The Administration of Palestine: Authority Unresolved

For more than a century, Palestinians have been governed, counted, classified, displaced, represented, assisted and negotiated over. Yet the fundamental question has remained unresolved: who possesses the legitimate authority to decide Palestine's political future? In The Administration of Palestine: Authority Unresolved, Tawfiq J. Al-Ghussein traces a continuous structure of external rule from Herbert Samuel's 1915 memorandum and the Balfour Declaration through the British Mandate, the destruction of Palestinian representative institutions, the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Oslo process and the contemporary administration of occupation, humanitarian relief and reconstruction. Drawing on official memoranda, international agreements, parliamentary debates, censuses, legal decisions, maps, ration cards and administrative records, Al-Ghussein shows how Palestinian political claims have repeatedly been translated into problems of management. Sovereignty becomes coordination. Rights become permits. Dispossession becomes humanitarian need. A people seeking political authority becomes a population to be documented, supplied and supervised. The book's argument extends into the present. It examines the control of movement, land, water, population registries and public revenue; the calculation of food permitted into Gaza; the classification of famine and civilian protection; and the power of digital platforms to determine which Palestinian testimony remains visible. Across these very different systems, one distinction persists: Palestinians may be recognised, represented and administered without being accepted as the source of the authority that governs them. Combining archival history, political analysis and international law, The Administration of Palestine offers a powerful reinterpretation of the modern Palestinian experience. It argues that the central problem is not an absence of government but a surplus of administration exercised from outside-and that no durable political settlement can emerge until the question of authority is answered by the people whose future is at stake.