 2009; Ghanem, 2013). What is important for the present discussion is that many commentators argue that this fragmentation was highly detrimental for the Palestinian national goals because it prevented different factions from working together towards their common aims. For example, Krause (2017) proposes that the Palestinian movement became efficient only when it was unified under the coherent leadership of Fatah during the 1980s, which enabled it to achieve the formal recognition of its aspirations by Israel. The Oslo accords of the mid-1990s then represented the first opportunity for the Palestinians to exercise self-autonomy (in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank), with the vision of becoming an independent sovereign state.