This is an archived version of the PW Sources newsletter from Saturday, June 22, 2024. Sign up to receive PW Sources directly to your inbox here.

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

In the wake of several countries unilaterally recognizing Palestine, Israel’s extremist Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich has promised to strengthen Jewish settlements in the West Bank and is considering further sanctions against the Palestinian Authority for attempting to bring about the formal recognition of Palestinian statehood. The US has urged Israel to release the Palestinian tax revenues that Smotrich froze in early May.

In a 2024 chapter, TARIQ DANA explains how Israel’s control of the PA’s tax revenue has been implemented as a form of indirect rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt) after Oslo:

“Unlike the Open Bridges’ reliance on the Israeli state’s financial resources to implement economic stimulus projects to stimulate pacification in the oPt, Oslo secured significant resources through donors’ commitments to support the PA under the banner of peacebuilding and economic development. International aid has been instrumental to the pacification process in crucial ways: it mitigates the harmful consequences of Israel’s colonization; it sustains the PA institutions; it provides salaries, social services, and humanitarian assistance to the population; and it supports the PA elite and its authoritarian and neo-patrimonial politics. Therefore, donors’ policies have been consistent with the Israeli position of keeping in place weak institutions and dependent economy through perpetuating the Oslo status quo. The complicity of donor-led peacebuilding in this arrangement is credited by Turner as being a form of counterinsurgency whose goal is to support compliant actors who have vested interests in ensuring stability and to help to embed their power in opposition to others who reject the autonomy arrangement. Moreover, the oPt economic dependency on Israel meant the continuation of Israeli control over vital resources for the PA’s institutional sustainability. In this way, Israel managed to subjugate the PA to heavy pressure to accept its demands. A prominent example is Israel’s control of the PA ‘tax clearance system,’ which is levied and transferred to the PA by Israel on a monthly basis. As the tax transfer accounts for more than 60 percent of all the PA revenues, Israel often uses this financial leverage to extract political concessions through withholding these amounts to force the PA to comply with its policies.”

+  “The PA revenue structure’s reliance on Israel impeded the PA’s ability to represent Palestinians in international settings. The example of joining and utilising the ICC highlighted Israel’s strategic use of clearance revenue to undermine the PA.” By Anas Iqtait. Link. And see Amal Ahmad on the PA’s revenue structure and Israel’s strategy of containment. Link.

+ “The urgent resolution of the ongoing clearance revenue dispute is critical, alongside addressing the volatility of revenues collected by Israel for the PA, which hampers predictability of fiscal policy implementation.” The World Bank’s 2024 report on the dramatically worsened fiscal and humanitarian crisis in the West Bank and Gaza. Link.

+  “The two-state solution’s exclusionary nature reveals a fundamental flaw: the authority to define a Palestinian state has always rested with external powers, whether Israel, the United Kingdom, or the US.” By Samer Elchahabi. Link. And Nadia Abu Zaher compiles interviews with Fatah’s Central Committee members concerning the option to dissolve the PA. Link.

NEW RESEARCHERS

Water Infrastructure

RÉGIS KOUASSI is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Montreal. In a working paper, he examines flash floods and water infrastructure quality in the United States.

From the paper:

“Drainage systems include a network of sewer pipes with auxiliary structures such as gutters, ditches, and pumping stations, tasked with collecting and evacuating water throughout human settlements (Fema, 2023a). Broadly, we can distinguish three types of sewers: separate stormwater sewers, sanitary sewers, and combined sewers, which respectively carry only stormwater, only sewerage, or both (USDHEW, 1964; USEPA, 2015). The relationship between a system’s capacity and local flood occurrence is more salient for combined sewer systems. Indeed, while they channel both rainwater and wastewater to treatment plants during periods of low precipitation, exceeding the capacity of the system during periods of heavy precipitation can lead to the backflow of untreated wastewater and stormwater into basements or surface streets via manholes (USEPA, 1999). In the case of separate sewer systems, local flooding could occur due to two phenomena termed Infiltration and Inflow. The first term refers to groundwater seeping into defective pipes or sewer joints, while the second refers to surface water, usually stormwater, which flows quickly into sewers. A 1990 report from the EPA to Congress, on rainfall-induced infiltration (RII) into sewer systems, indicates that most collection and treatment systems in the U.S. do not have the capacity to withstand peak flows during the rainy season, resulting in backups into buildings and overflows (USEPA, 1990). A 1970 survey of local jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada shows that these two problems are pervasive and create significant damages, which include back-flooding of sewerage into public roads and private properties, creating basement flooding, and properties inundation (APWA, 1970). Moreover, most capacity-related separate sewer overflows are related to wet-weather events (ASCE, 2004).”

+ + +

+  “The UMSCA lacks legal tools to enjoin corporations from defying their obligations to workers or the public good. Like NAFTA, the UMSCA’s main goal is to continue facilitating investments regardless of their social and environmental consequences.” New on PW, Alejandra González Jiménez on labor struggles in the context of Mexico’s electric vehicle boom. Link.

+  On July 1, at 4pm EDT, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Phenomenal World will host an online conversation between Noah Gordon, David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times, and Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay of the Polycrisis. Link to register.

+  “The price of mobilising private capital under the current austerity-minded Washington Consensus is therefore further dependence on fickle foreign investors.” Advait Arun in The Break Down. Link. And see Arun’s PW essay on the limits of private finance. Link. 

+  Mick Dueholm, Aakash Kalyani, and Serdar Ozkan consider how tight labor markets incentivize investment and automation. Link.

+  “The cancellation of congestion pricing jeopardizes key funding and matching federal dollars for a suite of the MTA’s construction projects at the 11th hour.” By Joseph Politano. Link.

+  “Our proposal to challenge mainstream comparative law’s coloniality lies in the idea of decolonial comparative law: a re-articulation of comparative law on the basis of decolonial theory.” By Lena Salaymeh and Ralf Michaels. Link.

+  Lenore Palladino and Harrison Karlewicz on public pension funds and the dominance of private financial markets. Link. 

+  “Contrary to a widely held view that India’s economic growth has been services-led, the article claims that in the last two decades, India has had manufacturing-led economic growth, not service-led.” By Bishwanath Goldar. Link. 

+  “In over four years, the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum process has failed to approve the identification of a single ineligible Israeli unit.” By Charles O. (Cob) Blaha. Link.

+  “Zong! #3, one of a cycle of poems written by M. NourbeSe Philip, exposes the tension between different (and sometimes competing) conceptualizations of value that characterised the enslavement of black Africans. ‘Some negroes,’ the equivalent sum of negroes, were jettisoned like any other species of cargo, by Captain Luke Collingwood in the hopes of recovering the value of the insurance funds that had been secured by the slave owners. The slaves did not exist in themselves (as individual human beings) in the eyes of the law, or one may surmise, Captain Collingwood, but rather as a type of property that could be deemed superfluous—an ‘etcetera.’ The simultaneous presence of these competing forms of value in the same object (a slave’s value, however ambiguous, as a person marked by racial difference, and her value as a commodity) speaks to the coemergence of modern conceptualizations of race and modern forms of property.” By Brenna Bhandar. Link.

Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org