Content area
Full text
Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution. By Glenn E. Robinson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 228p. $14.95.
Ian S. Lustick, University of Pennsylvania Although seldom included in comparative treatments of revolution, social movements, or decolonization, the Palestinian revolt of 1987-93, commonly known by its Arabic name as the "Intifada," has been well documented and studied. Dozens of books and articles have established a number of important characteristics of its causes, beginnings, and dynamics. The Intifada resembled many previous eruptions of Palestinian opposition to Israeli occupation, but it was so much more sustained, involved such a huge proportion of the population, and had such a substantial effect on Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that it is appropriately addressed as the kind of revolutionary upsurge which in many other countries during this period produced new regimes and even new polities.
As are many of the works that preceded Building a Palestinian State, Glenn Robinson's book is substantially based on field research and direct observation conducted during the very throes of the struggle. The distinctiveness of this study, however, lies in the fact that it was prepared as a book not only after the end of the Intifada and after the signing of the Oslo Peace Agreement between Israel and the PLO, but also after Arafat's assumption of the presidency of the Palestinian Authority within portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip no longer ruled directly by Israel. This affords the author the opportunity not only to place the Intifada within an appropriate historical and regional context-highlighting the relatively late development of an antinotable, nationalist "counterelite" in Palestine-but also to assess its limited success in comparison to similar elites in neighboring countries, to what Israeli governments seem ready to accept as a permanent settlement, and to the aspirations of grassroots Intifada leaders themselves. According to Robinson, the thousands of young, educated, and prison-toughened Palestinians who comprise the emergent elite were seeking to substitute...