"As destructive as the legacies of the Paris Protocol have been for the PA’s fiscal health, its current insolvency cannot be reduced to the misdeeds of Israel alone. Another major problem is the PA’s local revenue generation efforts. The PA’s woeful performance in terms of local revenue generation ultimately derives from the class biases, ideological delusion and rampant corruption that have undergirded the Palestinian national project ever since its reterritorialization within the Occupied Territories (if not before). These pillars of the contemporary political economy were laid down at the foundation of the PA, when the political party Fatah’s returning heroes opted to cede development planning and economic management to World Bank technocrats and a narrow coterie of business elites, the majority of whom had accumulated their fortunes while exiled in the petromonarchies of the Gulf. Provided ideological cover by PLO and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat’s axiomatic assertion that s
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51