Amos Elon, in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, reviews Sari Nusseibeh’s “Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life.” Elon summarizes Nusseibeh’s portrayal what the “peace process” installed in the West Bank and
He offers a rare insider’s view of the disorder, incompetence, mismanagement, and widespread corruption in the Palestinian government Arafat formed in 1994.
The new Palestinian ministers and other highly placed Palestinians had arrived from exile in
Tunis unprepared for their tasks. Some were aging revolutionaries in elegant Armani suits. They hadn’t been to the West Bank since 1948 and did not understand the problems and needs of its people. Nor did they bother to learn. They were dazzled, Nusseibeh writes, by the trappings of power, the state visits, the new flow of uncontrolled international development funds, their luxury cars, the adulation of West Bank Palestinians. They had no inclination to study reports or to listen to the local people who worked for them. Some were thoroughly corrupt. A few were simply "malevolent thugs." They acted as if they were demigods to the people under them, but ran to Arafat for permission to hire a secretary. Some — former members of the security services among them — rushed to make deals with shady Israeli businessmen in order to enrich themselves quickly with monopolies on gas, food supplies, and other vital commodities. Only after dire warnings from the World Bank did Arafat agree to appoint a commission of inquiry into such corruption. Nusseibeh was one of its members.
The commission submitted a devastating three-hundred-page report. More than 40 percent of the Palestinian Authority’s budget was said to be squandered through corruption and mismanagement. Arafat read the report but did nothing about it. . . . . Nusseibeh approvingly cites a report in The Guardian describing the Palestinian government as a "nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and naked extortion."