I can remember on more than one occasion visiting a particular Palestinian organization in Bethlehem and hearing staff describe, as they pointed to the bookshelf in the room where we were meeting, how many shelves could be filled with international humanitarian and human rights laws, resolutions, and the like regarding the rights of the Palestinian people. They did this to make the point that Palestinians did not need more laws or resolutions. Instead they needed the international community to follow through with the commitments that they had already put down on paper.

This is but one example that speaks to the topic that Lori Allen addresses in The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine. A central feature of Allen’s work is an attempt to understand the origins and functions of human rights as “performance” in occupied Palestine and the role that cynicism plays. The distinction Allen makes between “human rights” and the “human rights industry” is critical to her discussion. While “human rights” continues to invoke a set of principles with origins traced back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the “human rights industry” refers to the material and financial infrastructure that buttresses human rights work, such as “the complex of activities and institutions that function under the label human rights, including the professionals who work within those organizations, the formulas they have learned in order to write reports and grant applications, and the funding streams that this industry generates and depends upon” (p. 4).

While Allen points out that it is the tainting of human rights by this industry that Palestinians reject, it is through the appropriation or perhaps re-narration of this discourse that Palestinians have also made political claims and articulated political identity. This is an important piece of this book, in particular Allen’s discussion of how human rights and the human rights industry relate to political subjectivity, nationalism, and state building. For example, Allen points out that the human rights system “is one critical structure that mediates contests over the dynamics of nationalism, the nature of the Palestinian state and what kind of citizen should build it, and the national struggle against occupation and what kind of subject should undertake it” (p. 9). A critical link is made between political subjectivity, cynicism, and “the ongoing, and seemingly unstoppable, Israeli colonization of Palestinian land and the indefatigably brutal occupation,” leading Allen to challenge the impulse to label as “noneventful” the recent history of Palestine. Instead, she argues that we “take seriously the transformative effect of the accumulation of aborted events and frustrated expectations, rather than see rupturing events as the key to understanding social change” (p. 27). This analytical attention to the “noneventful” allows Allen to identify the meaning in occupied Palestine of sumud, the Arabic word for steadfastness.

Allen begins her examination into the rise of human rights in occupied Palestine by chronicling the origins and performance of the first Palestinian human rights organization (HRO) Al-Haq. Throughout the first chapter, Allen lifts up the efforts of Al-Haq to make the case to the world that Palestinians inhabited the status of “human” and so deserved basic rights and protections, despite being a “stateless people.” The appropriation of “rationality” was a key feature to these early human rights initiatives, Allen notes, as rationality had “long been a category used to justify colonial efforts to discredit and denigrate the colonized, whose supposed irrational passions required the civilizing discipline of the liberal West. Al-Haq’s goal was to subvert that colonial logic, and the long history of orientalism that has obscured and distorted the facts of the Palestinian case” (p. 37).

Yet there was a sensitive balance to be struck as Al-Haq navigated the tensions between nationalist and humanist values as well as the different standards of local and international credibility. It was in the context of the first intifada that reports from HROs like Al-Haq enhanced international attention to the Palestinians’ cause, and when, Allen notes referencing George Giacaman, “Palestinians ‘discovered’ human rights as the ideal language with which to make their voices heard internationally” (p. 56). Speaking with such a voice, human rights documentation became a form of history writing in a context of dispersal and upheaval where the Palestinian national narrative was merely an addendum to that of other nations.

As Allen charts the decline of human rights in occupied Palestine in chapter 2, she discusses the Oslo era as presenting the processes that led to “a shifting political terrain in which the social role of the ‘human rights worker’ as a category of profession has flourished, and cynicism and distrust toward it has grown.” First was the tremendous growth of HROs in occupied Palestine as well as the simultaneous constriction of their activities by foreign donors. Allen describes the “corralling” of these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) “toward a particular vision of ‘peace,’ which many Palestinians felt to be skewed away from achieving actual freedom” contributing to a declining credibility in Palestinian society that distanced them from the grassroots, while expanding career paths (p. 75). The second process emerging from Oslo was the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which led to a situation where “resistance to occupation was to some degree removed from the hands of the people, as politics was formalized in a new way and commanded by the PA” (p. 76). And yet in spite of the “NGOization of political activism,” Palestinians see through this, indicating that “popular opinion nevertheless

remains a powerful force for sustaining an ethical horizon against which these corrupting influences and resulting problematic social relations are judged” (p. 97).

In chapter 3, Allen explores the way in which human rights education works as “a means by which different groups, from the PA and international donors to academics to civil society activists, try to create a Palestinian state and shape the political subjects they think are most appropriate to it” (pp. 99-100). These “technologies of citizenship”--education for citizens-in-the-making for a state-in-the-making--are designed “to cultivate certain dispositions among subjects who are disciplined and brought into being to inhabit the roles of ‘citizen’ and ‘security’” (p. 100). Particularly interesting is Allen’s exploration of the role of human rights training for PA security forces and its connection to the modern state. Here Allen returns to the notion of state as performance, and in this case performance for a particular audience--especially the international states and donors from whom emerge funding and legitimacy. The building of a professional security service is “understood to be a necessary element within the assumed teleology of creating a ‘modern state’” (p. 116). But the transparency of this bureaucratized attitude is not lost particularly on critics of the PA who find objectionable “the pseudo-state’s dangerously denationalized approach to the public and the state-building project” (p. 118). But again, it is this critique that does not let Allen dismiss human rights or the human rights industry as simply an imperial tool, nor Palestinians as simply passive victims. Instead Allen argues this critique is itself an expression of political subjectivity not least in that it opens up a space in which Palestinians produce their own meanings and political projects that “cannot be subsumed under the labels of ‘imperialism’ or ‘liberalism,’ or be critiqued as a kind of false consciousness” (p. 129). This underscores her point that the activities and effects of this system are “multiple, complicated, and sometimes contradictory,” but that Palestinians are never completely defined by it (p. 98).

In her fourth chapter, Allen goes further with her discussion on human rights and security as makeup for a face presented outward, but that does not work in Palestine. “The West Bank PA has hinged the production of its own stateness on distinguishing itself as a state and defining its relationships to society through two key performances directed toward these audiences: one is the use of force though its security sector, the other is a stated commitment to human rights law.” But the unconvincing result of these performances again uncovers the PA as a nonsovereign entity unable to perform adequately the most basic exercises of governance, paradoxically resulting in “building a façade of the state and drawing attention to its fragility” (p. 132).

Allen follows this analysis of the West Bank with an examination in her final chapter of the interaction between Hamas and the human rights industry, highlighting the nationalist inflection in Hamas’s human rights discourse as opposed to Fateh’s technocratic tone. Hamas supporters present themselves as noncynical nationalists acting on behalf of the people, presenting an alternative take on human rights engendered within a nationalist framework, which explains much of “why the movement has been a preferred political alternative for some Palestinians” (p. 158).

As she concludes, Allen recognizes a larger phenomenon in which “the human rights system has become a central element of the conception of state legitimacy, a core mediating grid through which states are debated and constructed, a specific form of supranational governmentality that imposes criteria of legibility on supplicant states” (p. 186). But Allen helpfully reminds us that arguments over the hegemonic feature of human rights ideology assumes too much when it comes to Palestine, demonstrated by Palestinians’ varied engagements with human rights. This is where cynicism serves a political function as a “critical stance by which those who are displeased with choices available in the present hold on to the belief that such limited options are not all there should be. For many Palestinians, a horizon, however vague, of alternative possibilities and hopes endures because a history of more satisfying political bonds and contributions motivated by more sincerely held political values is remembered, or at least nostalgically imagined” (p. 189).

Despite Allen’s thorough work, one could still be left with questions regarding her explanation of human rights and the human rights industry in Palestine. In other words, how much power does her theory have in explaining the impact of the human rights industry in particular and its causal effect on the Palestinian response of critique and cynicism that she observes? For example, at times, she does not make a substantive distinction between the human rights industry and the humanitarian industry, or the peacebuilding industry, or civil society more generally understood. What role do these other “industries” play in producing Palestinian expressions of cynicism? Of course this is an analytical point about the totalizing effect of our categories that can be brought to bear on not only many discussions on Palestine but also any conversation in which civil society and the NGO sector sits in a privileged space. However, although Allen does notice the muddying of these distinctions--for example, in how “human rights” becomes “democracy-and-human-rights” (p. 163)--it would be interesting to learn more about how these categories and industries are working in a place like occupied Palestine.

Another place where I was left wanting more was in regards to human rights, the state, state making, and sovereignty. Allen does give time to this discussion, noting theories that identify excessive brutality as the basis of sovereignty as well as the elements of “de facto sovereignty,” such as the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity (pp. 153, 147). These performative aspects of state making are particularly salient given how the PA’s foreign benefactors see security sector reform as essential to state building. But I was left asking questions about the fundamental compatibility, or lack thereof, between law and sovereignty. For example, Paul Kahn has discussed the conflicting social imaginaries that establish the nature of political meaning--an imaginative structure of law on the one hand and of sovereignty on the other--and asks if an imagined space remains for a practice of sovereignty beyond law. With particular attention to the “no-torture” first principle in law, Kahn argues that politics creates meaning through sacrifice. “Political meaning often enters the world though the killing and being killed of war. We take our first step toward torture when we take up arms in defense of the state. This is the step from law to sovereignty.” [1]

And so a dilemma presents itself for those who reject torture and the very idea of sacrificial violence on appeal to law: it cannot be done “without rejecting the faith that supports the practice of political violence by grounding its sacred character in the idea of the sovereign.” For Kahn, “the killing and being killed of war occur on a symbolic field of sacrifice and sovereignty, which simply cannot appear within the ordinary order of law.”[2] I cannot help but think that what Allen has identified with cynicism has something to do with the tensions produced by these competing imaginaries.

In the end, Allen offers her work as one model for learning “how to appreciate the multiple powers of cynicism in politics and the possibilities of solidarity and, yes, the resistance to oppressive forces that are contained therein” (p. 193). This is indeed a research agenda worthy of further attention, and Allen has helpfully opened up more space to pursue it.

Notes

[1]. Paul Kahn, Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 14.

[2]. Ibid., 44, 151.

Allen’s ethnography of the professionalization of human rights activism is astute and applies to many other sites of international “democratization” and “development.” The overwhelming dependency of human rights organizations on international funding has created a “hegemony of a particular form of marketable human rights work that does not always support political activism or engagement” (p. 109). Such a flow of money and resources feeds an NGO globalized elite who find it riskier to take on more politicized projects (p. 82). In the case of Palestine, Allen observes human rights “deployed to create the perception of professional people and organizations that ‘deserve’ a state [because they ‘do’ human rights].”

The Palestinian Authority (PA) performs its part as well. “Officers are being taught to contribute to producing a fantasy of the state, an illusion of a professional, modern, human-rights-respecting state in which they play a role that is understood to be a performance for specific audiences” (p. 110). But the bravado of human rights and the garish show and use of physical force by the PA undermine its own act. This is compounded by corruption, ineptitude, and the knowledge that state accountability — the core principle of human rights law — is difficult to apply to occupied Palestine.

Cynicism inevitably grows from the myriad forms of hypocrisy and paradox Palestinians experience. Cynicism, Allen compellingly argues, is “a defining — but understudied force in human rights dynamics today” (p. 23). Normally perceived on a continuum from disappointment to inertia and apathy to anger, cynicism can be corrosive to political movements. But Allen asserts that this overlooks the constructive functions of cynicism. She views it as an analytical concept, “a mode of understanding, … a form of awareness and a motor of action by which subjection and subjectification are self-consciously resisted, or at least [End Page 173] creatively engaged” (p. 16). “Cynicism is a critical stance by which those who are displeased with choices available in the present hold on to the belief that such limited options are not all that there should be” (p. 189). That critical consciousness, together with a set of ethical values specific to Palestinians, sustain their nationalist vision. Although Palestinians may feel they have reaped little benefit from the human rights system, it would be a mistake to conclude that it is being foisted on them, or that it is entirely destructive to their objectives.

Palestinian civil society has been far more astute as to the constructive potential of cynicism than the political leadership. The book’s first chapter chronicles the “revolutionary” vision and methodology of Al-Haq (founded in 1979), the first Palestinian NGO to recognize the potential of human rights to “motivate a novel form of collective action and become a constitutive element of Palestinian nationalist politics” (p. 35). Utilizing law and documentation, Al-Haq’s founders understood the magnitude of allowing the human rights discourse “to stand on its own in what was a supremely politicized situation” (p. 40). They saw human rights and the rule of law not only as a tool to fight the Israeli occupation but as a universal value in themselves (p. 60). Jonathan Kuttab, one of Al-Haq’s founders, told Allen it was “a sign of great maturity that as soon as the PA was installed … in 1995, everyone expected them to abide by human rights standards” (p. 60).

The way states perceive the role of human rights in the production and legitimation of sovereignty comprises another principle theme. Human rights is constitutive of state-building, especially in the context of conflict and ongoing negotiations, as in Palestine. It is the only way for a transitioning state to prove itself. Both the West Bank PA and the Hamas government in Gaza understand this and, thus, make use of the human rights paradigm. Their agencies participate in international and intergovernmental human rights processes, from lavish donor initiated training programs of security personnel to official engagement with UN and other international bodies. It demonstrates the centrality of human rights performance to the concept of state legitimacy (p. 142).

Allen frames these patterns as “the politics of acting ‘as if.’” “In Palestine, cynicism is part of the process whereby human rights has come to be a frame of reference for people acting “as if”—that is, acting as if the human rights industry could stop abuses outside of real political, structural change” (p. 25). Allen understands that human rights can’t and won’t be meaningfully enforced without a fundamental shift in the political reality (i.e., an end to the Israeli occupation).

The Hamas government is discussed in the final chapter and, while their transgressions are not overlooked, they seem to be handled with slightly greater forbearance than the West Bank PA. Hamas is a foil for the PA (both actually and in the book); Allen notes that its leaders have stressed the “fit between Islam and human rights principles, and … the importance of bringing human rights into practical operation on the ground” (p. 177). With their extensive social services infrastructure they possess the means to implement this objective. The PA, on the other hand, is saddled with a deep-seated disdain for its excess and ostentatious performance (p. 152). Allen describes Hamas’s ability to harness human rights as if it were a significant policy priority, or at least a more convincing act. For example, the Hamas justice minister issued a formal and detailed, if deflecting, response to questions the Goldstone Commission posed to the Palestinian government concerning Operation Cast

Lead. Hamas’s shrewd report “normalize[d] the [Hamas] government as both the proper address of UN requests and as the responsible respondent that fulfills its obligations to the international community” (p. 180). Such acts of “auto-authorization” (p. 180), also practiced by the PA, may be pretense or may be genuine acts of sovereignty (or both). But, they manifest an assimilation of the human rights discourse and system and a critical consciousness about the state-making process that are distinctly Palestinian.

Allen spotlights the hypocrisies and paradoxes of the human rights system. But she also asserts that these are not reasons to jettison human rights. Her objective is not the deficiencies, pretense or deceit of the human rights system; she acknowledges that there is no real alternative in the foreseeable future. [End Page 174] Allen is more interested in what drives people even when they see themselves and the system compromised, to keep acting as if they were not and it was not.

Focusing on the varied ways that Palestinians engage with human rights “challenges simple condemnations of the human rights system as the thin end of an imperial wedge.” To Allen, “[t]he generative power of the suspicion and cynicism” as an expression of local critiques of the human rights regime is worth close examination (p. 187). Cynicism sustains a “robust, albeit declining, popular nationalism with its elemental system of political ethics” (p. 156). The Palestinian people are neither fooled nor cowed by the performance.

Lori Allen's study of Palestinians’ engagement with human rights is ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated. It should certainly be read by anyone interested in a comprehensive treatment of human rights activism in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip that is informed by the post-1967 history of Palestinian nationalism and the politics of state-building and statelessness. But her book deserves a much wider, interdisciplinary audience as well because of the compelling ways in which she tackles several of the thorniest issues in the contemporary politics and practices of human rights. Foremost among these is the question that resounds across the contemporary Middle East and in other parts of the world: what good are human rights (or what good can human rights do) when violations remain so common, enforcement so inadequate, and accountability so elusive?

Allen deploys cynicism as an analytical concept to help explain why human rights continue to matter to so many Palestinians despite the fact that the conditions of their collective existence remain so incommensurate with norms and standards enshrined in international law. Cynicism, in her hands, neither means “disdain” nor indicates “repudiation”; while it relates to “disillusionment,” it is not an interchangeable term. Rather, she explains, “[c]ynicism is a critical stance by which those who are displeased with choices available in the present hold on to the belief that such limited options are not all that there should be” (p. 189). The key term here is “belief” as multidimensional and culturally mediated phenomena, and she rightly notes that the best way to get at this is through ethnography.

Although Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “enjoy” neither the rights they “have” as humans nor those particular to a population living under foreign occupation, many find uses for human rights. For some, those uses are utilitarian or instrumental. For example, some of Allen's informants who were activists in nationalist parties and organizations through the first intifada shifted, for pragmatic reasons, to work for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at the start of the Oslo period. The political changes instituted through the Oslo process included a redoubling of the “NGO-ization” of Palestine, which is fueled by foreign funding and has produced neoliberal dependencies. Human rights organizations (HROs) constitute a significant portion of the NGOs in the occupied territories.

Allen compares how people employed by human rights organizations experience their frustration at the inefficacy of human rights but nevertheless continue to work in that sector because it is a source of income and/or a means for remaining involved in what, these days, is a dominant form of social engagement in the territories. A more baldly instrumental use of human rights is that of Palestinian Authority (PA) officials and security agents. They aspire to talk the human rights talk (e.g., by putting themselves through training sessions) as a means of performing legitimacy to appeal to foreign donors and international constituencies on whom their political power depends. These two examples of instrumentalized attachments to human rights illustrate why and how the concept of cynicism is so useful in analyzing Palestinian politics.

The alternative to cynicism is sincerity. As Allen explains, Palestinians who remain sincerely attached to human rights are not naive. Rather, their sincerity manifests as hopefulness in particularly cosmopolitan (i.e., internationally minded) kinds of ways. For them, human rights matter as a way of framing aspirations for the people's future, grounding critiques of occupation and authoritarianism—and the resultant violations—in the present, and providing terms (symbolic and rhetorical) for a Palestinian political narrative of national deserving that appeals to transcendent and universal norms. Allen's insights about sincerity—as a rebuttal to charges of naïveté—will be encouraging to human rights activists (in Palestine and beyond) and enlightening to scholars working in/on other parts of the world.

In addition to the various activist types one would expect to remain sincerely committed to human rights, the big surprise in the book is that Allen locates Hamas in this camp as well. Her point of departure is that Hamas self-consciously presents itself—because it is—as a sincere and effective alternative to Fatah, and that its alternative take on human rights is part of its appeal among Palestinians. This alternative take includes an “insistence on Palestinians’ right to be nationalist [and] on their right to demand rights that will be guaranteed by a political rather than technocratic solution” (p. 157). Allen's research for this chapter is, necessarily, somewhat different because of the impossibility of spending time in the Gaza Strip due to the Israeli closure and siege, and the sensitivities of talking about Hamas in the West Bank because of the fierce Hamas-Fatah rivalry that has been ongoing since 2007; consequently, her Hamas-focused interviews and participant observations are fewer and her reliance on texts is greater.

What her research contributes to knowledge about Hamas is a close reading of its leaders’ and thinkers’ engagements in debates about the relationship between Islam and human rights (commitment to social justice being the key), and the party's action-oriented approach to human rights, which includes earnest criticisms of the system for failing to live up to its own

ideals, using international law standards to criticize Israeli and PA violations, and being responsive and responsible to United Nations human rights bodies. I found the rosy picture more plausible than I would have expected. However, her narrative tends to minimize and in one significant way ignore the role of violence in Hamas politics. She writes: “by the end of the first intifada in 1993, the movement shifted away from political violence and moved toward social sector charity and educational initiatives during the Oslo period” (p. 161). The next sentence jumps to 2006 when Hamas won the national election. There is no mention of Hamas suicide bombings, which first occurred in 1993 and continued throughout the 1990s as well as during the second intifada. Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) bombings and Israeli targeted killing operations occurred in cycles, with each typically claiming their action was in retaliation for the other's violence. The tactic of suicide bombing became a major point of political disagreement among Palestinians, with critics decrying the consequences both to their own people and to the reputation of the nation in the international community. Allen does discuss rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, which she non-judgmentally portrays as a manifestation of Hamas' political position on the right to fight—and indeed international law (i.e., Additional Protocol I) does provide a right to fight against foreign occupation and for national liberation. What is provocative and novel in her argument is that she relates this fighting creed to Hamas’ approach to human rights, part of what distinguishes it from PA and Fatah cynicism and ineffectiveness.

Allen is influenced by Lisa Wedeen's concept of “as if” to explain how people individually and collectively act as if something is true while harboring no illusions that it is not. In the Palestinian context, which differs from Syria and Yemen where Wedeen did her political ethnographies, statelessness and the fraught, frustrated, or arguably failed process of state-building serve to cast “as if” in a different light. Poignantly, many Palestinians continue to believe in human rights as if their (varied) actions could make the difference.

Lori Allen, a cultural anthropologist, characterizes this imaginative and carefully argued book as an ethnographic study, based on her fieldwork in the West Bank, her involvement with Human Rights Organizations (HROs), and her interviews and interactions with numerous West Bank Palestinians. At the same time, the book is a work of contemporary history. It traces the emergence of Palestinian human rights from the later 1970s, inspired by the initiative of three Christian Palestinians who founded Al-Haq (The Truth) to provide proof of Israeli violations of international law and dispossession of Palestinian properties for the sake of Israeli settlement expansion.

For most West Bank Palestinians, the Oslo Accords (1993, 1995) and appearance of internationally- funded HROs have led to activities focused on fundraising and reporting events and abuses according to criteria established by outsiders at the expense of working to achieve Palestinian independence and a sovereign state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza. Within this framework, the behavior of the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces has been perceived as intended more to satisfy Israeli security demands than to protect Palestinians from Israeli expansion and assaults. In Allen’s words, “The human rights industry has become a kind of treadmill, spinning and rolling out projects, representational forms, funds, and jobs; but they have not ended the occupation or its abuses, instigated effective international intervention to protect basic human rights, or produced an accountable Palestinian government” (p. 15).

At the same time, these developments have enabled the PA, in part via its security forces, to act “as if” it was a state enforcing human rights, and have led Palestinians at times to act “as if” they believed HROs could intervene on their behalf at the international level. Here Allen uses, as well as critiques, the ideas behind the “state effect” (pp. 10–11), referring to the work of Timothy Mitchell and Yael Navaro Yashin, and the value of the “as if” concept, to explain cynicism as popular recognition of the gap between “awareness and (effective) action” (p. 24).

As for cynicism and its validity as an “analytical concept,” Allen argues that it does not solely represent a cynical attitude toward people who exploit the human rights endeavor for their own benefit. Rather, in contrast to apathy, cynicism represents “dimensions of emotion . . . which can only be captured ethnographically” (pp. 188–189), a definition that seems to a historian, but not an anthropologist, more tautological than analytical. Allen contends that her definition of cynicism “is particular to the Palestinian situation” (p.189) shaped by her conversations with West Bank Palestinians. To the extent that Palestine remains subject to occupation, the particularity of the Palestinian situation is clear. Allen’s analysis of independent “as if” states suggests a disjuncture between her comparative theoretical apparatus and her application of the concept of cynicism; especially when she refers to the concept as a useful tool for “broader social analysis” (p. 191).

That being said, Allen makes incisive comments on the comparative nature of sovereignty and popular dis- content in countries ranging from India to Turkey to Chile. Moreover, the Palestinian dilemma has many particular qualities, not least of which is that the UnitedStates, which proclaims itself a leader in defending human rights, has led the Security Council in vetoes since 1990; every veto was of a resolution concerning the Palestinians and the occupied territories. Moreover, Allen’s conception of Palestinian cynicism coexists with the view that most Palestinians retain hope in the principles of human rights as they should be applied to their circumstances, though her interviewees have lost faith in the founding assumption of Al-Haq that providing evidence would lead to results.

Unable to do fieldwork in Gaza, Allen’s chapter on Hamas relies on recent scholarship and interviews with Hamas members and sympathizers in the West Bank. She notes Hamas’s claims that its Muslim framework of beliefs is fully compatible with human rights values. Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, though not necessarily a “landslide” with respect to the popular vote, as she claims (p. 171), did indicate that many secular Palestinians voted for Hamas because it represented sincerity and a concern for social justice as opposed to the corruption and self-serving practices attributed to the PA and its party, Fatah.

Allen’s treatment of Hamas is less critical than that of the PA, perhaps due to her inability to conduct fieldwork in Gaza. Hamas has been aggressive in arguing its own and the Palestinian case on the basis of human rights criteria, thereby challenging the PA’s claim to constitute the only state-like structure representing the Palestinians, but she questions whether the universality of human rights as explained to her by her West Bank Hamas interviewees has actually been implemented in practice under Hamas rule. She seems uncertain whether Hamas should be considered as an Islamic movement or “a political movement with religious motivations” (p. 159). Some will question her statement that “religious beliefs and goals have not been core to the professed raison d’etre [sic] of the movement” (p.169), though it is clear that Hamas is both a Palestinian-nationalist movement as well as an Islamic one.

These issues do not lessen the importance of this book. It presents varied Palestinian perspectives on human rights within the framework of scholarship on the state and sovereignty, an approach rarely considered by historians. Aimed at anthropologists, this study can serve as a valuable addition to advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Middle East history.

Yet it would be to miss the point altogether to simply dispatch the shabab’s attitudes as bad faith. In her well- accomplished The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, that is precisely what Allen argues for those Palestinians living further to the south, in the Occupied Territories. To explain attitudes similar to the shabab’s, Allen deploys the etic concept of cynicism. In her understanding, cynicism serves not only as criticism of what exists today but also as an instrument for the moral- informed hope that a renewed social contract, being still possible, can entail better futures.

Allen launches her investigation by tracing the genesis and effects of what she describes as a charade, shared by Palestinian human rights defenders, abusers, victims, critics, and observers alike: why does the human rights industry, which, in the lack of structural political change enabling accountability, so obviously does not and cannot deliver on its promises of restraining violations, continue to grow? In the first chapters of the book, Allen historicizes the trajectory (1979–1990s) through which the legacy of the first Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq – with its insistence on the value of law, rationality, logic and testimony and esteem for an apolitical universalism – was progressively tainted (with the Oslo process, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and after the two intifadas) by an institutionalization of politics, efflorescence of human rights organizations, constriction of their activities by donors’ conditionalities, enormous flow of foreign funding, and infighting for monies. This situation led to overall political apathy, with human rights tending to be framed not so much as legal principles to be ingrained in state/society relationships, but rather as formalized set of rules taught at marketable courses for security officers, university students and refugee youth. Later and somewhat less ethnographic chapters contrast the West Bank PA’s efforts to perform two tasks normally required from states – use of force through its security sector and commitment to human rights law – which, in view of its incomplete sovereignty, leaves it entrapped in an impossible double bind, to what Allen names as Hamas’ ‘‘politics of sincerity’’ in the Gaza Strip. Differently from Fateh’s supposedly hypocritical and empty slogans, Hamas, Allen states, presents itself as an organization that, due to its adherence to an Islamic moral code of conduct, genuinely observes human rights legislation.

The chapter on Hamas’ popularity among Gazans is welcome, in view of the persistent gap and eventual bias in the specialized literature. Yet it is not as ethnographically nuanced as the others in the book. Unable to conduct proper fieldwork in Gaza, Allen had to rely on Hamas’ own self-depictions in its public rhetoric. Her reasoning might perhaps have benefited from a more dynamic interaction between the moral economies so powerfully depicted in the book and the political economy that helps explain the severe constraints to which the West Bank PA has had to adapt its performance of stateness. Another potentially revealing line of investigation might have been to probe for the emic notions through which Palestinians themselves frame what Allen describes as ‘‘cynicism.’’ Among the Palestinian refugees from Lebanon with whom I worked, sukhriya, from the classic vocabulary, might not be deployed often. But maskhara, from the popular dialect, eventually was. This word can probably be translated as ‘‘irony.’’ Such line of investigation might have prompted Allen to establish a dialogue with the anthropological literature on irony, perhaps less morally loaded a notion than ‘‘cynicism.’’ I was also left wondering as to which extent ‘‘cynicism’’ is not simply a renewed and revamped guise for the quintessential Palestinian concept of sumud (steadfastness), the awe-inspiring capacity to keep on working and believing despite the acute shortcomings of the present.

Besides often moving smoothly between the local and the global, as ethnographic studies of human rights should but not always do, Allen’s The Rise and Fall has also, among its many merits, that of not taking the state for granted. The book emphasizes throughout what a difference incomplete sovereignty makes. As such, it is not only the students of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or anthropologists of the Arab East that benefit from reading it. For activists and practitioners working at NGOs, the book puts in relief the need to pay due attention to local conditions and to the unintended consequences of some actions taken in the name of good will. In this sense, it shakes the (liberal) idealistic belief that NGOs, as supposed shields of moral purity, can ‘‘fix’’ things, hopefully prompting much needed (self)criticism towards and from NGO workers. Finally, for political anthropologists and philosophers, Palestinian cynicism, as portrayed by Allen, encourages questioning the very conditions of constitution of ‘‘stateness,’’ with the tangled issues of consent, authority, and legitimacy. Because it might point

to politics conceived otherwise as well as to different notions of the social contract, Palestinian cynicism echoes Arendt’s praise, in On Revolution , to local, non-sovereign and yet fully political futures

In her exceptional book, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, anthropologist Lori Allen explores a complex set of interlocking themes about the role of human rights in the Palestinian nationalist agenda, viewed through the prism of cynicism. Against all odds, the human rights system continues o grow, functioning as if it could fulfill its ideals and promises (p. 20). Allen is intrigued by the tenacity and breadth of the human rights system in Palestine, despite the fact that "the emancipatory potential of human rights [appears to be] unrelentingly foreclosed" (p. 22).

Allen's ethnography of the professionalization of human rights activism is astute and applies to many other sites of international "democratization" and "development." The overwhelming dependency of human rights organizations on international funding has created a "hegemony of a particular form of marketable human rights work that does not always support political activism or engagement" (p. 109). Such a flow of money and resources feeds an NGO globalized elite who find it riskier to take on more politicized projects (p. 82). In the case of Palestine, Allen observes human rights "deployed to create the perception of professional people and organizations that 'deserve' a state [because they 'do' human rights]."

The Palestinian Authority (PA) performs its part as well. "Officers are being taught to contribute to producing a fantasy of the state, an illusion of a professional, modern, human-rights-respecting state in which they play a role that is understood to be a performance for specific audiences" (p. 110). But the bravado of human rights and the garish show and use of physical force by the PA undermine its own act. This is compounded by corruption, ineptitude, and the knowledge that state accountability - the core principle of human rights law - is difficult to apply to occupied Palestine.

Cynicism inevitably grows from the myriad forms of hypocrisy and paradox Palestinians experience. Cynicism, Allen compellingly argues, is "a defining - but understudied force in human rights dynamics today" (p. 23). Normally perceived on a continuum from disappointment to inertia and apathy to anger, cynicism can be corrosive to political movements. But Allen asserts that this overlooks the constructive functions of cynicism. She views it as an analytical concept, "a mode of understanding, . . . a form of awareness and a motor of action by which subjection and subjectification are self-consciously resisted, or at least creatively engaged" (p. 16). "Cynicism is a critical stance by which those who are displeased with choices available in the present hold on to the belief that such limited options are not all that there should be" (p. 189). That critical consciousness, together with a set of ethical values specific to Palestinians, sustain their nationalist vision. Although Palestinians may feel they have reaped little benefit from the human rights system, it would be a mistake to conclude that it is being foisted on them, or that it is entirely destructive to their objectives.

Palestinian civil society has been far more astute as to the constructive potential of cynicism than the political leadership. The book's first chapter chronicles the "revolutionary" vision and methodology of Al-Haq (founded in 1979), the first Palestinian NGO to recognize the potential of human rights to "motivate a novel form of collective action and become a constitutive element of Palestinian nationalist politics" (p. 35). Utilizing law and documentation, Al-Haq's founders understood the magnitude of allowing the human rights discourse "to stand on its own in what was a supremely politicized situation" (p. 40). They saw human rights and the rule of law not only as a tool to fight the Israeli occupation but as a universal value in themselves (p. 60). Jonathan Kuttab, one of Al-Haq's founders, told Allen it was "a sign of great maturity that as soon as the PA was installed . . . in 1995, everyone expected them to abide by human rights standards" (p. 60).

The way states perceive the role of human rights in the production and legitimation of sovereignty comprises another principle theme. Human rights is constitutive of state-building, especially in the context of conflict and ongoing negotiations, as in Palestine. It is the only way for a transitioning state to prove itself. Both the West Bank PA and the Hamas government in Gaza understand this and, thus, make use of the human rights paradigm. Their agencies participate in international and intergovernmental human rights processes, from lavish donor initiated training programs of security personnel to official engagement with UN and other international bodies. It demonstrates the centrality of human rights performance to the concept of state legitimacy (p. 142).

Allen frames these patterns as "the politics of acting 'as if.'" "In Palestine, cynicism is part of the process whereby human rights has come to be a frame of reference for people acting "as if"-that is, acting as if the human rights industry could stop abuses outside of real political, structural change" (p. 25). Allen understands that human rights can't and won't be meaningfully enforced without a fundamental shift in the political reality (i.e., an end to the Israeli occupation).

The Hamas government is discussed in the final chapter and, while their transgressions are not overlooked, they seem to be handled with slightly greater forbearance than the West Bank PA. Hamas is a foil for the PA (both actually and in the book);

Allen notes that its leaders have stressed the "fit between Islam and human rights principles, and . . . the importance of bringing human rights into practical operation on the ground" (p. 177). With their extensive social services infrastructure they possess the means to implement this objective. The PA, on the other hand, is saddled with a deep-seated disdain for its excess and ostentatious performance (p. 152). Allen describes Hamas's ability to harness human rights as if it were a significant policy priority, or at least a more convincing act. For example, the Hamas justice minister issued a formal and detailed, if deflecting, response to questions the Goldstone Commission posed to the Palestinian government concerning Operation Cast Lead. Hamas's shrewd report "normalize[d] the [Hamas] government as both the proper address of UN requests and as the responsible respondent that fulfills its obligations to the international community" (p. 180). Such acts of "auto-authorization" (p. 180), also practiced by the PA, may be pretense or may be genuine acts of sovereignty (or both). But, they manifest an assimilation of the human rights discourse and system and a critical consciousness about the state-making process that are distinctly Palestinian.

Allen spotlights the hypocrisies and paradoxes of the human rights system. But she also asserts that these are not reasons to jettison human rights. Her objective is not the deficiencies, pretense or deceit of the human rights system; she acknowledges that there is no real alternative in the foreseeable future. Allen is more interested in what drives people even when they see themselves and the system compromised, to keep acting as if they were not and it was not.

Focusing on the varied ways that Palestinians engage with human rights "challenges simple condemnations of the human rights system as the thin end of an imperial wedge." To Allen, "[t]he generative power of the suspicion and cynicism" as an expression of local critiques of the human rights regime is worth close examination (p. 187). Cynicism sustains a "robust, albeit declining, popular nationalism with its elemental system of political ethics" (p. 156). The Palestinian people are neither fooled nor cowed by the performance.