The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad

Abstract

legislation, lobbying, civic education, and women’s participation, the PA was expected to focus on institution building, anti-corruption, and above all security reform. In the case of both Palestinian civil society and the PA, depoliticization was the result of the highly political goals of Western donors, including European and American aid agencies, for whom the success of the peace process to a large extent depended on Israel’s security remaining paramount and the exclusion of certain, problematic political groups and constituencies. More could have been said about the underlying political provisions of Oslo and its idiosyncrasies. Most notably absent were the specific structural constraints imposed by the Oslo framework, including the primacy of security (for Israel, that is) and the securitization of the PA—both major focuses of the donor community, as well as the PA’s governance model. Also left unsaid is the highly intrusive nature of Oslo itself, which was at once a process of conflict resolution and an exercise in state building, and which gave outside actors—including Western donors and even Israel—a direct say in Palestinian political life. Likewise, there is a tendency to gloss over key differences between the Palestinian and Salvadoran cases—most notably whether the Oslo process, which was an interim arrangement that left all of the core issues of the conflict unresolved, should even qualify as a “conflict-to-peace” transition. Despite these relatively minor issues, Jamal’s book is a timely and welcome contribution to the literature on the complex relationships between democracy promotion, state building, and peace building. Above all, the book is a reminder of the primacy of political settlements—and of politics more broadly—in supporting democratic outcomes as well as the folly of attempting to reengineer or freeze out elements of Palestinian politics. While donor aid can help create institutions and even keep them afloat, as Promoting Democracy diligently explains, it is no substitute for a vibrant civil society and coherent domestic politics.