‘If We Go on Living Like This, Israel Is Not Going to Find Peace’
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is now the highest-ranking American official to suggest that the Palestinian Authority—which governs the West Bank, under Israeli military supervision—should take over Gaza. Last month, he told a Senate committee that it would be good for an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza,” where the PA has been powerless and unwelcome for the past 15 years. On Wednesday, Blinken said again that Gaza should be “unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”
Indirect rule by the Palestinian Authority is a moonshot idea, but it’s preferable to an indefinite Israeli presence—an idea floated on ABC this week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And because most of the other post-invasion ideas (rule by Egypt, American troops on the ground) may as well be trips to Alpha Centauri, this particular moonshot is worth considering in some detail. Already a few Israeli politicians have broached it. At a press conference last month, the leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, said, “The best thing is that the Palestinian Authority goes back into Gaza.” I suggested that this sounded like wishful thinking. Lapid replied that the PA still had thousands of loyalists in Gaza, which was more than could be said for any of the other possible entities that might take over.
But what about the Palestinian Authority’s interest in this daunting assignment? For the past two decades, since the death of Yasser Arafat, it has limped along in the West Bank, still smarting from its loss in the only election that Palestinians have ever held. In 2006, Hamas won a plurality. A year later, it violently seized control of Gaza, kicking out its more nationalist and more secular counterparts from Fatah. The Palestinian Authority is led by Mahmoud Abbas, 87, who is too wily ever to risk sitting in an election again. This week, Blinken went to Ramallah to speak with him about his willingness to oversee the thin band of rubble that will remain after Israel’s invasion. The conversation lasted less than an hour. Apparently the answer wasn’t no.
[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]
Last month, I told the Palestinian Authority’s shrewd minister of finance, Shoukry Bishara, that I thought the United States would soon come to Ramallah to beg for the PA to save Israel from having to reoccupy Gaza. The Gaza invasion might even be an opportunity for the PA. Bishara is a former high-powered banker, and he knows how to negotiate. “In every crisis, there’s an opportunity,” he told me. “But this is not a crisis. This is a massive, biblical upheaval.” He said that before the PA could contemplate a role in Gaza, Netanyahu’s rush to swallow the West Bank would have to stop. “The same people who created the mindset of the assassin of [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin,” Bishara told me, “are now in power in Israel.” He said Lapid “is the kind of person with whom we can seriously build a future.” But with Israel’s turn to the right, any chance of cooperation evaporated. “Finito,” he said. All negotiation and discussion with his counterparts had ended.
He did not exclude the possibility that Israel’s current government would wipe out Hamas—only to turn its gaze to the West Bank and decide to annihilate the PA too. He then repeated a familiar PA call for a third partner in this ménage. “Left to our own resources, we will not achieve peace,” he said. “We have a partner in Israel that never, not for one moment, contemplated seriously what the outcome of peace should be.” So he appealed for international guarantees, “a collective international decisive drive to impose peace.”
The current Israeli government has worked hard to make sure the Palestinian Authority is kept out of any solution. Netanyahu’s implication that Israel will just manage things itself is subtle compared with the rhetoric of some of the more fanatical types he has welcomed into minor portfolios of his government. I wrote previously about his minister of diaspora affairs and social equality, Amichai Chikli, who told me a few weeks ago, “I don’t believe in the leadership of Fatah and Abu Mazen, and unfortunately, I am afraid that within their heart they are very happy with what happened” on October 7. So to Netanyahu’s right, the idea is a nonstarter.
Among Israel’s professional governing class, the idea of a smooth PA takeover is treated as risible. Blinken spoke of an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority.” That might require some serious time at the gym. Zohar Palti, who until last year ran the policy shop at Israel’s Ministry of Defense and earlier headed the intelligence directorate of the Mossad, told me this week that he saw little hope for the idea. “From a practical point of view: no way,” he said. First, he said, just observe how poorly the PA manages the territory it controls. Second: Those thousands of PA operatives in Gaza, on whom Lapid suggests that a conservatorship be built, have been long dormant because of Hamas’s domination. “They were trained by the PA to do police work, public safety.” In 15 years, Palti said, they’ve aged, and may have lost what little competence they might have had. “How do we know they don’t have a belly out to here?” He traced a generous paunch with his cupped hand. “These are the guys who are going to protect us from Hamas?” Even with training—he suggested the Jordanians could manage that—the task would take years. Palti’s counterproposal is to start from scratch, with a new government led by a few dozen talented, hypereducated Palestinians untainted by the corruption of the PA or the fanaticism of Hamas. Get Americans, Europeans, and Arab states to pay them, and demand transparency. Anything less ambitious, he told me, would be just trying the same old failed formulas and expecting new results.
[Read: How the Palestinian Authority failed its people]
The dispute over the PA’s suitability for the job is, as of now, a dispute over whose long bet is longer. A U.S. official in Israel, who requested anonymity so he could speak freely, told me that however far-fetched a PA-led Gaza may be, it is “the last chance,” and that Biden knows it and will provide backing. The official also said the picture of a corrupt, incompetent PA is outdated, and that funding cuts since the Trump administration have left the PA with nothing to steal. “If the PA is supported by Israel and the international community, then they will succeed,” the official assured me. But he echoed Bishara’s claim that the PA won’t participate without policy changes in the West Bank—including a stop to settler violence, opening of funding sources to the PA, and other reforms that Israel’s current government is loath to grant. “If the PA is given the freedom to maneuver,” the official said, “then there is no better alternative.”
But Israel, the U.S., and the Palestinians all have long records of choosing the worse of two alternatives. Pessimism remains in abundant supply among the Palestinians. I asked Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian philosopher and former PA official, whether he thought his former colleagues would be good fits to govern Gaza.
“It isn’t going to work forever,” he said. “Why? Because it gives Israel even more confidence in itself—that this whole thing is under its thumb, that it can do with it as it pleases.” A government selected off a menu for Israel and the United States would never be sustainable. “If we go on living like this, Israel is not going to find peace.”