The Political Economy of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process: An Introduction.

This paper provides an overview analysis of the political economic causes of the rise and fall of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. It argues that the ebb and flow of Israeli-Palestinian relations should not be understood in agential or narrowly political terms, but rather within the context of structural transformations in global, national and regional political economies. The paper thus offers a historical materialist analysis of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The main sub-theses advanced are (1) that the content of the Oslo peace process was always distinctly limited, and its benefits to some extent fictional; (2) that this 'insubstantial peace' took the form that it did primarily because of (a) the only partial liberalisation of the Israeli political economy; and (b) the political economic marginalisation of the Palestinian diaspora; (3) that the subsequent collapse of the Oslo peace process followed inexorably from these features, as well as from the decline of the internal Palestinian political economy; and (4) that, more broadly still, the dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian relations have been and continue to be structured by the Middle East's status as a dysfunctional region within the global political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]