Financialization of energy vulnerability in Palestine: a conversation with Tareq Radi

It all begins in 2007.

This

is a

year

after Hamas had a landslide victory and was democratically elected against the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.

The U.S. and international community had decided to impose financial sanctions on the territories.

There's a lot of stuff that happens in between, but this generated political and economic crises within Gaza and the West Bank that then eventually led to the split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, between the governance being in Gaza and the West Bank.

And during this time, the U.S. then decided to impose a strategy called West Bank First Strategy, which the basic idea was they were going to establish economic policies that were supposed to improve life, improve mobility, give a good vision of what life could be through economic investment, while economically and politically abandoning Gaza under Hamas's rule, with the hope that this would eventually

generate

support

for the Palestinian Authority and turn the population against Hamas.

So between 2007 and 2017, when I first started this research, there was just a massive wave of financialization that overtook the West Bank's economy.

I mean, we saw an expansion of banks.

We saw an expansion of personal loans.

We saw housing developments go up.

So I started to study this process a little bit more deeply.

All of it was generated when I talked about like how to generate support for the Palestinian Authority was under the guise of providing affordable housing.

So they created a mortgage facility in 2007 with the aim of providing affordable housing.

But in reality, when you looked at the cost of the housing, less than 10% of the population could actually afford those houses.

So

immediately as a young master's student, I was like, okay, what's actually happening here? How did this lead to this massive expansion?

And what I ended up finding is that actually it wasn't about providing affordable housing, but rather expanding the banking sector through the extension of credit through all circuits in the production of housing.

This explanation is going to give the political economic context to understanding how solar panel projects today relate to this previous investment.

In Palestine, you have the state, the Palestine Investment Fund, which is our sovereign fund.

You have the banking sector, and then you have the private sector, which is dominated by a network of holding companies that really I mean, you'll have a company like Pataco that we'll be talking about today, which is the Palestinian development and investment company.