Yusif Sayigh Development Lecture

In the 2025 Yusif Sayigh Development Lecture delivered today globally from MAS in Palestine, Professor Adam Tooze of Columbia University provided a wide-ranging analysis of the global and regional forces that will shape reconstruction in Palestine in the coming years. He both warned of the pitfalls facing Palestine amidst a global great-power struggle for influence, alliances, resources and capital centered increasingly in the Middle East.  But he nevertheless pointed to opportunities that might emerge for leveraging Palestinian national economic and political interests in a rapidly changing regional landscape.

He was joined by the Palestinian Minister of Planning, Dr. Estephane Salameh as discussant, who shared his own thoughts on the arguments of the lecturer and the issues surrounding reconstruction in the near and medium term.

Tooze prefaced his analysis with his own readings of recent MAS studies and reports, produced since the start of this latest phase of the long struggle, which he said “are a remarkable body of work that deserve far wider hearing.”

Comparing scholasticide and mass starvation in Gaza with that in Sudan, Tooze affirmed that the conclusion is unambiguous. The numbers in Sudan are vast, but the concentration of firepower, the asymmetry, the deliberation in Gaza is of a different order. What is also remarkable is that there is a different kinds of resistance: The Gaza population did not yield. Their clear desire was to stay. Furthermore he pointed out, the Israelis received aid and applause, but they could find no partner for their project of expulsion.

“And that impasse, produced by Palestinian resistance mattered. Israel had been throttling Gaza’s nutrition, but it was now driving it to starvation. And those images had a shock effect. They weakened international support and intensified the political crisis of Israel. The move from apartheid to an open embrace of genocide produced revulsion and a splintering of the pro-Zionist coalition,

This opens the possibility to one of the scenarios suggested in the MAS Political Economy report, which is the sudden turn in a quite different direction: A combination of Palestinian direct power through resistance and national unity, influencing the global and regional policy agenda and longer-term shifts in Israeli and global perceptions, pushing Israel to cede land for peace, imposing international law, and ensuring equal national rights and justice for Palestine (in contradiction to the current aims of national-religious Zionism in Israel).

This “emergence scenario” captures the emphatically political demand that if the project of formulating the conditions of possibility for a Palestinian economy makes any sense it must be on the basis of explicitly formulating a horizon of a permanent status. Not simply a process but a goal and that goal must start with the basic conditions for a viable and sovereign Palestinian economy.

Tooze added: “When it comes to reconstruction planning, MAS provides the indispensable reference. Its recent dissection of the range of Gaza plans is a sustained piece of brilliance. But it is also couched in terms of general categories of politicization, depoliticization etc. This is hugely illuminating. But it is also, dare I say, it too surgical. Certainly too surgical to do justice to the kind of thing that comes out of Washington these days.

In concluding, Tooze ventured: "If we ask what are the forces that help to condition the radical openness and fluidity of the situation in Palestine, my simple comments would be:

1. In the insistence on development for Palestine and the scandal of de-development, don’t underestimate the radicalism of development elsewhere. Exactly as you say the form may be the same but the content is what it is all about. Economic growth is not equal economic growth. True development is inherently political and historical.

2. On the main axes of the world power structure, as a result of true development, we are in the midst of a manifest crisis that goes to heart of US power.

3. The pace at which that crisis is unfolding is breathtaking. The Chinese green energy revolution happened during COVID. Hyperscaling during the Gaza war.

Tooze warns: “The result is that though the basic players in the Middle East may be the same, quite unlike in the 1990s the broader question of what international order is, what development means and what the imaginary of the future is more open than at any time since the 1940s. That includes the possibility of the “emergence trajectory”. The question is how to assemble the coalition of forces that will allow that sudden shift.