Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Kareem Rabie. Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. 272 pp.
Review by Eman Abdelhadi
27 March 2025
What does neoliberalism look like in Palestine? Rightfully, scholars have focused on settler colonialism and occupation as the frameworks through which to study Palestinian life. But situated fully within those systems are neoliberal machinations for state building, privatization and “development.” Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank by Kareem Rabie sheds light on how the Palestinian authority (PA) and Palestinian capitalists attempt to craft opportunities for profit and expansion even within the constraints imposed by Israel’s military and political domination. The book consists of rich ethnographic and archival data documenting the life history of a large housing development built outside of Ramallah—Rawabi. Through an intense publicity campaign—both within and outside Palestine—developers marketed Rawabi as the Palestinian future, a future that would take urban Palestinians out of multigenerational family homes they own outright to debt-financed nuclear-family suburban homes. With Rawabi comes visions of a Ramallah that is like Dubai or nearby Amman—stable, secure, and prosperous. But Rabie points out that building this stability means committing to a version of the future that reinscribes the present, and the present of Palestine is the occupation.
Rawabi becomes a case study of the Palestinian Authority—an entity that lacks sovereignty but whose obligations to capital find it ceding power to the private sector. Rabie shows how the project’s risks and costs were absorbed by public coffers, how the PA facilitated expropriation of village land for the project, and how it helped funnel foreign aid money into the work. Yet the profits and even some of the functions of governance of Rawabi would remain with capital. Thus the decidedly non-state Palestinian authority sees state building as a fundamentally neoliberal project. As Rabie puts it, “The economy has not replaced the state, but the state project is one to create a national economy that can be made in lieu of a state.” (p. 20).
Israel violently curtails building or even home repair by Palestinians across historic Palestine. To make this project possible, developers courted liberal Zionist support both within Israel and the United States. They became a darling of international development agencies and even garnered acclaim, gaining positive coverage in many Western news outlets. They used these connections and this publicity to lobby the Israeli government for the necessary permits, with the PA also helping facilitate. Palestinians who raised alarms about collaboration with Israel, about land expropriation, and about the neoliberal modality of the project were met with repression. Yet none of this could quell Israel’s thirst for land and the Israeli commitment to extinguishing Palestinian life. The last two chapters of the book detail how settlers in the West Bank lobbied against the development, arguing they were being discriminated against for not being able to build settlements as Palestinians built on their own land. These final chapters bring home the futility of attempting a stable future that precludes liberation.
This fascinating case study is a refreshing and necessary intervention—one that will hopefully trigger more research on the political-economic conditions in Palestine.
