The recently published Political Economy of Palestine: Critical, Interdisciplinary, and Decolonial Perspectives, edited by Alaa Tartir, Tariq Dana, and Timothy Seidel, makes the important argument that an approach to economics that does not consider the political – a de-politicized economics – is inadequate to understanding the situation in occupied Palestine. It outlines a critical interdisciplinary approach to political economy that challenges prevailing neoliberal logics and structures that reproduce racial capitalism, and explores how the political economy of occupied Palestine is shaped by processes of accumulation by exploitation and dispossession from both Israel and global business, as well as from Palestinian elites. It also explores a decolonial approach to Palestinian political economy that foregrounds struggles against neoliberal and settler colonial policies and institutions, and aids in the defragmentation of Palestinian life, land, and political economy that the Oslo Accords perpetuated, but whose histories of de-development over all of Palestine can be traced back for over century.

Political Economy of Palestine is organized in three parts. Following an introduction by the editors, Part I, “Contextualizing Palestinian Political Economy,” offers an in-depth analysis and an overall framing to critical dimensions in the realm of political economy in Palestine. Tariq Dana explores Israeli strategies and policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) since 1967 that shaped the Palestinian political economy through pursuing economic domination and economic pacification. Ibrahim Shikaki investigates the political economy of dependency and class formation in the OPT from 1967 to the present day. Furthermore, Timothy Seidel examines settler colonialism and argues that a decolonial approach to political economy in occupied Palestine gives attention to enduring indigeneity and the role of land in the struggle for autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination.

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