The Village Leagues : Israel’s native authority and the 1981-1982 Intifada

Abstract

After the 1967 Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Israeli military commander Moshe Dayan adopted an approach to Palestinian society that purportedly kept the occupation “invisible,” allowing for the continuation of the preexisting Jordanian system of governing through a network of urban and rural West Bank notables. After Menachem Begin’s Likud party, ideological opposed to any territorial compromise, won the 1977 Israeli elections and signed the Camp David Agreements with Egypt, Israeli strategy over the West Bank changed to one in which the imposition of a Palestinian Native Authority became central. The first attempt to impose such a Native Authority was called the Village Leagues, a subject about which very little has been written. This thesis attempts to fill this gap in the literature through research in the newspapers of the period to tell the story of the Village Leagues and the Palestinian uprising that defeated them. The thesis also includes an examination of the shift in Israeli colonial strategies and objectives engendered by the coming to power of Likud. Central to the form that the Palestinian Native Authority took in 1981-1982 (the Village Leagues) was Israeli knowledge production about Palestinian society that was carried out by academic orientalists who also served as military advisers and strategists. The final chapter of the thesis examines Israeli orientalism and how it contributed to the rise and fall of the Village Leagues as an idea and as a failed colonial strategy.