In this well informed and accessibly written book, Glenn E. Robinson traces the emergence of a new political elite in the West Bank and Gaza in the 1980s and the grassroots political and social revolution it launched during the Intifada. Local self-help organizations forged in this period - student groups, labour unions, women's committees, agricultural relief committees, medical relief associations, and voluntary works organizations - took power away from the notables (the traditional landowning elite) and began building popular institutions, which organized Palestinian society and which Israel found impossible to eliminate. Yet, in the post-Oslo period, power in the post-Intifada polity was captured by an outside political force: Yasir Arafat and the PLO. The resulting disjunction between the grassroots popular authority of the new institutions and the centralizing, authoritarian tendencies of the PLO undermines the prospects for building a stable Palestinian state.