Consociation in a Constant State of Contingency? The case of the Palestinian Territory

Abstract

It has become common to regard consociational democracy as a method of managing conflict in ethnically divided societies but little attention has been paid to its applicability to societies where the primary political cleavage is between secular and religious forces. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by examining the applicability of consociationalism to the case of the Palestinian Territory. We argue that, while Palestinian society is characterised by ‘pillarisation’ along a secularist/Islamist cleavage, formal power-sharing between the representatives of the two main Palestinian factions, namely Fatah and Hamas, has proved elusive. However, rather than seeking to explain the seeming inability of the factions to share power by reference to the nature of the cleavage, as other authors have done, we instead highlight the contextual factors that have made power sharing difficult to achieve, namely the difficulties Hamas and Fatah face in accepting each other as political partners, and opposition from external actors.

Notes

We would like to thank Abdelafo S Aker (Abud), Saeb Erekat, Are Hovdenak, Stefan Krauss, Heather Marquette, Colin Scicluna, Stefan Wolff and Sami Zemni for their helpful comments and suggestions at various stages in the preparation of this article. Our thanks also go to Shahid Qadir, and to our anonymous reviewers for recommending our work for publication. Responsibility for any mistakes or omissions remains, of course, our own.

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60 See Tuastad, ‘The role of international clientelism in the national factionalism of Palestine’.

61 Ibid.

62 For Palestinians this is an annual day of commemoration of the displacement that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948.

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69 A version of the text is available publicly (see note 65), but this version is not official and is not signed. On the accuracy of this text and other questions that remain unanswered in regard to the content of the agreement, see Y Yehoshua, The Fatah–Hamas Situation: Was there an Agreement?, Middle East Media Research Institute Inquiry & Analysis Series Report 699, 24 June 2011, at http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5402.htm, accessed 23 August 2011.

70 The period since Hamas's electoral victory in January 2006 has seen many initiatives designed to restore some semblance of Palestinian unity. There have been talks in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Cairo as well as in Israel. Some of those bore no fruit at all; others led to short-term or partial agreements. Despite these efforts, divisions among Palestinian leaders remained deep. See NJ Brown, ‘Can Cairo reassemble Palestine?’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace web commentary, November 2008, at http://carnegieendowment.org/files/cairo_palestine.pdf, accessed 23 August 2011.

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