{"id":1213435,"date":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=444770"},"modified":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","slug":"mahmoud-abbas-holocaust-controversy-spotlights-deep-disillusion-with-palestinian-authority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/09\/15\/mahmoud-abbas-holocaust-controversy-spotlights-deep-disillusion-with-palestinian-authority\/","title":{"rendered":"Mahmoud Abbas Holocaust Controversy Spotlights Deep Disillusion With Palestinian Authority"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mahmoud Abbas, the<\/u> usually low-profile president of the Palestinian Authority, was widely condemned around the world this week, including by prominent Palestinian intellectuals<\/a>, after making antisemitic comments<\/a> about the Holocaust in a televised speech to his party last month. While Abbas\u2019s words and actions rarely command significant international attention, the incident put a spotlight on his deep unpopularity among Palestinians, some 73 percent<\/a> of whom want him gone, and their growing disillusionment with the PA.<\/p>\n

Abbas, whose spokesperson disputed<\/a> that his remarks were antisemitic, was one of the architects of the Oslo peace process, which commenced with a historic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn 30 years ago this week. Oslo has long been dead<\/a> to Palestinians<\/a>, whose hopes in the statehood promised to them under the deal collapsed years ago.<\/p>\n

Now, faced with the most far-right extremist Israeli government to date, escalating settler and military violence that have laid bare the PA\u2019s inability to protect its people, and Abbas\u2019s increasingly authoritarian rule, many Palestinians have also begun to question the future of Oslo\u2019s most enduring legacy: the PA itself. As Palestinians look with growing concern to an unclear succession path following Abbas, who is 87 and has ruled since shortly Arafat died in 2004, they are also asking whether the institution itself can \u2014 or should \u2014 survive a political moment so profoundly distant from that of its establishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a very big question mark about the sustainability of the Palestinian Authority,\u201d said Ammar Dwaik, director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, Palestine\u2019s official rights ombudsman.<\/p>\n

It was a question I heard from many Palestinians across class, generation, and political allegiance during a trip to the occupied West Bank earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s the point of the PA?\u201d asked Ehab Bseiso, a former minister of culture whom Abbas fired in 2021 after he publicly criticized Palestinian security forces\u2019 killing<\/a> of an outspoken critic of the PA. \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of having a PA if we still have expansion of settlements, incursions, killings, shootings, and so on? There\u2019s nothing that the PA can offer. It\u2019s been trapped in one function: maintaining order, condemning Israeli violations, addressing the international community. It doesn\u2019t match the anger and frustration on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bseiso pointed to Abbas\u2019s rule-by-decree governance, with no elections held in a generation and Parliament dissolved years ago. \u201cThe whole Palestinian political future is linked to, \u2018What\u2019s going to happen after Abbas is gone?’\u201d Bseiso said. \u201cThat\u2019s a failure in itself, because if we had institutions, this question wouldn\u2019t have been emerging. In a healthy political system, one president goes and another comes. But we have no institutions, there is no Parliament, no elections for the last 18 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The authority has become \u201cirrelevant\u201d to many Palestinians, echoed Mustafa Barghouti, a co-founder of the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, a third party aiming to overcome the split between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, Abbas\u2019s party.<\/p>\n

Abbas Zaki, a veteran Fatah member, put it more bluntly. \u201cThe PA is over, they are finished,\u201d Zaki said. \u201cWe need to reorganize ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"GAZA<\/p>\n

Israeli forces use gas bombs against protesters at a demonstration marking the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords signed between Palestine and Israel, Gaza City, Gaza, on Sept. 13, 2023.<\/p>

Photo: Ali Jadallah\/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Subcontractors for the Occupation<\/h2>\n

The Palestinian Authority was established as part of the Oslo agreements as a transitional body to administer the territories Israel has illegally occupied since 1967: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement until the contours of a sovereign Palestinian nation could be finalized in negotiations. That, of course, never happened. Instead, Israel has spent the last 30 years seizing control of most of the territory that was intended to constitute the basis for a Palestinian state. In the five years that Oslo set aside for negotiations, the population of settlers in the occupied territories more than doubled<\/a>, ballooning to some 700,000 today<\/a>.  <\/p>\n

With prospects of a two-state solution all but vanished, so has the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority itself. While Abbas is deeply unpopular, his potential successors fare hardly better<\/a>, a clear sign that the institution, more than the man himself, is the problem.<\/p>\n

Still, even the PA\u2019s most outspoken critics stress that its failures must be understood in the context of an Israeli occupation of which the authority is but an extension. From the start, the PA had no real sovereignty or power. While a series of agreements technically gave it administrative and security control over 17 percent of the West Bank \u2014\u00a0the most densely populated areas known as Area A\u2014\u00a0Israeli forces frequently invade those lands, exposing the meaninglessness of those arrangements. Meanwhile, the PA has virtually no control over the majority of the West Bank, what\u2019s known as Areas B and C.<\/p>\n

The PA is charged with running the functions of local government \u2014 such as education, health care, trash collection, and policing \u2014 even though under international law, the occupying power is responsible for the care of the people under its control. Israel, meanwhile, controls all movements outside and within the West Bank, its natural resources, and its economy.<\/p>\n

The Oslo agreements also resulted in one of the most fraught features of the authority\u2019s existence: its obligation to a deeply controversial security coordination with Israel. While PA officials need to coordinate with their Israeli counterparts to administer a host of services, including policing, the security coordination also sets up Palestinian security forces, trained and funded largely by the United States and European countries, to work with the Israeli military to suppress Palestinian resistance. That, in addition to the PA\u2019s inability to protect Palestinians against violence by the military and settlers, has deepened its delegitimization in the eyes of Palestinians.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

At the same time, the authority\u2019s role as civic administrator has made it indispensable to maintaining a modicum of normalcy and services for the population. Crucially, the donor-funded PA has become the primary economic engine in Palestine, employing at least 150,000 people in a bloated bureaucracy designed to inject liquidity in an otherwise strangled economy. (Some 942,000 Palestinians<\/a>, a quarter of the population, are entirely dependent on PA salaries). But even those economic benefits are subject to Israel\u2019s whims. Israel collects taxes and tariffs from Palestinians and transfers them to the PA, frequently withholding funds to apply political pressure and leaving tens of thousands of people without income.<\/p>\n

Against that backdrop, a growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe people look at it as a subcontractor,\u201d said Shawan Jabarin, the director of the prominent Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, echoing a common refrain. \u201cThe PA, at the end of the day, is not an independent state, it’s still not a sovereign state. We don\u2019t like to say that, for national reasons, not to harm them, but purely speaking, it is a subcontractor.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Israeli<\/p>\n

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs a weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem on Aug. 27, 2023<\/p>

Photo: Menahem Kahana\/Pool Photo via AP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

The End of the PA<\/h2>\n

In Ramallah, the authority\u2019s de facto capital, foreign-sponsored ministry buildings bear the insignia and flags of a \u201cState of Palestine.\u201d That statehood was recognized by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations\u2019 General Assembly in 2012, perhaps Abbas\u2019s greatest political accomplishment, but it does not exist in practice.<\/p>\n

In fact, mostly powerless at home, the PA\u2019s leadership has staked its hopes in international forums and mechanisms, including bids to bring Israeli crimes before both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. It\u2019s a strategy that has slowly earned Palestinians global solidarity while also angering Israeli officials, who dubbed the efforts \u201cdiplomatic terrorism.\u201d But it also put the fate of Palestinians in the hands of fickle global trends and left many of them feeling alienated by efforts that have no real impact on their daily lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cared more about the outside. We worked so hard in the international arena to get some recognition and support,\u201d said Zaki, the Fatah veteran. \u201cNow we\u2019re shifting, we\u2019re turning inside. We need a plan to protect our people and help people confront the settlers. We need to focus on national unity and reorganizing the Palestinian household.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and others pointed to the current moment in Israeli politics, with the country\u2019s most extremist government to date \u2014 headed by third-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in coalition with some of the country\u2019s most far-right parties \u2014 attacking its institutions and enflaming internal divisions, as one of great danger but also of opportunity for Palestinians. \u201cThe big difference between the Israeli governments of the last 20, 30 years is that some of them were working under the table, and this one is working in front of the whole world,\u201d Mousa Hadid, the former mayor of Ramallah, told me. \u201cThis government will take us to a place that the whole world must stop and start thinking about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israeli leaders have relied on the PA for the last 30 years, understanding the strategic need for maintaining its administrative role and security cooperation. Yet the current Israeli government has shown little interest in its survival. Instead, the country\u2019s leadership has made no secret of its disdain for the PA. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, for instance, has called on Israel to \u201cwork towards its collapse<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether that will happen or not, many Palestinians have already begun to think about a future not only after Abbas, but also with leadership and a political process that is more representative of their aspirations. With some 70 percent of the population younger than Oslo<\/a>, many Palestinians are also pushing for different goals and frameworks than those laid out by the agreements.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do believe our goal as Palestinians should not only be fighting the occupation, I think we should call for ending and bringing down the whole system of apartheid and racial discrimination in the whole of Palestine,\u201d said Barghouti, the Palestinian National Initiative secretary. \u201cThey\u2019re killing the two-state solution? We can have a one-state solution. But we will not live as slaves in a system of apartheid.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post Mahmoud Abbas Holocaust Controversy Spotlights Deep Disillusion With Palestinian Authority<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years after the Oslo Accords, Palestinians question whether the pseudo-government borne from the peace process can \u2014 and should \u2014 survive.<\/p>\n

The post Mahmoud Abbas Holocaust Controversy Spotlights Deep Disillusion With Palestinian Authority<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":300,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/300"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213435"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1214868,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213435\/revisions\/1214868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}