The Palestinian Emirates: Power and Social Class in the West Bank
By Ameed Faleh – Oct 7, 2025
September 13 marked thirty-two years since the signing of the “Declaration of Principles” between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. Back then, hopes were pinned on what was hailed as the “peace process”: the First Intifada would be halted — rather aborted — in exchange for the promise of a Palestinian state. It has been more than three decades since Yasser Arafat shook Yitzhak Rabin’s hand in Oslo. That promise has evaporated. Today, the Palestinian Authority (PA), established by Arafat and later reshaped by Mahmoud Abbas into an administrative, economic, and security machine, stands at a crossroads. Meanwhile, Israel is executing its plan to erase Palestinian presence altogether. Tel Aviv’s so-called “decisive victory” would crown the Zionist entity as the uncontested empire of the Arab region.
To make sense of the West Bank, three key elements are important to highlight: (1) the social classes born of, and nurtured by, Oslo; (2) the armed uprisings in West Bank cities during the 2021-2023 period; and (3) Israel’s drive to dismantle the PA as a political body in the West Bank and replace it with a patchwork of mini “West Banks.”
Why Ramallah?
The PA is often referred to as the “Ramallah Authority.” And the choice of Ramallah was not incidental. Before the Authority’s establishment, Ramallah was just another town next to al-Bireh, Birzeit, and Kufr Aqab. Unlike Nablus or Hebron, it had no entrenched political or urban power. It was a “blank slate,” perfect for a social engineering project.
Onto this “slate,” the PA was drawn as an administrative, economic, and security apparatus. Therefore a middle class and a business elite flourished, fed by investment inflows and the expansion of a service public sector drawing from the peripheries of villages and towns.
Ramallah became a mosaic of commuters, and displayed obvious contradictions of both class and politics present in the macro West Bank. Other urban centers in the West Bank differ only in degree of inequality, but Ramallah is above all the political epicenter. The distinction here between political centralization and economic enclavization is necessary.
The PA relied on a class of administrators who had gained experience within the PLO bureaucracy in Beirut and Tunis, the so-called “returnees.” They were transplanted overnight to the West Bank and Gaza to build sprawling networks of public sector and security employment. Under Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership, these networks sank deeper roots, mainly after international calls for “good governance,” “anti-corruption,” and “counterterrorism,” on the one hand, and the internal battle within Fatah on the other.
On one side stood Arafat loyalists, largely returnees working in public institutions and Fatah structures. On the other stood Abbas loyalists, often drawn from the local Fatah cadres. By expanding his circle to include a larger proportion of West Bank Palestinians across all government functions, Abbas killed two birds with one stone; he consolidated his rule while neutralizing dissent within Fatah. In doing so, he secured international support for an order built on dismantling Palestinian resilience, from armed groups to grassroots initiatives seeking self-reliance. This was Oslo’s illusion, that a post-colonial template of statehood — with its bourgeoisie, middle class, and ruling-party dominance — would somehow conjure a sovereign Palestinian state.
Instead, nurturing a middle class and business elite only deepened the structural dependency on Israel, entrenched by a logic of quick profits at the expense of a political economy that seeks disentanglement from Israel. Strategic staples like wheat, chickpeas, and vegetables were abandoned under cheaper Israeli imports, while Palestinian companies seized vast tracts of the Jordan Valley for date cultivation, exported not only to local and foreign markets but even into Israel itself. The service sector expanded while the productive capacity of the West Bank in terms of agriculture diminished greatly. In addition, without any regulatory or oversight framework barring merchants from trading staples, especially strategic ones, with the occupation, West Bank merchants supplied the settlers’ egg demand during Hezbollah’s 2023–2024 Support Front War, after Israeli production of eggs in the Galilee collapsed.
The same profit logic dominated both public and private service sectors, now the main source of jobs in the West Bank. This has locked daily dependency on the status quo: no-war, no-peace. Traditional crafts and agriculture declined. Palestinian labor in settlements soared. Oslo delivered dependency in practice, and bounded the structure of the Palestinian Authority to this dependency via the Protocol on Economic Relations (PER) signed in Paris, creating a legalistic framework that permits this structurally unequal relationship and binds the West Bank to it due to the lack of control over customs under the guise of a “customs union” with Israel.
Armed Uprisings
The second element is the wave of local armed uprisings after the 2021 Battle of Seif al-Quds. In Nablus and Jenin, uprisings emerged from disillusionment with Ramallah’s political leadership. They grew out of marginalized peripheries such as refugee camps and old cities, where a new generation alienated from the Oslo economy found no place.
What factor lies in the continued crackdown on localized resistance groups in the West Bank? Besides the obvious answer of PA and Israeli surveillance and crackdowns, the question lies in the urban fabric carved out of Oslo’s grip and the political-economic clash it generated. For West Bank elites, “no-war, no-peace” was ideal. And any minor armed resistance threatened that arrangement.
As youth flocked to resistance, both the PA and the localized resistances in the West Bank faced a dilemma: civil war or concession. Resistance movements kept their rhetoric fixed on fighting the occupation, wary of alienating public opinion, since issues of revenge and bloodshed trigger family and clan feuds in the West Bank regardless of the legitimacy of the cause. The PA, meanwhile, feared social unrest would undermine its security grip. The 2022 protests that followed Musab Shtayyeh’s arrest made the PA wary of “accelerating” its campaign against the localized resistances in the West Bank beyond the “appropriate” time.
The Gaza genocide, Israel’s repeated raids, and joint arrests of resistance fighters by Israel and the PA paved the way for renewed crackdowns. Israel’s campaign went even further by erasing the Jenin camp as a physical refuge. In Nablus, the merchant class was pitted against the resistance after repeated raids and tighter restrictions at checkpoints, effectively cutting off Nablus merchants from their markets; the centuries-old exchange of the periphery, the village, supplying the center, the city, with raw materials and consumers while the center supplies the periphery with commodities was threatened by the checkpoints. By disrupting this cycle, Israel turned the merchant class against Nablus’s localized resistance groups, boxing them in socially under the banner of economic interest.
The Palestinian Emirates Solution
The third element is Israel’s drive to dismantle the PA. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s “decisive victory” plan calls for total submission or forced expulsion. The idea traces back to the founder of Revisionist Zionism Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall doctrine that underlined the importance of Israel’s superiority over Arabs. By that logic, no Palestinian political framework — no matter how compliant with Israel — can ever be allowed to exist.
Disagreements do exist between Israel’s governing coalition and the international community on this issue. But the debate is not whether to control Palestinians, but rather how to do so: maintain the PA as a hollow shell for the so-called “day after” plan, or dissolve and replace it with a patchwork alternative?
The idea was revived in a paper by Mordechai Kedar, a researcher at the Begin–Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, published by Israel’s Defense and Security Forum: Reimagining the Conflict: From Conceptual Stalemate to Realistic Vision. Like his orientalist predecessors Amnon Cohen and Menachem Milson, the latter an architect of the Israeli-created Village Leagues project designed to uproot the PLO factions in the West Bank, Kedar views the West Bank society through a colonial lens: patriarchal, lacking political and national bonds, in addition to being unsocialized. As such, his prescription for this “illness” is to copy the model of the United Arab Emirates: tribal sheikhdoms federated under Israeli oversight. His vision converges with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s doctrine of “decisive victory,” and with the broader genocidal calculus of Israel.
In July, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Wadee’ al-Jaabari, who declared himself the “Emir of Hebron” and called for replacing the PA with a system of Palestinian Emirates, within the framework of the Abraham Accords. This article was rejected by Hebron tribes and ignored by the PA. To some, it was a moment of dark comedy: an Emir of Hebron? Yet history shows that this is precisely how political projects are born: Habib Bourguiba’s 1965 call for negotiations with Israel was dismissed at first; the PLO’s 1974 Ten-Point Program, calling for the phasing of the Palestinian struggle and as such the abandonment of the One Democratic Palestine paradigm, was rejected by Fatah’s lower-and-middle-level cadres and the PFLP; and Anwar Sadat’s Egypt was boycotted by Arab states after the Camp David Accords, even as secret ties remained. The key point is not the initial backlash, but the slow normalization of the idea. Publishing such an interview in a major US outlet shows the intention to put the “Palestinian Emirates” project on the table and move toward its implementation.
The current political economy of the West Bank only accelerates this plan. The PA’s room for maneuver is increasingly limited by Israel’s “piracy” of clearance revenues and dwindling international aid – despite the PA’s scenes of bravado after the recognition of a Palestinian state by European countries. Economist Raja Khalidi points out that “Palestinian economies” as a reality have long functioned as narrow urban enclaves fractured by class contradictions. The “Palestinian Emirates” scheme appears as a natural extension of occupation policies imposed since 1967 and reinforced after the PLO’s “return” to the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Oslo, where local and transnational Palestinian elites thrive in their own respective enclaves, while political representation is monopolized by Ramallah. Israel, as such, only seeks to cut off political representation in its bid to erase Palestine completely.
An alternative to the status quo would require working towards a different political economy, but it is still a theory. Obstacles are immense: legal frameworks, debates over profitability and popular appeal of self-sustainability economic endeavors, management challenges, and above all, the structural dependency on the occupation. However, the West Bank is at a crossroads, and any fundamental change to stop a wide ethnic cleansing campaign would rest on analyzing the social classes of the West Bank and working towards an emancipatory project that centers political economy as a pillar of its analysis.
