The Palestinian politics of democratization in Israel and the West Bank: a comparative study of colonial and post-colonial contexts

Abstract

This study focuses on understanding how, why and under what circumstances a differentiation between the agendas and political priorities of Palestinians living as citizens in Israel and Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank has occurred; because today in the West Bank the Palestinians prioritize their fight against the occupation, while Palestinians with Israeli citizenships prioritize terminating the discrimination. This thesis argues that this differentiation has structural reasons that can become clear by studying the production of space, because it is through the production of space that Israel has been able to form to different governances over the Palestinians. Thus, this thesis initially concentrates on the legal, spatial and time dimensions of the production of Palestinian spaces under Israeli rule. After locating the reasons of such difference between Palestinians on a theoretical basis, this study demonstrates the practices of NGOs that deal with the problems of Palestinians - either in the form of discrimination or occupation - living under Israeli rule. The NGO practices demonstrate that, even if political problems are reduced to the level of technical problems, there is still the possibility of politicization through technicalization, because through providing technical solutions to political problems, the injuries that were previously invisible in the public space could become visible. Consequently, this study states that it is by bringing visibility to invisible problems that NGOs can in fact foster processes of democratization in the countries where they operate. For Palestinians on both sides of the Wall, the significance of this finding is the possibility of terminating both the occupation and discrimination through democratizing Israel.