In Chapter 8, we turn to a slightly different question, but one that has occupied much public interest – the topic of judicial polarization. Looking at the federal courts, we document how our framework of the judicial tug of war can explain ideological polarization in the courts as politicians attempt to replace judges with ones who are more ideologically compatible. In addition, we show that greater polarization leads to greater judicial conflict, including more dissenting opinions and increased intra-court uncertainty. To this extent, the American judiciary has followed the general trend in American politics toward increased partisan conflict and polarization, facilitated by the tension between political and legal elites.

This chapter summarizes the new economic case for immigration restrictions. This includes the arguments made by George Borjas and Paul Collier.

Virtually every government currently places restrictions, and often severe restrictions, limiting the numbers and types of foreign-born people allowed into their countries to live and work. Yet hundreds of millions of people, often in poorer countries, desire to emigrate to other countries and engage in economic exchanges with people already residing there.1 There are large numbers of natives in these would-be destination countries who would also engage in economic exchanges by employing, renting to, and purchasing goods and services from these would-be immigrants. A central tenet of economics is that voluntary exchange is expected to be mutually beneficial. When governments use their coercive powers to prevent voluntary exchanges, they make people who would have otherwise made an exchange worse off and, as long as there were no large externalities that would have impacted third parties, make the world poorer as a result. Immigration restrictions that prevent exchanges between would-be immigrants and people residing in destination countries are likely the largest policy-induced economic distortion in our global economy.

We start in Chapter 2 by discussing how the bar – the nation’s attorneys – occupies a historically prominent place within American politics. As we show, the United States is quite unusual in this respect. Unlike European countries, where governments have (historically at least) been populated by members of an aristocratic class, the United States had no entrenched nobility; the bar emerged as an educated, wealthy class, and, as some historical observers noted, occupied the role that in other countries had been assumed by the nobility. Over time, the organized bar emerged, and it developed fairly conservative policy interests and economic and regulatory interests. As we document via a series of novel empirical findings, this has contributed to American exceptionalism in several policy areas, most pronounced in those areas relevant to the bar and its interests.

Do immigrants undermine culture in a way that destroys productivity in destination countries? Some scholars have argued that because immigrants come from countries with dysfunctional social capital – norms and institutions – they will import it and pollute the social capital in destination countries. One potential channel through which this could occur is corruption. We examine stocks and flows of immigrants over a twenty-year time period to see if corruption increased in destination countries. We generally find that immigration is not associated with increases in corruption. Additionally, we find that immigration tends to decrease corruption in destination countries with low levels of corruption or high levels of economic freedom.

A growing empirical literature supports the importance of strong private property rights, a rule of law, and an environment of economic freedom for promoting long-run prosperity. But little is known about how immigration impacts these institutions. This chapter empirically examines how immigration impacts a nation’s policies and institutions. We find no evidence of negative and some evidence of positive impacts in institutional quality, as measured by the economic freedom index, as a result of immigration.

Introduction

Having looked at the aid aspects that relate to funds to the PA and CSOs, it is now time to look at similar aspects peculiar to UNRWA as one of the key organisations responsible for aid delivery to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. There are two core issues to focus on: first, the ways the post-Oslo aid dynamics have impacted humanitarian operations in Gaza; second, how these dynamics have led to the imposition of further control over the humanitarian spaces in the territory. We have seen in the introductory chapter that the postaid dynamics are associated with two things: the ‘aid for peace’ and the set of political and security conditions that influenced this paradigm.

It is important for us to understand the way UNRWA conducts its work and how its operations have changed over past decades, more specifically following the creation of the PA in 1994. The changing working dynamics of the organisation have exposed it to a great deal of criticism from different stakeholders, including refugees, the PA and other humanitarian organisations, especially its service provision in Gaza. There is a need to investigate in depth the challenges the organisation is experiencing in its attempt to continue its operations in Gaza, particularly after the recent significant cut of US funding to the organisation by the Trump administration. Hence, it is essential to this analysis to investigate those elements of control discussed throughout this thesis, and in particular how Western donors impose certain operational agendas on the organisation and how these agendas are influenced by securitised and politicised frameworks.

We will briefly look at the historical role of UNRWA as an organisation, a role that was established solely to assist displaced Palestinian refugees to integrate socially and economically into their new community and to provide the necessary humanitarian relief to facilitate this integration. This will help us demonstrate how the humanitarian operations have changed over time and how UNRWA's roles have changed in accordance with the political and demographic changes on the ground as well as the funding trends of the organisation's main donors. These factors, as will be demonstrated in the following sections, had a significant impact on the level and types of services the organisation could provide and the organisation's autonomy over its operational and financial agendas.

Introduction

It is now time to look at the most important aspect of how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as mediated by the United States and others, has influenced aid delivery to the PA and thus the PA's structures and operations from the Oslo Accords until after Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip (2007–13). Key to this, it is also important to examine the extent to which the securitisation and politicisation of foreign aid contributed to sustaining political and social divisions within Gaza and between the WB and Gaza. Although the ultimate focus of this book is directed towards Gaza, the discussion in this chapter will involve the situation in Palestine as a whole so as to properly address specific issues in Gaza.

The partner for peace framework has emerged following the Oslo peace process (1993). In the context of this chapter, this term is crucial to understand the dynamics surrounding foreign aid to the Palestinians and examine how this framework has been used to divide the Palestinian nation's polity according to their commitment to the workings of this framework. The application of the partner for peace framework assists an understanding of the terms ‘securitisation’ and ‘politicisation’ of aid in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this context, it is important to explore the kind of peace that was meant to be achieved, whether it is peace between the PA political and security leadership that does not include the Palestinian people or peace that is based on a security or an economic agenda. It is also important to examine the kind of partner needed to achieve this peace. Is it a political partner or a security agent that caters to Israel's security agenda? Is it a partner that maintains Israel's interest in sustaining the status quo of occupation? These questions are key for unpicking the existing political frameworks that contribute to deciding the legitimacy of the Palestinian partner and according to whose interests, whether donors seek a security agent or a development agent to maintain the flow of their aid and whether the ultimate purpose of this aid is to achieve development or maintain Israel's security.

Introduction

This chapter provides an analytical framework for this book by offering a radical perspective on development (of which foreign aid is a key instrument) and how it turned into a tool to place the world's populations into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ categories. The framework builds on this categorisation to show that development practices became a justification to intervene in the lives of those underdeveloped and a tool to impose mechanisms of control. The chapter focuses on the key issues underlying the development problematic: the relationship between development and modernisation, how ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’ have emerged as social designs that are determined by economic growth and industrialisation as materialistic indicators and finally how development has become a tool for the creation and control of ‘surplus people’. Before these issues are discussed, the chapter explores how ‘development’ as a concept has emerged and how it has meanings, interpretations and procedures that have developed over time. The chapter will also explore how the different meanings and procedures have affected how development has been perceived by those who implement it as well as those who are supposed to benefit from it.

Through examining development as a new industry that has emerged since the Second World War, particularly through associating it with modernisation, the chapter argues that development is, as an issue, highly political in character. It has established a new form of division, a new world order that is based on scientific and economic advantages (Truman, 1949). Peoples and nations are looked at and judged in accordance with the living style they maintain and the economic powers they enjoy. The chapter will illustrate how this new world order, ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’, has deliberately ignored the colonial legacies that have contributed to shaping the current resources, institutions and political settings of the so-called underdeveloped societies. This divide between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ has also contributed to forming new power relations that are based on superiority (Willis, 2011), the superiority of the ‘developer’ who enjoys power that exists in both money and knowledge. Furthermore, it will be argued in the chapter that ‘development’ has paved the way to the emergence of a modern rather than a traditional hegemony, one that is intellectual and ideological. An illustration of this is the creation of the ‘modern state idea’ (Shanin, 1997) and how development offers a bureaucratic rationality of managing and controlling people.

Introduction

For more than seven decades, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have lived under various and multi-layered forms of control. This control extended from the Ottoman era over the Levant region, including Palestine in the 1830s, followed by the British Mandate (1920–48) and Egyptian administration (1948–67). Shortly after the 1948 Nakbeh, and under the Egyptian administration and the newly formed UNRWA administration, the Palestinian population in Gaza was isolated from the rest of Palestine. However, the 1967 Israeli military occupation of the remainder of historical Palestine, particularly the Gaza Strip, has had the most significant effect by reshaping the socio-economic and political realities on the ground (up to the present day). Control over the territory has not only impacted every aspect of people's lives, but has systematically restricted their abilities and potential to progress, politically, economically and socially. The occupation's socio-economic warfare and control have applied Sara Roy's ‘de-development’ concept. Discussions in this book have therefore acknowledged that the Israeli occupation has been, and continues to be, the main factor of control over the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.

However, in this book we aimed to go beyond the Israeli occupation as the main instrument of control and de-development and to examine how foreign aid has facilitated the emergence of new forms of control over the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip in the period that followed the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. By the emergence of new forms of control, we explored the aspects of life that have been influenced by the working dynamics of foreign aid delivery and the work of aid agencies in Gaza, and to see the ways in which Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are controlled and have evolved since the Oslo Accords and continue to evolve in such a way that affects their daily lives.

This book has provided empirical evidence with some examples that support the analysis presented in this conclusion. In brief, the book has relied on the post-development theory as a framework that guided the analysis of the relationship between the ‘developed’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ worlds. The framework emphasised that the emergence of ‘underdeveloped’ people or nations was originally a social construct determined by the ‘developed’ on the basis of the latter's economic growth and modernisation.

Introduction

After the previous examination of foreign aid delivery to institutions within the PA and the kind of structural imbalances the norms of delivery have created since the Oslo Accords (1993), the task now resides in the analysis of the impact of such phenomena within the CSOs, particularly to what extent has the post-Oslo aid agenda contributed to reconstructing the role Palestinian NGOs play as compared to the pre-Oslo era and how has the securitisation and politicisation of aid influenced the socio-economic advancement of both NGOs and aid beneficiaries? In this chapter, we are not looking at CSOs and NGOs as development actors, but rather investigating the aspects embedded in these questions will help us to understand two things: the kind of civil society that donors sought to empower and maintain in the Gaza Strip and whether this sector contributes to Gaza's development and humanitarian relief or rather to practicing further governmentality over its population. It will also help us understand how the sector's key stakeholders, both institutions and individuals, are influenced by the aid dynamics imposed by donors and the extent to which they play a role in deepening the impact of the securitised aid agenda.

The chapter is based on a dozen interviews with CSO workers and aid consultants, in addition to government and political parties representatives. Accordingly, the analysis of the relationship between CSOs and donors, on the one hand, and CSOs and the local society, on the other, is articulated in four sections.

The first section will provide a historical overview of the work of the CSOs in Palestine and more specifically in Gaza. It will discuss the political dynamics that impacted the work of this sector in three major periods: the First Intifada (prior to the establishment of the PA), the post-Oslo civil society and the Second Intifada onwards. The second section will examine the concept of ‘globalised elite’ introduced by Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar (2002, 2004). Yet, it falls short of illustrating how this elite developed over time, of describing its current relationships with the governing authorities, donors and the society and how these relationships impacted the current structures of the civil society.