Mar 14 2011 by Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour
A spectre is haunting the Middle East – the spectre of popular revolts against autocratic governments. Listening to the loud chants from demonstrators in Algiers to Sana’a asserting their political and economic demands, it is clear that exorcising this spectre needs more than just political regime change: they are demanding the change of the system that has produced poverty, unemployment and vast income disparities. These phenomena did not occur spontaneously or as a natural stage of development. Rather, they are among the outcomes of an economic policy model widely adopted in the region over the past decades and shaped by the neoliberal Washington Consensus advocated by the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWI), the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Curiously however, just at the moment when neoliberalism is being rejected by widening popular movements in the region and by developments elsewhere in the global economy, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is stepping up its neoliberal state-building program entitled ‘Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State’. The program was launched by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in 2009 amidst unprecedented internecine political divisions and a historic crisis of legitimacy, indeed survival, of the national liberation movement. While it promises to build ‘good governance’ institutions to garner local and international support for the PA’s statehood plan, a more critical reading reveals that the PA has embarked on a path that seems to be trading off national liberation for neoliberalism.
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http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/904/after-tunisia-and-egypt_palestinian-neoliberalism-at-the-cross-roads
