Western diplomats have turned to the previously neglected Palestinian Authority to fill the political vacuum likely to be created by the planned destruction of Hamas in Gaza, but know their chosen rescue vehicle is unpopular, deemed corrupt, and badly in need of a new generation of leaders that no one has yet been able to identify.
The west’s placement of the PA at the heart of post-conflict governance in Gaza has also been rejected by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, causing consternation in the Biden administration.
Indeed, Israel is so hostile to the PA that it banned the authority’s foreign minister from travelling this month to Bahrain to speak to a conference attended by US and Arab leaders on its post-war plans.
The PA – established in the 1990s as part of the then peace process to run areas in the West Bank and Gaza under Palestinian control – has said it is willing to play a role in Gaza, from where it was expelled by Hamas in 2006, but only if it is part of a clear, comprehensive peace plan with Israel that also includes the West Bank. But many doubt its ability to do so, even if there were such a plan. Nasser al-Qudwa, a nephew of Yasser Arafat tipped as future PA leader, said: “I think the current authority, in its present form and with the men leading it, is unable to even set foot in the Gaza Strip, let alone handle the major tasks required at this time.”
Other observers, such as former Israel negotiator Daniel Levy, counsel the PA against entering Gaza if security remains an Israeli preserve, as Netanyahu has insisted it will. “I don’t think it would be wise for any Palestinian movement to say: ‘We will do this under the watchful eye of Israel,’” he said.
These hurdles mean western policy-makers face a huge challenge in transforming the PA into a body that is acceptable to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as to an Israel prime minister who has spent 15 years reducing the organisation’s influence. It also requires clearer understanding than at present on how security and politics will be handled postwar.
At present, some diplomats, such as the US Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, speak of a reformed or revitalised PA to run Gaza and the West Bank. Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, said: “Who will be in control of Gaza? I think only one could do that. The Palestinian Authority.”
More vaguely, some speak of the need to back “peace-loving Palestinans”, a phrase recently used by the former UK foreign secretary James Cleverly.
That implicitly means removing Hamas from Gaza, including debarring its supporters from standing in any future elections. The Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, however says Hamas is an idea and argues that it has deeply embedded itself in Gaza since winning Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, then violently ejecting Fatah, the dominant party in the Palestinian Authority, from Gaza.
The truth is no one knows what political mood will emerge from Gaza at the end of the conflict, but Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and many Arab leaders feel it is a heroic assumption to think that “peace-loving Palestinians” are going to stumble out from underneath the rubble of Gaza.
To assess whether the PA will be capable of taking on this task in Gaza, and is reformable, some explanation for its current parlous state is required. That in turn has to start with an acknowledgment that those calling for a “revitalised” PA are precisely the same actors who have resisted such steps for many years.
There are many reasons for the PA’s weakness, some self-imposed, some not. Corruption is widespread, although Palestinian diplomats say it is not endemic. But it has been financially crippled by a US-led donor strike, occasionally supported by the EU. In 2013, external grants at nearly $1.4bn (£880m) accounted for a third of total PA expenditure. By 2022, this had fallen to less than $350m (£305m) or just under 3% of total PA expenditure, according to a report this year by the UN Middle East envoy. Israel in 2023 was slated to withhold Palestinian import taxes worth $800m. The consequences in terms of poorer schools and hospitals was evident.
Tony Blair, in his eight years as special envoy for the Quartet of international powers seeking a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians from 2007, also tried hard to construct a functioning Palestinian Authority, built on a growing economy, and largely failed for the familiar reasons that the Israeli-imposed blockade strangled the Palestinian economy. The US, which now champions the PA, has withheld any payments to it since 2017 in protest at the paying of benefits to families of Palestinian prisoners and those killed in the conflict, including militants implicated in attacks against Israelis. The US Congress on a bipartisan basis calls this “pay to slay”, as does Israel.
But the PA’s biggest weakness is that it has had to operate on a false assumption. When the PA itself was created in 1994, Palestinian leaders promoted it as a transitional body in a diplomatic process after the Oslo accords that would lead to statehood. Yet the collapse of any worthwhile peace diplomacy and the dwindling prospects of a two-state solution have deprived the PA of its raison d’etre.
With bilateral diplomacy blocked off from 2001, when newly elected Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon refused to meet PA president Yasser Arafat and amid a second intifada led by Palestinian militant groups, the PA focused on other ways to prove its relevance and to show a strategy of non-violence could produce results. Above all it sought status and purpose through the UN.
Thus Mahmoud Abbas, succeeding Yasser Arafat, started a campaign to seek full recognition for the state of Palestine at the UN. US opposition doomed it to failure, leaving it only with UN observer status. It managed to gain membership of Unesco, but even a modest attempt to join the UN’s tourism body was abandoned due to US pressure.
In its big play, the PA in 2015 requested permission for the international criminal court to open an investigation into war crimes committed by Israel in the West Bank. After five years of deliberation, the ICC agreed in 2021 it did have jurisdiction. But this led to the US and UK coming down on the PA like a ton of bricks. In a letter dated April 2021 announced not to parliament but to the Conservative Friends of Israel, then prime minister Boris Johnson said: “We oppose the ICC’s investigation into war crimes. We do not accept that the ICC has jurisdiction in this instance given that Israel is not part of the statute of Rome [that established the ICC] and Palestine is not a sovereign state.” He added: “This investigation gives the impression of being a partial and prejudicial attack on a friend and ally of the UK”.
Similarly, the US led by Donald Trump opposed any ICC scrutiny of Israel. The Trump administration said: “Palestinians do not qualify as a sovereign state and therefore are not qualified to obtain membership as a state in, participate as a state in, or delegate jurisdiction to the ICC.” The Trump team attacked the PA’s use of the court as a “unilateral judicial action that exacerbates tensions and undercuts efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution”.
Joe Biden has not changed the US stance. When the US president met Abbas in Ramallah in 2022 he urged him to drop the ICC investigation, but Abbas refused, saying it was one of the few non-violent routes available to opposing Israeli settlements.
In some ways the UK opposition was the more jarring for the PA, since the UK is, unlike the US, a supporter of the ICC. Moreover, the UK had not submitted any observations to the pre-trial chamber of the ICC when the prosecutor referred the issue to it.
It left a frustrated Palestinian ambassador in the UK, Husam Zomlot, to complain: “Boris Johnson’s position rules out any legal avenue to seek accountability and redress for crimes perpetrated against our people, leaving Palestinians to ask what does the British government expect them to do?”
Another legal nonviolent avenue pursued by the PA was to go to the UN’s international court of justice, the top court for dealing with disputes between countries. In December 2022 the UN general assembly had voted by 87 to 26 to request an advisory ruling on the status of the occupation from the court in The Hague. But no sooner did the PA lawyers turn up in The Hague than so did US and UK government lawyers, again saying this was an improper legal avenue for the Palestinians to pursue. Oral proceedings are due in February next year and the US is now telling the PA to pull out if it wants Israel’s agreement to let the PA into Gaza.
Nor could the PA convince its supporters much benefit came from lobbying western politicians that the expansion of Israeli settlements would set back the chance of a viable two-state solution.
The former UK Middle East minister Alistair Burt recalls in office being confronted by a Palestinian delegation with a list of his comments on various Israeli settlements. “They read it out and they said: ‘Mr Burt, on such and such a date, you said you were “very concerned” about settlements. And on this date, you said you were “gravely concerned”, and on this occasion you said you were “most concerned”. And here you said you were “extremely concerned”’. And they went through the list of different adverbs, and they pointed out that there was no action taken by the international community in terms of settlements. And it was a fair charge.”
He added: “The PA was not well served by the Israeli government, who were quite happy to keep it going, but not be particularly effective. And the leadership of the PA rather went along with that so by and large there was a sense of stasis in the whole area.”
As a result, the PA ended up being viewed by Palestinians increasingly as a security sub-contractor for Israel, and in the name of fighting terrorism often imposed arbitrary justice in the West Bank. Lawyers for Justice, a group that documents just such arbitrary justice cases, estimated that in 2022 alone the PA arrested more than 500 Palestinians for anti-Israeli offences. The alternative, the PA argued, would be a third intifada and the collapse of the PA.
This has all taken a massive toll on the PA’s reputation. Respected opinion polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that days before the Hamas assault on Israelis 80% of Palestinians considered the PA corrupt, and 62% viewed it as a liability rather than an asset. None of its main institutions enjoys popular legitimacy.
The increase in violence in the West Bank this year has only weakened the PA further, playing into the hands of West Bank militants that offer West Bank youth a chance to confront Israeli settlers and security forces. Recent student university elections saw the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Wafa bloc defeat Fatah in a run of hotly-contested votes.
The worry is that, in seeking to make the PA the centre of a post-war Palestinian politics in the West Bank and Gaza, the US may be backing the wrong horse, and underestimating the resilience of Hamas in Gaza.
Certainly, Abbas as the champion of a reformed Palestinian politics seems a ridiculous proposition. Biden, no spring chicken himself, came away deeply unimpressed when he went to see Abbas in Ramallah in 2022 and was subjected to a 25-minute rambling opening statement. The 88-year-old Abbas is in his 18th year of a four-year presidential term – no elections having been held since a 2010 round was postponed.
The jockeying to succeed Abbas has been under way for years, making the factionalism even worse.
Hussein al-Sheikh, as secretary of the PLO executive committee, is favoured by the US because he is at least seen as practical. He speaks fluent Hebrew, and knows senior Israeli military officers and politicians well.
Marwan Barghouti would be a more plausible candidate, except he has been in prison since 2002, serving a life sentence for murder after leading the second intifada. He would probably have beaten Abbas in the cancelled 2021 elections for PA president, and according to recent polls would also beat the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh 60% to 37% – Abbas would not.
Another Abbas rival is Mohammad Dahlan, the former leader of Fatah in Gaza, who has the benefit of being born in a Gaza refugee camp. He is however seen as a creature of the UAE, one of the countries that normalised relations with Israel, something that Abbas regarded as a betrayal. Abbas expelled Dahlan from the Fatah movement in 2011, and has refused to reconcile with him despite pressure from Egypt and Jordan.
Those that challenge the authority of Abbas pay the price. Nasser al-Qudwa, Arafat’s nephew, was removed from Fatah’s central committee in May 2021 after he said he would form a joint list with Barghouti to challenge Abbas.
Similarly, the one internally generated attempt at PA reform – launched in 2010 and entitled Last Stretch to Freedom – ended in disaster for the then prime minister Salam Fayyad. His attempt to root out corruption ended with him being rooted out in 2013. He now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Borrel is convinced there is a residual Fatah presence in Gaza on which to build. He said: “There are 60,000 people in Gaza who receive a salary from the Palestinian Authority: 30,000 who were employees of the Palestinian Authority before Hamas took over, and another 30,000 pensioners.”
Western diplomats are not exactly clueless in Gaza about the path ahead, but the task might seem less daunting if they had not simply watched, or worse connived, in the PA’s slow atrophy.
