Can the Palestinian Authority be beefed up?

The two parts of the Palestinian territories that Israel has occupied since 1967 are just 40km apart at their closest point. Yet the devastation of Gaza can feel farther from the West Bank than it does from many capitals in Europe. The West Bank, the bigger chunk of the Palestinians’ hoped-for independent state, has witnessed few big protests. Whereas people have boycotted American goods elsewhere in the Arab world, Palestinian officials serve Coca Cola. Few people in cafés watch the continuous coverage of the Gaza war on Al Jazeera, the Qatari channel. Couples laugh over cards and backgammon. “They come here to lose themselves,” says a Hamas fighter-turned-barista in a rooftop café in Nablus, one of the West Bank’s biggest cities.

Overseeing this calm—if not responsible for it—is the Palestinian Authority (pa). Persistent conflict with Israel has taught West Bankers the cost of violence. Gaza under Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, has seen six wars with Israel since 2007; the West Bank has largely shied away from large-scale confrontations. For decades Mahmoud Abbas, the pa’s president, has favoured negotiations to liberate Palestine, rejecting violent resistance. Western and Arab governments now pin their hopes for Gaza’s future on him and the pa.

Yet the Palestinian government has rarely looked weaker. It faces three major threats. Jewish extremists have moved from Israel’s political fringe into the heart of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, bent on ending the pa’s rule in the West Bank and annexing the land for Israel. Second, Hamas poses a growing challenge. The Islamists’ success in puncturing Israel’s defences on October 7th has reinvigorated Palestinians’ belief in the armed struggle. Third, battles within the pa over who will succeed Mr Abbas, who is 88, along with its inefficiency and corruption, have further undermined it. The gulf between the authority’s capabilities and what the world hopes for it is vast.

Successive Israeli governments have sought to erode the PA. But some of the Israeli prime minister’s allies want to get rid of it altogether. Even before October 7th, the Israeli government had almost doubled the number of Israeli army battalions in the West Bank to 25, leaving just four on the border with Gaza. Since then, the far-right national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has created and armed community security squads, in effect Jewish settler militias. Violence by settlers has reached unprecedented levels, diplomats say, with attacks up from an average of one a day in 2021 to four a day last year.

Meanwhile Israeli forces are tightening the noose around areas supposed to be run by the pa. New checkpoints choke Palestinian cities. Thousands have been arrested and held for months without charge. Some have been filmed being stripped naked and urinated on. Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed around 350 Palestinians in the West Bank since Hamas’s attack—the bloodiest period for decades.

Mr Netanyahu’s government is throttling the pa financially, too. The pa relies on Israel to collect import taxes on its behalf, which represents 64% of the authority’s total revenue. Since October Bezalal Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, has withheld much of this cash; after calls from President Joe Biden, he agreed to transfer some into an escrow account in Norway. Without it, the pa cannot pay its workers. Israel has banned Palestinian labourers from entering Israel. Shops are shut. Banks say they may go bust. Predictions of the pa’s collapse are old. But never have proponents of Israel’s territorial expansion had such a grip on Israeli policy.

Hamas poses the second big threat to the PA. For years the Islamists have sought to undermine it. Hamas’s preachers have denounced the pa’s co-operation with Israeli security forces. It has egged on new militias in the West Bank, such as the Lions’ Den, and older ones like Islamic Jihad. A recent study led by Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research suggested that 82% of people in the West Bank backed Hamas’s decision to attack Israel. Worryingly, only 5% of West Bankers recognised that it had committed atrocities against civilians on October 7th. “For years we watched Abu Mazen [as Mr Abbas is known] begging Israel to stop confiscating land and negotiate, but no one listened to him,” says Qassem Barghouti, a son of an imprisoned leader of Fatah, Mr Abbas’s nationalist party. “The world only notices when Israel is also in pain.”

The PA’s inefficiency has boosted such criticism. Even in Gaza Mr Abbas’s ministries are responsible for much of the health and education systems. The pa still pays 19,000 security people there. But its masters in Ramallah, its West Bank headquarters, show little appetite for alleviating Gaza’s woes. Some of them even seem to see an upside in Israel’s efforts to eradicate their rivals in Hamas.

The rot starts at the top. Polls show around 90% of Palestinians in the West Bank want Mr Abbas gone. He rarely tours his realm. When he made an appearance in Jenin last year, he was heckled. “Hamas may be underground,” says Muhammad Daraghmeh, a Palestinian journalist, “but it’s the pa which feels like it’s in hiding.” The ailing president dissolved parliament in 2007; 19 years into a four-year term, he has repeatedly cancelled elections. He refuses to appoint a deputy.

Mr Abbas’s courtiers are almost as ancient and self-serving as he is. His advisers are keen to grab his crown yet share his determination to keep challengers at bay. Outside Ramallah the pa has largely ceded power to the Tanzim, a new generation of activists in Fatah, the party headed by Mr Abbas. At night younger hotheads make tempting recruits for Hamas.

When the dust of the Gaza war settles, could the pa step back in? Despite its miseries, the West Bank under the PA has been far less horrible than Gaza. Ramallah, once a sleepy town, has fancy residential districts, restaurants, museums and a techno park for budding entrepreneurs.

Some Western and Arab governments once again want to beef up the PA into a government that could pave the way to a Palestinian state, finally ending the conflict with Israel. Almost 70% of West Bankers want to reform the PA, not dissolve it, according to a poll last month by the Institute for Social and Economic Progress, a think-tank in Ramallah. Over half still want to negotiate a two-state solution rather than have a single state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs together.

Such attitudes suggest that West Bankers feel the PA may be worth saving. Most seem wise to the risks of violence. “Don’t give the Jews the opportunity to destroy what we’ve built,” an ex-Tanzim fighter who now runs a cultural centre tells young men in Nablus. Even West Bankers who cheer Hamas have mostly ignored Gazan pleas to join their war. In 1998, when an earlier round of talks was faltering, Mr Shikaki wrote: “Peace now or Hamas later.” Despite its flaws, the pa still looks like the most plausible basis for a Palestinian state that might coexist peacefully with Israel. ■