The Administration of Palestine: Authority Unresolved by Tawfiq J. Al-Ghussein, The Britain Palestine Project, 2026, pp 151
In his piercing debut, Palestinian writer and researcher Tawfiq J. Al-Ghussein provides a rigorous anatomy of this historical paralysis.
For over a century, the Palestinian people have been subjected to a relentless cycle of being governed, counted, displaced, represented, assisted, and negotiated over. Yet, a fundamental question has remained unresolved: who possesses the legitimate authority to decide Palestine’s political future?
Drawing on a vast archive, 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 management problems. Sovereignty becomes management—rights become permits. Dispossession becomes humanitarian need. A people seeking political authority becomes a population to be documented, supplied and supervised.
Al-Ghussein’s central thesis is that administration in Palestine has never been a neutral, technical process. Rather, it has often functioned as an instrument through which power has been exercised, territory managed, populations classified, and political aspirations deferred. The book argues that many contemporary structures governing Palestine are not temporary responses to conflict but part of a much longer historical continuum.
"The Palestinian question has never simply been a territorial dispute," Al-Ghussein told Ahram Online. "It has been a struggle over political authority, repeatedly recast as a problem of administration."
The book illustrates that the British Mandate was not merely a colonial document, but the foundational act of a political arrangement that outlived the British themselves. It created a paradigm where power is exercised upon Palestinians, but the source of that power remains external to them. While most nations resolve political conflict through internal shifts in government or constitutional reform, Palestine has been kept in a state of suspended agency. Decision-making power is consistently sourced from outside the society, bypassing the necessity of a mandate from the people being governed.
The Oslo Accords receive particular attention. While internationally presented as a transitional framework toward Palestinian self-government, the book argues that Oslo created an extensive administrative apparatus without transferring sovereign authority.
Palestinian institutions assumed responsibility for areas including health, education and municipal administration, while Israel retained control over borders, airspace, territorial continuity, movement, water resources and other core sovereign powers.
The book’s scope extends to the present day, linking the colonial past to the digital and logistical present. From the calculation of food calories permitted into Gaza to the power of digital platforms to curate and censor Palestinian testimony, Al-Ghussein maps how disparate systems of control converge on one objective: ensuring Palestinians are documented, supplied, and supervised, but never recognized as the legitimate source of their own authority.
Educated at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Al-Ghussein has written on governance, international law, colonial administration, and political authority in Palestine.
The author is the grandson of Yaqub Al-Ghussein, a Palestinian political figure who founded the Arab Youth Congress, a nationalist movement established during the British Mandate to mobilise Palestinian Arab youth.
The book is published by The Britain Palestine Project, a UK charity formerly known as the Balfour Project, which rebranded in 2025 to focus on Britain's historical responsibilities and contemporary legal obligations regarding Palestine.
The Administration of Palestine serves as a stark warning: every proposal of the last century has failed precisely because it refused to confront the question of legitimate authority. By framing the Palestinian struggle as a surplus of external administration rather than a simple absence of government, Al-Ghussein argues that no durable peace can emerge until the people whose future is at stake are finally empowered to determine it for themselves.
Ultimately, the book is a call for a fundamental reset amid the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza and yearning by the Palestinian people for self-determination. As Al-Ghussein demonstrates, until the question of who has the right to rule is answered by the Palestinians, every new administrative arrangement is merely a new iteration of an old, unresolved injustice.
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