Glenn E. Robinson

The Role of the Professional Middle Class in the Mobilization of Palestinian Society: The Medical and Agricultural Committees

The political mobilization of Palestinians in the occupied territories in the 1980s was closely tied to the rise of a new elite and the marginalization of the traditional notable leadership. Such mobilization was necessary in order to overcome, at least in part, the class, kin, and regional cleavages that had long fragmented Palestinian society and that had been used by occupying powers to undermine collective national action. The mobilization of Palestinian society by a new elite was made possible by structural changes that had led to the peripheralization of the traditional elite. The three most important structural changes were the dramaticrise of wage labor after 1967, which transfigured a basically peasant society, extensive land confiscations, and the widespread availability of university education after 1972. Each of these developments helped to break traditional patron–client relations that had been the social base of the old elite and paved the way for the rise of a more extensive, better educated, more rural, and nonlanded elite which had gained cohesion in thePalestinian universities. In addition, these developments, and in particular the diminution of the Palestinian peasantry, meant that large segments of the population had, in effect, been cleaved from their social moorings and were, thus, more open for recruitment into new forms of social relations and organizations. It is to refer to these structural changes in Palestinian society that I use the term “social mobilization.”

The battle for Iraq: Islamic insurgencies in comparative perspective

Abstract This article constructs a model of three types, or clusters, of Muslim insurgency over the past two centuries. It analyses how each cluster shares a common ideological formulation, impetus, leadership type, propensity for violence, organisational structure and level of durability. Examples from each of the three clusters are briefly examined and compared on these criteria. The article then examines Iraqs insurgency (more correctly, insurgencies) from mid-2003 to the present in light of the models to suggest how the insurgency ‘fits in’ with other insurgencies in the Muslim world. Understanding its characteristics in light of the models sheds light on how durable the insurgency may be. The most durable insurgencies have been ones in which the mantles of nation and Islam are successfully fused.

Political Succession in the Middle East

The following briefs were presented in a workshop on “Political Succession in the Middle East” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1, 2001, in San Francisco. Louis J. Cantori, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University, were the conveners of the Conference Group on the Middle East, which issued this report.

Oslo, Three Years On

The Politics of Protest: The Israeli Peace Movement and the Palestinian Intifada by Reuven Kaminer. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1996. 247pp. £16.95. Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Governments Road to the Oslo Accord by David Makovsky. Boulder, CO: Westview Press in cooperation with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1996. 239pp. £11.50. Human Rights in the West Bank and Gaza: Legacy and Politics by Ilan Peleg. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 191pp. £31.50. The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De‐development by Sara Roy. Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995. 304pp. £22.50. Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence after Oslo by Graham Usher. London and East Haven: Pluto Press in association with the Transnational Institute and the Middle East Research and Information Project, 1995. 146pp. £9.95.