No Good Options in Post-War Gaza
Despite decades of failed diplomacy and billions in international aid, the Palestinian Authority remains entrenched in corruption, extremism, and its refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
With a hostage and ceasefire between Israel and Hamas agreed, serious diplomatic talks are now underway about what a post-war Gaza should look like.
Outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has outlined his vision. Reading it felt like being in an episode of “Star Trek” where the Enterprise gets caught in a time loop and keeps experiencing the same events. It was nothing but ideas that have failed for three decades.
To keep it short, Blinken wants the Palestinian Authority1 to bring in international partners to create and run an interim administration for key civil sectors in Gaza, such as banking, water, energy, health, and civil coordination with Israel. The international community would provide funding, technical support, and oversight. As the Palestinian Authority already governs Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), such a move would put the Palestinian Authority in charge of all Palestinian territories.
Blinken then lambasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to accept the Palestinian Authority as an alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza and Netanyahu’s refusal to accept a time-bound, conditions-based pathway to a Palestinian state, in which the Palestinian Authority would govern Gaza and Judea and Samaria.
The U.S. speaks of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority. Such vague nonsense obscures the reality that reforming the Palestinian Authority would be a Herculean feat, and more likely a Sisyphean one.
Accepting Israel’s Right to Exist
Apologies in advance for what will be a not-so-brief history, but reforming the Palestinian Authority requires an honest understanding of what it is, and what it wants. These basics are sorely missing from the discourse.
The Palestinian Authority exists to destroy Israel, which is why it still does not accept Israel’s right to exist. It still thinks Israel can be destroyed even though believing this, and trying to achieve it, has brought misery to Palestinian Arabs for 76 years.
In a weird and dangerous denialism, two-state advocates just pretend this fundamental truth is not so.
Too often forgotten, or even unknown in today’s era of post-modern gibberish and revisionist history, is that the Palestinian Authority is just the old Palestine Liberation Organization terror group revamped. It was established to govern and prepare the Palestinian territories for statehood under the Oslo Accords2 in 1994.
The Palestinian Authority played make-believe for a short while, until its then-leader Yasser Arafat — the only Nobel Peace Prize winner to have killed more people after winning the prize than before doing so — walked away from a deal that gave the Palestinians everything they claimed they wanted.
Israel offered Arafat a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, 96 percent of Judea and Samaria, and four percent of Israel in a land swap for Israel’s settlements in Judea and Samaria.
Arafat rejected it and launched the Second Intifada in which Palestinian factions (Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) blew up Israeli civilian targets including buses, nightclubs, pizza parlors, and open-air markets.
As former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who was involved in the negotiations, said recently: “You walk away from these once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunities, and you can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there. You can’t do it.”
Clinton also said that, “All [young people] know that a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from, and they can’t believe it.”
Arafat rejected the Oslo Accords because they did not give the Palestine Liberation Organization/Palestinian Authority what it wanted, which is what is has always wanted: the destruction of Israel and genocide of Jews. It is why the Palestinian Authority declared the Second Intifada.
This treachery of signing the Oslo Accords and then rejecting them, plus the violence that followed, should have made the Palestinian Authority an international pariah. However, the degenerate international community continued to recognize and engage with the Palestinian Authority as though it was a legitimate organization. This lunacy continues today.
The desire to destroy Israel is embedded in the Palestinian Authority’s mutant DNA. It has no interest in a Palestinian state — for Palestine was never a country or nation — but sees it as a stepping stone from which to chip away at destroying Israel. As the Arabic saying goes, “After Saturday comes Sunday.”
The Palestinian Authority still has not even condemned the October 7th attacks, because it agrees with them. Given this, something as fundamental as getting the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel’s right to exist is not simple.
The Palestinian Authority’s history of lying may be the only thing that matches its history of killing. So, even a genuinely reformed Palestinian Authority — a mythical beast if ever there were one — will find it hard to convince Israel, and others, of its sincerity.
The so-called Palestinians are the undisputed world heavyweight champions of rejecting peace. Besides the Oslo Accords, they rejected a two-state solution in 1937 (Peel Commission), 1947 (UN Partition of Palestine), 1967 (end of the Six-Day War), 2000 (the Oslo Peace Accords revisited), 2005 (Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza), and 2008 (improved version of the Oslo Accords).
The Palestinian Authority refuses to recognize the Jewish state’s existential rights because the Palestinian Authority is made up of Islamic fanatics. The world’s denial of this is infuriating.
Islamic Fanaticism
The mainstream media dishonestly presents the Palestinian Authority as the “moderate” force in Palestinian politics, in contrast to the Islamist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The is cock-eyed nonsense. The Palestinian Authority is not moderate.
Antisemitism’s foundations in the Muslim world are always religious. Yet, the media will not admit this for fear of being called “Islamophobic.” The Palestinian Authority hates Jews and Israel because they fear the religious implications for Islam.
Islamic extremism comes in more forms than the Hamas-like and ISIS-like Caliphate builders. The Palestinian Authority may not want to build a Caliphate, but it does want to kill Jews and destroy Israel for religious reasons. It is a zebra with black and white stripes as opposed to one with white and black stripes.
In fact, Palestinianism is a form of Islamism. Unable to defeat Israel militarily, the Arabs adopted a strategy of trying to destroy Israel by creating an Arab nationalist movement. Palestinianism — being Palestinian in the sense that the word is used today — was developed specifically for this purpose.
It was a propaganda masterstroke. By reframing the issue as a nationalist one through an invented Palestinian identity, the Palestine Liberation Organization managed to pretend its goals were nationalist and anti-colonialist, rather than an Islam-based antisemitic terror movement.
Jews bother the Islamic mind more than other non-Muslims because the Jews were there when Muhammad preached so are living reminder that not everyone who encountered Muhammad was moved by his teachings. That is quite an affront to a religion that claims to be God’s final world. It would be much easier if the Jews were not here to remind them. This is the source of Muslim antisemitism.
Israel’s military success against Arab armies poured salt into this wound. Islam’s rapid military and colonial expansionism was seen as a religious proof point. Each military success showed Islam was true. The corollary is that if winning wars and expanding makes Islam true, what do Islamic armies continually losing wars to the Jewish state mean? Hence, defeating Israel is a religious requirement for many Muslims, simply as part of their worldview.
Israel’s success is a further humiliation. It must be galling for Muslims to watch the Jews, on a slither of land without oil, build a prosperous democracy with the world’s most effective military. To the religious-minded, Israel’s success also looks like God keeping his promise to the Jewish People regarding the Land of Israel.
This is the backstory of the Palestinian Authority’s fundamental worldview. Far from being moderate, it is innately Islamist; not in the Caliphate-building sense, but in their foundational view that Islam must prevail over the Jews to show that it is true.
The Palestinian Authority then feeds this extremism through a school system, often with the United Nations’ complicity, which teaches Palestinian children that Jews are evil and that every Muslim should aspire to die a martyr in the struggle against them. Modern Western political thought has no framework to understand Islamism, which is why the West struggles to tackle it domestically and cannot recognize it in the Palestinian Authority.
Deradicalization
Reforming the Palestinian Authority requires deradicalizing it from the top down.
The Palestinian Authority’s dictatorial leader, 89-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, is a walking dictionary of antisemitic quotes and mad beliefs. Even if he were pushed out in reform attempts, the Palestinian Authority’s “revitalized” cabinet includes people who no sane person would consider moderate.
Minister of Religious Affairs and Endowments, Mohammad Mustafa Najem, has quoted Quranic verses demonizing Jews as “apes and pigs” and “characterized by conceit, pride, arrogance, rioting, disloyalty and treachery.” Mona al-Khalili, the Minister of Women’s Affairs, supports terrorism and speaks of Palestinians resisting “75 years of occupation,” a number that means Israel’s existence is the occupation.
If these are the kinds of “moderates” who will make up a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, who then are the non-deranged ones who are going to oversee the fantastical reforms and deradicalization?
Countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and others could play a role here, since they have had some success in deradicalizing their own jihadists. However, because the international donor community of Left-leaning Western countries do not understand Islamism, their favored way of combating it — with investments and loans — is as sure to fail as I was in my Year 9 Computer Science exam. (I got 27 percent.)
The Western orthodoxy is that investment and reconstruction are key tools in fighting radicalization. The thesis is that if Palestinians have economic opportunities and are free from Israeli oppression, they will be less disaffected and less prone to extremist ideology.
Something similar to the Marshall Plan, in which billions of dollars were put into rebuilding Germany and Europe after World War Two, is often touted as a key plank of deradicalization.
This is wrong.
Palestinian terror increases when the money flows in. It is axiomatic that the wealthier religious extremists become, the more resources they have to invest in their Jihadist agenda.
Gaza itself shows this. The West has sent more than $4.5 billion to Gaza since Israel pulled out in 2005. That is more on a per-capita basis than the Marshall Plan. Far from being deradicalized, Hamas used this money to build the most extensive terror state in history. It then attacked Israel ceaselessly for years, culminating in the October 7th attacks.
Estimates of what it will cost to rebuild Gaza run as high as $20 billion. Without deradicalization, that will be $20 billion flowing to extremists, whether they are of the Hamas or Palestinian Authority variety.
Only the likes of Blinken, the soulless clones at the UN, and the world’s multilateral agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) could believe that any money provided without — and before — deradicalization will be spent on anything other than terror.
The case for rebuilding Gaza is a moral and humanitarian one, but because the Palestinian Authority’s motives are rooted in religion, money will not reduce Islamism among Palestinians.
How can the world fund and rebuild Gaza, and invest in Palestinian Authority-run territories, when doing so has historically led to greater terror? No one in the commentariat classes even asks this because they know they will not like the answer. Instead, they choose to wear blinkers big enough for a Clydesdale.
Rather than hoping that prosperity will work some kind of magic, it would be better for international donors not to invest or lend until there is tangible deradicalization.
Donors can measure whether the Palestinian Authority has ended its notorious pay-for-slay policy in which it pays stipends to Palestinians who murder Jews, removed the antisemitism from school books, stopped the hatred spewing out of mosques, ceased publishing support for terrorism in the local media. Finally, Palestinian leaders themselves need to stop stoking terrorism.
Here is the kicker, though. These are things the Palestinian Authority is already supposed to be doing and to which financial aid is supposed to be tied. The bodies that are meant to hold the Palestinian Authority’s reform to account are useless, corrupt, and entrenched interests.
Bodies such are International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), for example, are either complicit in Palestinian terror and derive large parts of their funding from Palestinian aid.
UNRWA, which Israel has finally banned, has been directly involved in terror, while the International Red Cross helps facilitate the Palestinian Authority’s pay-for-slay policy. The entire international ecosystem around all things Palestinian needs reform as much as the Palestinian Authority does.
Does anyone who is serious believe that such institutions will reform the Palestinian Authority and hold it accountable? Even my cat laughs at that.
Deradicalization is difficult because Islamism is ingrained in Palestinian culture. Countries such as Iran and Qatar — not to mention external non-state groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda — keep fomenting Islamism in the Palestinian territories. It is a forever battle. Then there are Palestinian jihadist groups, such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which are Caliphate-seeking rivals of the Palestinian Authority.
Since its inception, the Palestinian Authority has proven itself unwilling and unable to tame jihadism. The unwillingness comes from the Palestinian Authority being extremists. Put simply, why would the Palestinian Security Forces crack down on terrorism when they support it? Between 2021 and 2023, at least 80 Palestinian Security Forces members were implicated in terrorist activities targeting Israelis.
Even if the Palestinian Authority wanted to crackdown, it is far from clear that it could do so without Israeli support. For example, the Palestinian Authority lost control of Gaza to Hamas in the Palestinian civil war after Israel pulled out in 2005.
Ever opportunistic, the Palestinian Authority is now trying to show it is serious about reform and governing, so it is trying to retake control of the city of Jenin. Jenin is in Area A of Judea and Samaria, under full Palestinian Authority control, but Palestinian Islamic jihadist terrorists run the city as a fief.
The Palestinian Security Forces has found regaining control of Jenin tough. The Israel Defense Forces have had to conduct multiple anti-terror operations there. This shows that an effective Palestinian Authority would need substantially stronger security forces.
This is another area where the limp-brained two-staters think international support and resources are the answer. The U.S. and European nations already train some Palestinian Security Forces troops and could train more and help equip them better.
Yet, Israel has every reason to be wary of such schemes. After October 7th, Israel would be mad to allow a larger and better equipped Palestinian force so close to its heartland. This is just a security reality.
Democratic Reform
This is where the international community’s fantasy world collides with reality.
Abbas is a crud dictator who has not held elections in Judea and Samaria in almost 18 years. To be fair, the Palestinian Authority is as democratic as any of the world’s 21 Arab states, all of which are dictatorships. The odds of a Palestinian state being the Arab world’s first democracy are vanishingly small.
Abbas runs a kleptocracy through which he has amassed a $100 million fortune. His sons are each worth many times that as Abbas has granted them exclusive import rights for tobacco, and lucrative government contracts in construction, real estate, and cellular communications. He has a private jet in Amman, the capital of Jordan.
His patronage extends to supporters in his unusually large 23-member cabinet and to the Palestinian Security Forces, which at one point had more generals than the U.S. army. The Palestinian Authority never established an independent or credible judiciary, properly functioning ministries, or any other necessary organs of state.
Accountability without transparency is impossible and the Palestinian Authority’s budget is as opaque as a ginger beer bottle. The Palestinian Authority restricts freedom of expression and targets Palestinian journalists brave enough to report on this corruption.
Abbas knows that this corruption, cronyism, and nepotism has made him unpopular, and that Hamas might well win an election, as it did in Gaza in 2005 when Israel pulled out. It is partly why he has stopped holding elections, though main reason is that he is tyrant.
Advocates of reform dream of solving these problems by establishing anti-corruption commissions, transparent budgets, spending watchdogs, and other such imaginings. This is what the international community means when it speaks of providing “technical support” and “oversight.”
In theory, the world could, and should, condition aid on the Palestinian Authority enacting democratic reforms (as with deradicalization steps). Yet, we are back in the “Star Trek” time loop. This is what is meant to be happening now and meant to have been happening since the Oslo Accords were signed 30 years ago.
Withholding money is rarely used to force the Palestinian Authority to reform because donors fear the humanitarian implications for ordinary Palestinians. Plus, there are just too many entrenched interests such as UN agencies and NGOs that have their deformed snouts in the Palestinian financial trough. Putting such groups in charge of accountability is like putting a saltwater crocodile in charge of a day spa.
Besides, this is the Middle East, where taking your opponent’s head is not just a metaphor. It is just nonsense to think that committees of bureaucratic reform are going to turn jihadist thugs and thieves into model citizens.
The Palestinian Authority is simply made up of jihadists in business suits.
The Fatah-controlled government body that exercises partial civil control over the Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank as a consequence of the 1993–1995 Oslo Accords
A pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1990s
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
By this definition, the U.S. State Department is insane.
Blinken is a devotee of the John Lennon School of Diplomacy