5. The West Bank-Israel Economic Integration: Palestinian Interaction with the Israeli Border and Permit Regimes

This contribution engages critically with the literature on the economic relations between the West Bank and Israel. It attempts at both highlight various relationships neglected in previous research and drawing on new analytical foundations. Sweeping characterizations of the Palestinian economy as de-developed and dependent obscure the complexity of economic relations at a disaggregated level. Israel’s colonial domination of the West Bank has indeed resulted in a deprived, exploited and pauperized economy, but it has also given rise to profit-seekers and cross-border networks. Therefore, the chapter focuses on smugglers and permit brokers as two examples of the under-researched interaction between Palestinian economic actors and the Israeli occupation. For this purpose, two analytical tools are employed to shed light on the variety of positions that Palestinian actors actually occupy in the context of economic integration with Israel. First, the idea of borders as selective “corridors,” and not only rigid barriers, enables us to identify a wide range of border-crossing activities that entail different types of encounters with Israel’s border regime. Second, precisely because of the rigidity of Israel’s segregating measures, brokerage plays a pivotal role in inventing and enabling new economic relations.