The PA Keeps Saying No, But Never Gave an Honest Yes

No matter how many times Palestinian officials declare that agreements they never lived up to are null and void, such Palestinian officials will always become more irrelevant.

As Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports in English, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) Deputy Chairman, Ali Faisal, announced last month that there is a legally-binding decision across Palestinian Authority (PA) institutions to “renounce … all agreements with Israel.” This is the front of anti-normalization that the PA is promoting in the name of “peace and justice,” all while brutally cracking down on dissidents, armed opponents, and even nonviolent protestors who may think that the PA functions otherwise.

Clearly, there are conflicting interests at play for Palestinian government officials. Yet what weaves together all of these disparate objectives in Palestinian politics is the pursuit for a monopoly on power by telling every audience what they want to hear: the internal base (Palestinians), the powerful patrons (the Europeans and the Americans), and beyond.

The lucky folks who are shunned, even while being asked for funding, are the Israelis and the Sunni Arab nations. Fortunately for the PA, these increasingly aligned states have an interest in making sure that Palestinian nationalist fervor is ruled by the law and order of a local entity, albeit an autocratic one currently.

This corrupt, pandering, incendiary and dictatorial PA government shows many signs of decline and a desperate aim to hold on for control. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, entering his seventeenth year in office for a four-year term, is running out of phony attempts to announce and postpone elections.

This corrupt, pandering, incendiary and dictatorial PA government shows many signs of decline and a desperate aim to hold on for control.

Abbas’s efforts over the past few years to scale down or threaten to end any cooperation with Israel is just the latest bid to grab international attention, as well as unconditional aid, domestic legitimacy and a unilateral path to full sovereignty. Ensuring the security of Israeli civilians? Bottom of the list, if at all.

Nearly thirty years after the Oslo Accords that pioneered an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Oslo is only as dead today as the Palestinian leadership says it is. But here’s the thing: The Palestinian Authority never gave peace an honest, full-blown try in the first place.

Negotiating and signing for peace in bad faith, sponsoring terrorism via the Martyr Fund, and expecting the full benefits of sovereign independence is like planning on having a healthy child with your partner while deliberately engaging in substance abuse, and then blaming your partner for the miscarriage. And there have been plenty of “checkups” and rounds of talks along the way to correct the course.

Despite his enduring tensions with rivaling Palestinian factions such as the terrorist organization Hamas, Abbas seems to think that he would lose power only by truly committing to peace and acknowledging such terror in the first place. When Australia recently chose to list all wings of Hamas as a terrorist organization, Abbas condemned the decision as an unfair classification for this supposedly mainstay party, which, according to him, represents the fabric of “Palestinian resistance and pride” as well.

Meanwhile, new worlds are opening to increase partnership with Israel, from the Gulf and North Africa to Israel’s Arab sector itself. As PA President Mahmoud Abbas cheers on Amnesty International for another debunked report isolating Israel as an “apartheid state,” Israeli Islamist party head of Ra’am, Mansour Abbas, partakes in the current Knesset coalition, condemns terror attacks, advances reforms for Arab-Israeli citizens, and openly recognizes Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Where there is room to gain credibility as a partner for peace and convince more Israelis to challenge legitimately problematic policies affecting Palestinians, Palestinian leaders cut down every measure possible that would build Israeli trust for reconciliation. Trauma is the cognitive barrier that keeps Israelis skeptical and hawkish toward withdrawal from the West Bank and full Palestinian independence.

Strangely enough, the PA sees an unconditional guarantee to preserve its power by entrenching Israeli trauma through fanning Palestinian resentment and violence toward Israeli civilians. This isn’t a plan to practically get rid of Israel overnight. It’s a desperate, but calculated effort for the long-haul in making peace impossible, to the political and monetary benefit of only President Abbas and his elites.

What is most profoundly ironic is that Palestinians aren’t moved by leaders threatening to cut ties with Israel. Many Palestinians have long perceived a coexisting sovereignty alongside Israel as a humiliating surrender of the regional monopoly Arabs have largely enjoyed. Simultaneously, over 100,000 Palestinians make remarkable ends meet in Israel. Kids who stabbed other kids got paid more by the PA on their first check in 2017 ($1,719 minimum upon incrimination) than the monthly salary of a PA public sector employee in 2021, during the pandemic: $1,390 (from $292 million USD divided among 210,000 PA employees when averaged).

Abbas isn’t making amends with his subjects by speaking the same lines. The PA is failing to keep credibility among their frustrated people. Encouraging “resistance in all its forms,” as Ali Faisal touted, is like playing with fire. Even if you direct it against your enemy, you risk getting burned yourself. So if you’re bound to get removed from the throne with a stagnant, corrupt agenda, you might as well leave with the lasting reputation of a peacemaker instead. 

The views expressed in the article are the sole author’s and do not reflect that of his employer, the IAC.

Justin Feldman is a former research assistant at the UCLA Center for Middle East Development (CMED) and contributor to Dr. Steven Zipperstein’s “Zionism, Palestinian Nationalism and the Law: 1939-1948.” He is the National Activism Manager for the Israeli-American Council, Mishelanu.