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The Palestinian Cooperative Movement: An Arena of Confrontation Over Social Production and Reproduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2025

Faiq Mari Open the ORCID record for Faiq Mari [Opens in a new window]
Faiq Mari*
Affiliation:
Department of Architectural Engineering and Planning, Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestinian Territory
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Email: fmari@birzeit.edu
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Abstract

The word taʿawuniyya (“cooperative”) in Palestine today can mean multiple things. It can mean a registered cooperative, or can loosely refer to any initiative based on collective labor and possession, geared toward a collective societal benefit—a communal garden, for example. This vernacular usage of the term, close to the concept of the commons, is borne out of Palestinian history and is an invitation to go beyond the formal definition of a cooperative when searching for a Palestinian “cooperative movement.” Registered cooperatives in Palestine have historically played a role that ranged from subordination and placation by ruling authorities to reformist and survival mechanisms for a colonized population. Informal cooperatives, on the other hand, played roles that surpassed survival and attempted to upend the basis of colonial control. Apart from structure and labor relations, what unites both senses of the term “cooperative” is the political role they have played, as well as their tendency to focus on basic necessities such as food and housing. The history of the cooperative movement in Palestine tells a story of social production and reproduction as an arena of struggle, particularly against Zionist colonization. This essay will give an overview of this history, focusing mainly on the areas of Palestine occupied in 1967.

Keywords

PalestineZionist colonizationsettler-colonialismcooperativescooperativismsocial reproductionanti-colonial struggleliberation struggleWest BankGaza

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International Labor and Working-Class History , First View , pp. 1 - 11
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

The beginnings: late Ottoman and British mandate periods

Institutions of collective labor and possession existed in Palestine in different forms during the late Ottoman period and before, such as the mashaʿ (or mushaʿ) land tenure system.Footnote 1 Formal “cooperative societies,” however, were first founded in Palestine during the late Ottoman period by Zionist colonists, who imported their cooperative model from Europe. British colonization under a League of Nations mandate legally inaugurated the cooperative movement through the enactment of the “Cooperative Societies Ordinance” of 1920.Footnote 2 This act aimed to meet the demands of Jewish colonists in Palestine, whose credit and agricultural cooperative associations had operated without Ottoman recognition. It also aimed to provide a modern legal framework for developing capitalist commerce and industries in Palestine.Footnote 3 Both aims ultimately facilitated the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

The earliest Jewish cooperatives under the British Mandate were credit and thrift societies, followed by agricultural production and marketing societies; housing, industry, and consumer cooperative societies; and societies for the management of collective or cooperative settlements (kibbutzim and kvutzoth).Footnote 4 These cooperatives were supported by international Zionist colonial organizations and capital.Footnote 5 All were instrumental in helping the inchoate Jewish colonization of Palestine gain control over land and labor. In the case of the kibbutz, for example, cooperative labor was a means to achieve the “conquest of labor” (i.e. employing Jewish rather than Palestinian workers in settler enterprises, despite greater cost) and thereby, in the words of Ben Gurion, ensure that settlers belong to Palestine by being its workers and not merely its landlords.Footnote 6

By 1932, there were 376 registered Jewish cooperative societies, alongside three Arab cooperative societies.Footnote 7 In 1933, the British colonial authorities issued a new “Cooperative Societies Ordinance” which aimed to extend cooperative societies to Palestine’s native Arab population, and particularly its peasants.Footnote 8 Extending cooperatives to the Palestinian population was posited as a developmental policy aimed at bettering the conditions of the peasant and increasing the efficiency of peasant production, which would ultimately increase tax revenue for the government.Footnote 9 An underlying goal, however, was to placate the restive Palestinian population – especially peasants – who stood against British colonial policies, including expropriation and support for Jewish colonization.Footnote 10 Nonetheless, while the British Mandate intended to use cooperatives toward its own ends, Palestinian peasants were often reluctant to cooperate with the authorities or attempted to use these cooperatives toward their own political aims.Footnote 11 British authorities thus faced challenges in their introduction of cooperative societies to the Palestinian peasantry, but by 1933 already twenty-six Arab cooperatives had been registered, and by 1937 the number reached 127 (compared with 871 Jewish cooperatives) despite the peasant-led Great Revolt of the prior year.Footnote 12 By 1948, there were 244 Arab cooperatives, most of which were agricultural and received around 84 percent of their capital from Mandatory government loans.Footnote 13

In effect, these Arab cooperative societies—not unlike the mandate’s land registration project—were yet another facet of the colonial capitalist state’s attempts to incorporate the Palestinians’ production and reproduction, fostering market dependence while facilitating British goals in Palestine, including Zionist colonization.Footnote 14 Meanwhile, Jewish cooperatives constituted a major building block of the Zionist state-in-formation.

1948–1967: In the shadow of the nakba

After the Nakba of 1948, the states ruling the land of Palestine changed, but the role formal cooperatives played remained similar: as reformist tools of placation and demobilization. Yet despite these intentions, these cooperatives did provide a source of livelihood, especially for rural communities, and a contact point for basic agricultural extension and short-term lending.Footnote 15 In the West Bank, the ruling Jordanian regime encouraged cooperatives as means of maintaining its rule by dampening the economic repercussions of the Nakba. Starting in 1952, Jordan issued several laws to support cooperatives and established institutes and departments to offer training, auditing, marketing, and other services to the fledgling sector.Footnote 16 Between 1948 and 1967, the number of cooperatives in the West Bank rose from forty-two to 222 or 238. The majority were agricultural, but they also included consumer and service cooperatives.Footnote 17 These cooperatives, however, were little more than temporary tools used by Palestinians to receive funding and by 1966 most of them were frozen and awaiting dissolution. On the other hand, even the funding they supplied constituted a fraction of what other public and private institutions lent to farmers seasonally.Footnote 18 In Egyptian-ruled Gaza the number of cooperatives reached sixty by 1967, thirty-two of which were part of a centralized consumer cooperative.Footnote 19 Within Israel’s 1948 borders, Palestinians were repressed, expropriated, and excluded from the Israeli Farmers Union. Though some small water, infrastructure, or housing cooperatives emerged, no successful agricultural cooperative did.Footnote 20

1967–1993: the occupation

Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 brought significant changes to Palestinian cooperatives. Israeli authorities first froze their activities, then attempted to use them as counterinsurgency tools. Jordan and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), on the other hand, utilized cooperatives to support the livelihood of Palestinians, while remaining limited by the bounds set by the ruling Israeli military occupation. Relatedly, in the same period, the phenomenon of informal cooperatives grew significantly as a countermeasure, especially during the first intifada and at the hands of leftist Palestinian parties. The range of roles that formal and informal cooperatives here assumed, or aspired to, mirrored the debate on development under occupation during the period.

In the immediate aftermath of 1967, the occupying Israeli regime blocked the development of the productive cooperative sector and froze its local representative bodies. West Bank cooperatives remained registered in Jordan, but were rendered inactive. In the late 1970s, Israel began to encourage the formation of cooperatives as a means of controlling the Palestinian population. Cooperatives featured in the very first public debut of the Village Leagues, local bodies run by collaborators that mediated between the Palestinian population and the Israeli military’s Civil Administration. Though these cooperatives and their ill-fated parent Leagues were ostensibly meant to benefit villagers neglected by local politicians, in reality, they aimed to stoke geographic, familial, confessional, and urban-rural divisions within Palestinian society. Ultimately, Israel’s goal was to develop dependent local institutions that could claim to represent Palestinians in negotiations that further Israeli goals, sidelining the increasingly popular PLO.Footnote 21

Two other channels for the support of cooperatives emerged in the late 1970s, and both were also delimited by Israel’s rule. The first was international NGOs, and particularly American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which funded a range of projects that aimed to improve Palestinians’ living conditions under occupation. The second was the Jordanian-Palestinian Joint Committee (JPJC), a body formed by the Arab League in 1978 to support the sumud (“steadfastness”) of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). The JPJC distributed the League’s funds in projects such as cooperatives and was jointly run by the PLO and Jordan.

But Israel held supreme authority over these actors’ projects; in the case of cooperatives, the legal framework Israel enforced granted it the power to sanction their formation, to oversee their operations, to vet and even appoint each cooperative’s board, and to approve or deny any project undertaken by them. By and large, Israel supported or condoned cooperatives and their activities only inasmuch as it believed them to further its own goals.Footnote 22 International NGOs, and particularly USAID and ANERA, coordinated their projects with the Israeli occupation regime and worked to placate the Palestinian population and facilitate Israeli plans while relieving Israel of its commitments to the occupied population (e.g. infrastructure maintenance). Economically, their projects were geared toward integrating the Palestinian economy with Israel’s, and politically, they aimed to cultivate a “moderate leadership.”Footnote 23 JPJC projects served a range of goals. For Jordan, funding was geared toward garnering support among locals in the West Bank and strengthening the notables allied with it, while for the PLO’s Fatah leadership, it aimed to support local steadfastness, but in an increasingly corrupt manner that heightened dependence and loyalty to that leadership.Footnote 24

Eighty-three cooperatives were founded in the West Bank between 1967 and 1979, and an additional seventy-six were established by 1983. Only ten cooperatives were established in Gaza during the same period.Footnote 25 The cooperatives founded across this period included agricultural cooperatives, which were present in 50 percent of oPt villages and included 15 percent of oPt farmers, and offered various material and immaterial benefits, including loans.Footnote 26 They also included housing cooperatives that offered loans and access to housing.Footnote 27 Other examples included consumer cooperatives, water and electricity cooperatives, bakeries, and light manufacturing.Footnote 28 Nonetheless, the cooperative nature of these institutions was questionable—most acted as mere instruments for members to receive funding and services. Funding itself was not based on feasibility studies or assessment, and resembled charity work. In effect, registered (formal) cooperatives, while offering crucial services to a struggling population, acted to increase the dependency of Palestinians on the bodies that funded or controlled formal cooperatives’ operation: Israel, Western states, Jordan, and the PLO leadership—each pursuing its own political goals.Footnote 29

Across this period, Israel weaponized service provision through the denial or conditional approval of services and attempted to subordinate Palestinian labor and economic activity. In response, and under a climate of repression of direct political activism, leftist Palestinian parties in the oPt developed a range of institutions, including volunteer, women’s, and specialized professional committees and their unions that geared production and reproduction toward the liberation struggle.Footnote 30 Many of those committees founded small, unregistered cooperatives that had informal structures and limited capital. These included food processing cooperatives founded by women’s committees and farmer cooperatives founded by agricultural committees. This was a model intentionally developed to overcome the dependent models of formal cooperatives and charities; and being unregistered, these cooperatives could circumvent the monitoring and diktats of the Israeli military administration.Footnote 31

These informal cooperatives played several roles: they supported the livelihood of their members, provided a substitute for labor in the Israeli market, gave female members an independent income as well as space that allowed them to participate in national politics, and supported rural farmers with agricultural extension services, seeds, and marketing. Some cooperatives supported the operations of rural activist cadre groups by providing a source of income independent from their party and therefore more secure. Islamic organizations (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) had their own cooperatives at the time, also focused on basic reproductive necessities like daycare and groceries, which they used to expand their social base and spread their thought.

While the economic effects of such cooperatives remained limited, given that their number, membership, and capital were limited, the political role they played was significant. Like other “popular organizations”—unions, committees, cooperatives, and the like—they functioned as cogs in the machine of nationalist political mobilization.Footnote 32 The effect of these cooperatives manifested itself during the First Intifada, which witnessed a rapid expansion in their kind and number.Footnote 33

The uprising, sparked by an Israeli truck driver ramming Palestinian workers from Gaza and killing four, evolved in weeks from a spontaneous mobilization into one led by political parties and their popular bodies like unions and committees. The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) focused on attaining autonomy from Israeli authorities, which was to be achieved partly through boycott of the colonial labor market, its goods and services, and creating alternatives. The UNLU called on people to grow their own produce at home and in communal gardens at the urban neighborhood and village levels. For their part, the popular bodies played central roles in mobilizing the Intifada, and ramped up their cooperative projects among other productive and reproductive initiatives. The number of informal cooperatives increased significantly, including farms, a printing press, food processing, and other areas. Furthermore, communal gardens themselves came to be termed as cooperatives. One study in the Ramallah Governorate lists a sample of five youth cooperatives with 140 members (two of these cooperatives predated the Intifada), twenty neighborhood committees and gardens with 268 members, and sixteen farming families.Footnote 34 None of these initiatives were registered as cooperatives, of course, and many lacked a clear organizational form. However, the moniker accurately reflected the collective and collaborative nature of their labor and their pursuit of a greater good. Importantly, these cooperatives represented modes of organizing social labor toward political goals, turning production and reproduction from chokepoints that the Israeli authorities utilized to subdue and expel the Palestinian population, to an arena of defiance and a building block of revolutionary autonomy.

The role that cooperatives played, or were envisioned to play, within the Palestinian revolutionary movement was closely tied to visions and debates over development and steadfastness under occupation. Among the range of visions, some saw no possibility of development, others defined development under occupation as the maintenance of the colonized population on its land in the face of settler-colonial attempts at ethnic cleansing. Regardless of the terminology, the latter was the primary concern, while the tools for achieving it remained an open question. Those who envisioned a limited version of steadfastness on the land supported formal cooperatives like those backed by JPJC funding.Footnote 35 Informal cooperatives tied to the revolutionary movement, on the other hand, constituted a building block for models that advocated an expansive definition of steadfastness, which involved challenging the basis of subordination and not only its symptoms.Footnote 36 Between these two poles existed many perspectives, and cooperatives had a role in all of them.Footnote 37 However, these visions remained far from implementation, as both registered and informal cooperatives faced serious challenges. Many informal cooperatives, for example, sought donor aid due to their limited access to resources, and thus became mired in a form of dependency not entirely different from that of formal cooperatives.Footnote 38

1993-present: Oslo and the “peace process”

After the end of the first intifada, the signing of the Oslo Accords ushered in the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a form of Palestinian self-rule in the oPt. Cooperatives maintained their position as institutions of both the ruling authority and grassroots initiatives. Formal cooperatives played a similar role to many of the oPt’s post-Oslo civil society organizations: adopting a post-colonial neoliberal state-building project, and shifting Palestinians’ posture from fighters to dependent “entrepreneurs” and salaried workers, thus depoliticizing societal work and social reproduction.Footnote 39 Formal cooperatives’ role as top-down channels for conditional foreign funding grew; and while several NGOs, such as those with leftist grassroots origins, sought to escape dependency, they remained bound to donor aid stipulationsFootnote 40 as well as to the imperatives of the regulated NGO and cooperative space of the oPt.

The PA provided the institutional and legislative backing for this cooperative push. In 1995, the PA issued presidential decrees to mandate the continued application of Jordanian and British cooperative laws in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. In 2009, following the persistent efforts of local and international organizations such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), the PA began developing a national cooperative policy and a national cooperative law. The law finally came into effect by presidential decree in 2017.Footnote 41

By 2023, the number of formally registered cooperatives in the oPt was 780, of which only 369 were operational (i.e. 47.3 percent). The plurality of cooperatives were in the agricultural sector (45 percent), followed by the housing sector (29 percent) and the service sector (15 percent), while the artisanal and consumer sectors made up 8 and 3 percent, respectively. These cooperatives exhibit a high number of closures, a low number of employees, as well as high deficits and low revenues.Footnote 42

According to a number of local studies, cooperatives in the oPt suffer from several challenges and limitations. Studies identify challenges that relate to the PA (the weakness of the PA’s institutional and legal framework for cooperatives, taxation, lack of support or subsidies, and its open market system), challenges that relate to the cooperatives themselves and society more broadly (weak managerial capabilities, lack of awareness, and aid dependency), and challenges that relate to Israeli colonial policies (restrictions on movement, land confiscations, settlements and the apartheid wall, direct violence, water limitation, limitation on imports, and Israeli taxes and tariffs).Footnote 43 These various challenges can be explained by the oPt’s position within the colonial order prevailing in Palestine. Yet most policy recommendations regarding cooperatives, as Ahmed al-Huneiti argues, either overlook or contribute to the structural conditions that they seek to overcome.Footnote 44 Protectionist policies are not possible under the Oslo Accords’ commitments or the PA’s policy, and the PA is neither able nor designed to challenge Israeli colonial policies.Footnote 45 The aid structure that Oslo and the PA presume, as well as the form of market participation they recommend, both increase dependency among cooperatives.

Against the various limitations structurally imposed on registered cooperatives since the onset of PA rule, informal, unregistered cooperatives have remained an alternative that offers both economic and political possibilities. Informal cooperatives gained momentum in the aftermath of the second intifada (2000–2005), and more strongly in the mid-2010s, then again during the COVID-19 lockdownFootnote 46 and more recently in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Palestinians since October 2023, which, among its horrors, also resulted in the revocation of Palestinian workers’ permits in the Israeli labor market.Footnote 47 In all these instances, these cooperatives responded to economic hardship, offering a source of livelihood to their members.

These informal cooperatives have mostly been agricultural, an activity that, on the one hand, offers essential goods and, on the other hand, requires limited capital investment. However, there have also been coffee shops, food production cooperatives, plant nurseries, an engineers’ cooperative, and at least one cooperative that merges several activities in a model of a circular economy. Most of these cooperatives are located in villages or refugee camps and have between five and twenty members each, between the ages of sixteen and forty. Many of these cooperatives provide only a secondary source of income for most members while fully employing other members. I have counted thirty such cooperatives in operation between 2017 and 2024. Many others exist, but the full number is difficult to determine given their informality.Footnote 48

Since Oslo, informal cooperatives have also offered a space for mobilization, counteracting the political alienation faced especially by Palestinian youth. Many cooperative founders have been members of popular committees, former political prisoners, or others simply searching for a point of political intervention. Several have been motivated by an intention to build, through productive activity, the economic preconditions for political mobilization, with the belief that without sovereignty over necessities, Palestinians will remain hostage to the market and to colonial control. Cooperatives have also offered a space for political debate and exchange, and trailblazing attempts to overcome aid dependency. Yet they also face the risk of cooptation via offers of conditional aid and formal registration.

Conclusion

A “cooperative” has been a contested concept in Palestinian political discourse, with contradictory connotations that straddle between dependency and autonomy, resistance and domination, passivity and proactivity. A cooperative movement could imply either, and the direction it takes is very much a question of its political makeup and, relatedly, its developmental outlook under the conditions of colonialism. Indeed, this topic has been debated in Palestine since at least the 1980s.

Cooperatives continue to be relevant, in visions and in practice, and for different actors in Palestine. They offer a means to pool resources, whether for the purpose of participating in the market or providing for members’ livelihoods. They have focused on basic needs of a colonized population, and continue to show how social reproduction has been geared toward a range of goals, from domination and counter-insurgency, to sumud, to revolutionary change.

But a cooperative movement in the true sense hardly exists. For most members of formal cooperatives, the latter are a little more than temporary vessels for funding whose viability remains in question. Informal cooperatives resemble such a movement more closely, as they are self-directing and many of them coordinate their actions toward normative economic and social visions at various scales. These cooperatives remain small and limited in number, but are multiplying and developing. Both types face various challenges. Formal cooperatives suffer from the same conditions as capitalist enterprises under occupation, while their position in the PA’s economic policy remains marginal. Attempts to challenge the structural limitations imposed by Israel and the PA require a form of political organization, which the highly monitored registered cooperatives cannot facilitate under the oPt’s repressive environment. On the other hand, informal cooperatives—being less closely monitored and unregulated—offer a space for experimentation, including with alternative economic forms and political organization. However, they continue to face the challenge of limited resources. On the other hand, inasmuch as cooperatives may be intended as counter-insurgency institutions (as with Israel’s failed Village Leagues), they face the resistance of a highly politicized Palestinian population. For all these reasons, cooperatives continue to persevere, but without quite constituting a consolidated movement.

Nonetheless, the factors that have fostered the emergence of various kinds of cooperatives in Palestine persist and deepen. Zionist colonization is increasingly assuming the posture of ethnic cleansing. In Gaza, under the ongoing genocide, all means of Palestinian livelihood have been under attack, and in the West Bank, various populations face extreme violence and expropriation, and others are subjected to attempts at placation and demobilization. Meanwhile, the economic conditions of the West Bank are dire and increasingly volatile. All these factors put Palestinians’ social reproduction on the line, creating conditions for the continued formation of cooperatives—whether as tools of reform, domination, or liberation.

Acknowledgements

This research was undertaken with the support of an FWO Senior Research Project Grant G0AE125N for the project “Roots of Resistance: Palestine’s Struggle Against Green Colonialism” at the University of Antwerp, where the author is Senior Researcher.

References

Notes

1. Ya’akov Firestone, “Crop‐sharing Economics in Mandatory Palestine—Part I,” Middle Eastern Studies 11, no. 1 (1975): 3–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/00263207508700284; “Crop‐sharing Economics in Mandatory Palestine‐part II,” Middle Eastern Studies 11, no. 2 (1975): 175–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/00263207508700293; “The Land-Equalizing Mushā’ Village: A Reassessment,” in Ottoman Palestine 1800-1914, ed. Gad G. Gilbar (BRILL, 1990), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004661462_009; Munir Fakher Eldin, “Communities of Owners: Land Law, Governance, and Politics in Palestine, 1858–1948” (Doctoral dissertation, New York University, 2008), 30, 88, 142.

2. Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine; Report by the Registrar of Cooperative Societies on Developments during the Years 1921–1937, Jerusalem, 1938 (Printed at the Govt. Print. Press, 1938), 4.

3. Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine, 4.

4. Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine, 78.

5. Ahmed Al-Huneiti, Agricultural Cooperatives (Al-Taawuniyyat al-Zira’iyya), Silsilat Awraq Tanmawiyya (Bisan Centre, 2013), 7, available at: http://rosalux.ps/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B2%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%B9%D9%8A%D8%A9.pdf; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, 8 (2006): 388, 389; Talal Asad, “Class Transformation under the Mandate,” MERIP Reports, no. 53 (December 1976): 7, https://doi.org/10.2307/3011204.

6. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War (Oxford University Press, 1985), 140, available at: https://books.google.ps/books?id=BoltAAAAMAAJ.

7. Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine, 9.

8. It is revealing that the Registrar’s report (1938) described the Palestinian peasant as brutish and individualistic person incapable of collaboration while simultaneously praising traditional local collaborative institutions that were seen as seeds for a cooperative ethic to be utilized by Mandate authorities. While the official report claimed the inability of Palestinian peasants to collaborate, the Mandate was the one who abolished the peasants’ collective land possession arrangement, the mashaʿ, due to its perceived inefficiency (see note 14). Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine, 19–20.

9. Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine, 7.

10. Muwatin Team, Cooperatives in Palestine: Youth Unemployment, Poverty, Carelessness, and Higher Education (Al-Taʿawuniyyat fi Filastin) (Muwatin Institute for Human Rights and Democracy, 2021), 49.

11. Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine, 1.

12. Registrar of Cooperative Societies, Cooperative Societies in Palestine, 9.

13. Muwatin Team, Cooperatives in Palestine, 48–49.

14. In fact, both the land registration and the abolition of the mashaʿ were pushed and even carried out by Zionist individuals and organizations who saw in them a means for facilitating their colonial project. See: Dov Gavish, The Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate, 1920–1948 (London: Routledge, 2005), xiv; Aida Asim Essaid, Zionism and Land Tenure in Mandate Palestine, Routledge Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict; 12 (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 106.

15. “Agricultural Cooperatives in the West Bank an Analytical Perspective (Al-Taʿawuniyyat al-Ziraʿiyya fi al-Daffa al-Gharbiyya),” Samed Al-Iqtisadi, no. 46 (December 1983): 96.

16. Cooperative Housing International, “About Jordan—Cooperative Housing in Jordan: History, Current State, and Key Insights,” Housing International, accessed June 21, 2025, https://www.housinginternational.coop/co-ops/jordan/; ICA-AP, Legal Framework Analysis within the ICA-EU Partnership: National Report of Palestine, Legal Analysis, Legal Framework Analysis within the ICA-EU Partnership (International Cooperative Alliance Asia and Pacific, 2019), available at: https://coops4dev.coop/sites/default/files/filefield_paths/National%20Report%20-%20Palestine.pdf; Al-Huneiti, Agricultural Cooperatives, 8; Jordan Cooperative Corporation, “The Establishment and Evolution of the Jordanian Cooperative Movement,” Jordan Cooperative Corporation, June 1, 2025, available at: https://jcc.gov.jo/EN/List/Achievements_of_the__Foundation.

17. Muwatin Team, Cooperatives in Palestine, 49; Cooperative Housing International, “Cooperative Housing in Jordan”; ICA-AP, Legal Framework Analysis; Al-Huneiti, Agricultural Cooperatives, 8; Jordan Cooperative Corporation, “JCC Achievements”; Khalil Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations in Palestine: Towards Societal Development (Mu’assasatna Al-Ahliyya fi Falastin) (Jerusalem, 1990), 20–21; Adnan Ibeidat, Agricultural Cooperatives (Al-Taʿawuniyyat Al-Ziraʿiyya), Development for Sumud Conference (Mu’tamar Al-Tanmiya min Ajl al-Sumud) (Al-Multaqa Al-Fikri Al-Arabi, 1981), 21.

18. “Agricultural Cooperatives,” 97.

19. Jihad Al-Shrouf, The Development of Cooperative Legislations in Palestine (Tatawwur al-Tashriʿat fi Filastin) (Ministry of Labor, General Directorate of Cooperatives, 2010), 2, available at: https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@arabstates/@ro-beirut/documents/genericdocument/wcms_210779.pdf; Al-Huneiti (2013) states that the number of cooperatives in Gaza in 1967 was sixty-two although only seventeen of them were active.

20. Raja Khalidi, “The Economy of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel,” in The Palestinian Economy (RLE Economy of Middle East) (Routledge, 2015), 48.

21. Salim Tamari, “In League with Zion: Israel’s Search for a Native Pillar,” Journal of Palestine Studies 12, no. 4 (1983): 41–56, available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2536244; “Agricultural Cooperatives,” 100.

22. “Agricultural Cooperatives,” 102–104; Al-Shrouf, The Development of Cooperative Legislations in Palestine.

23. Ibrahim Dakkak, “Development from within: A Strategy for Survival,” in The Palestinian Economy (RLE Economy of Middle East) (Routledge, 2015), 292–93; Awartani, “Agricultural Development and Policies,” 153; Al-Huneiti, Agricultural Cooperatives, 10; Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations, 35–39.

24. Dakkak, “Development from Within,” 290; Mahram Barghouthi, “A New Conceptualization of Development (Tanmiya bi Mafhum Mukhtalif),” Al-Kateb 7, no. 78 (1986): 45–56; Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations, 32–39.

25. Awartani, “Agricultural Development and Policies,” 157; Al-Shrouf, The Development of Cooperative Legislations in Palestine, 2; Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations, 21; “Agricultural Cooperatives,” 101; Al-Huneiti, Agricultural Cooperatives, 11.

26. “Agricultural Cooperatives in the West Bank an Analytical Perspective (Al-Taʿawuniyyat al-Ziraʿiyya fi al-Daffa al-Gharbiyya),” 102–103; Adnan Ibeidat, Achievements of the Joint Palestinian Jordanian Committee and the Lessons Learned (Munjazat al-Lajna al-Urduniyya al-Falastiniyya al-Mushtaraka), 5, no. 1 (1995): 52–60; Bseiso, “The Role of Housing in Achieving the National Sumud Strategy in the Occupied Territory (Dawr al-Iskan fi Tahqiq Istratijiyyat Da’m Al-Sumud),” Samed Al-Iqtisadi 9, nos. 69–70 (1987).

27. Between 1980-1986 the JPJC earmarked 18.2 percent of its budget to housing. It supported forty-three cooperatives with 9.5 million Jordanian Dinars, benefitting 1415 families. See: Fuad Bseiso, “The Role of Housing” 20, 29–33.

28. Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations, 22.

29. Ahmed Al-Huneiti, Agricultural Cooperatives, 10; Mahram Barghouthi, “A New Conceptualization,” 45–46; “Agricultural Cooperatives,” 100; Khalil Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations, 35–39.

30. Faiq Mari, “Masha’ of the Periphery: Collective Labor and Property in Palestinian Liberation Struggle” (Doctoral Thesis, ETH Zurich, 2024), Chap. 2, https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000705191; Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations; Odeh Shehadeh, “The Palestinian Economy: 21 Years from Dependency to Intifada,” in The Uprising is a Popular Initiative: A Study of the Roles of Social Forces (Al-Intifada Mubadara Sha’biyya) (1990).

31. Shehadeh, “The Palestinian Economy: 21 Years,” 185; Nakhleh, Our Civil Organizations.

32. Ibrahim Dakkak, “Development from within: A Strategy for Survival,” in The Palestinian Economy (RLE Economy of Middle East) (Routledge, 2015), 304–306. In the Palestinian shatat (diaspora), Palestinian political parties since the start of the Modern Palestinian Revolution in the 1960s similarly utilized cooperatives as part of liberation struggle. These included a few cooperative kitchens and women workshops, farmers’ cooperatives, consumer cooperatives. See: Mari, “Masha’ of the Periphery,” 61–87.

33. Shehadeh, “The Palestinian Economy: 21 Years,” 184–185.

34. Shehadeh, “The Palestinian Economy: 21 Years,” 184–196.

35. Bseiso, “The Role of Housing”; Adnan Ibeidat, Agricultural Cooperatives.

36. Adel Samara, Cooperatives, 2018; ‘Adil. Samara, Beyond De-Linking: Development by Popular Protection vs. Development by State (Al-Mashriq Al-A’amil for Cultural and Development Studies, 2005).

37. Barghouthi, “A New Conceptualization”; Hisham Awartani, “A General Overview of Agriculture in the West Bank (Nathra ‘Amma ‘ala Awda’ al-Ziraʿa fi al-Daffa al-Gharbiyya),” Samed Al-Iqtisadi, no. 46 (December 1983): 17–52; Mahram Barghouthi et al., “Development, Its Conceptualization, and Its Horizons in the Occupied Territories (al-Tanmiya, Mafhumha, Wa Aqafaq Tatawwurha Fi Al-Manatiq Al-Muhtalla),” Al-Kateb, no. 71 (March 1986); George T. Abed, ed., The Palestinian Economy (RLE Economy of Middle East): Studies in Development under Prolonged Occupation, 0 ed., vol. 24, Routledge Library Editions: The Economy of the Middle East (Routledge, 2015), DOI: 10.4324/9781315744704, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781317592921.

38. Shehadeh, “The Palestinian Economy: 21 Years,” 187.

39. In the words of the International Cooperative Alliance Asia and Pacific (ICA-AP), since the establishment of the PA “cooperatives have focused on peace building and socio-economic development of people…” See ICA-AP, Cooperatives in the State of Palestine (International Cooperative Alliance Asia and Pacific, 2022), 3, https://icaap.coop/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/20March22_Palestine-Country-Snapshot.pdf

For more on the transformation of civil society organizations during this period see: Linda Tabar, Humanitarian Aid: Deconstructing Anticolonial Resistance Towards Alternative Solidarity (Al-Musa’adat Al-Insaniyya), Development Papers (Birzeit University, Development Studies Program, 2012), 1–28, https://fada.birzeit.edu/handle/20.500.11889/7639: Linda Tabar, Humanitarian Aid: Deconstructing Anticolonial Resistance Towards Alternative Solidarity (Al-Musaʿadat Al-Insaniyya), Development Papers (Birzeit University, Development Studies Program, 2012), 1–28, available at: https://fada.birzeit.edu/handle/20.500.11889/7639.

40. Al-Huneiti, 17.

41. The contemporary formal cooperative sector in the West Bank is structured hierarchically: cooperatives, sectoral unions, then the General Cooperative Union, and all overseen by the PA’s Ministry of Labor (MoL). See: Jihad Al-Shrouf, The Development of Cooperative Legislations in Palestine (Tatawwur al-Tashriʿat fi Filastin) (Ministry of Labor, General Directorate of Cooperatives, 2010), 1–6, available at: https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@arabstates/@ro-beirut/documents/genericdocument/wcms_210779.pdf; Abed al-Aziz Al-Salhi, “Rethinking the Approach of the Palestinian Cooperative Movement,” Institute for Palestine Studies, July 31, 2023, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654188; ICA-AP, Cooperatives in the State of Palestine, 2; Civil Society Team for Enhancing Public Budget Transparency, Regulating Agricultural Cooperatives in Palestine (Hawkamat al-Taʿawuniyyat al-Ziraʿiyya fi Filastin), no. 198, Reports (Aman, 2021), 1–42, available at: https://www.aman-palestine.org/reports-and-studies/16514.html.

42. In the West Bank, there were 344 active cooperatives (and 344 inactive), while in Gaza there were 25 (67 inactive)— although according to the ICA-AP, the number of cooperatives in Gaza in 2018 was 122. 64.2 percent of cooperatives in the West Bank were mixed-gender, 24.9 percent were male-only, and 10.9 percent were female-only. Inactive cooperatives were sectorial divided as such: 42.3 percent housing, 37.2 percent agricultural, 12.4 percent services, 3.6 percent artisanal, and the rest divided over other sectors. In total, cooperatives in the oPt employed 543 workers in 2023, an increase of 4 percent over the year 2022. Only 95 cooperatives (25.7 percent) achieved a surplus in the year 2023 (amounting to 8.47 million USD) while 63 cooperatives (17 percent) suffered a deficit (amounting to 422,000 USD), and in total 106 cooperatives (28.7 percent) suffered a carried-over deficit (amounting to 2.12 million USD). Total revenue for cooperatives in 2023 amounted to 6.3 million USD; while total grants received were 17.2 million USD. Numbers in the previous five years are similar. See: Cooperative Work Agency, “Annual Report of the Cooperative Work Authority for 2023,” Annual Report (Ramallah: Cooperative Work Agency (CWA), 2024), available at: https://cwa.pna.ps/uploads/REPORTS/17230279450.pdf.

43. Cooperative Work Agency, The National Strategy for the Cooperative Sector 2021–2023 (Al-Istratijiyya Al-Wataniyya) (Cooperative Work Agency (CWA), 2020), 16–18, available at: https://cwa.pna.ps/uploads/STRATEGIES/16031060510.pdf; Civil Society Team for Enhancing Public Budget Transparency, Regulating Agricultural Cooperatives in Palestine, 13.

44. Al-Huneiti, Agricultural Cooperatives, 23.

45. For example, in 2018, the PA spent 26 percent of its budget expenditures on its security sector, 11 percent on healthcare, and 1 percent on agriculture. See: MAS, Social Entrepreneurship Institutions in Palestine and their Responsiveness to Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Mu’assasat Al-Riyada) (MAS, 2024), 1, available at: https://mas.ps/cached_uploads/download/2024/08/13/social-entrepreneurship-study-2024-1723555961.pdf.

46. 52 percent of Palestinian wage laborers lost their income and the economy suffered immensely. See: Cooperative Work Agency, The National Strategy, 20–21.

47. Nadine Fattaleh and Andrew Ross, “An Alternative Economy Takes Root in the West Bank,” Hammer & Hope, no. 5 (2024), available at: https://hammerandhope.org/article/palestine-west-bank-economy.

48. Mari, “Mashaʿ of the Periphery.”