In April 2013, when Prime Minister Fayyad resigned, fed up with political attacks from President Abbas’s Fatah, a number of observers worried that it marked “the beginning of the end of the PA.”1 Western governments viewed Fayyad as indispensable, the only uncorrupted figure both aligned with their interests and sufficiently independent of Fatah to check its unelected rule in the West Bank.
Although Fayyad was unpopular locally, he was a capable technocrat, successfully administering the Palestinian Authority’s scattered municipalities. He spoke a common tongue with international donors, having formerly served as the International Monetary Fund’s representative to the PA, and was valued in Washington primarily because of his reputation for transparency, his efforts at reforming the security forces, and his close collaboration with Israel. He was appreciated not in spite of his poor relations with the two largest Palestinian political parties but because of them. And he displayed a keen sense for what US officials might like to hear, proclaiming his “open-ended commitment” to fire any individuals Washington disliked from boards of Islamic charities; his hostility to Hamas, which he described as “our problem much more than it’s Israel’s or the U.S.’s”; and his “better relationship with the Central Bank of Israel than with the PMA,” the Palestine Monetary Authority.”2
Yet Fayyad’s Israeli and US champions were also a cause of his downfall. The United States reduced its aid to the Palestinian Authority, helping contribute to a financial crisis that Fatah then used to whip up protests against Fayyad’s economic policies. After Abbas’s decision to apply for Palestine’s upgrade in status at the UN General Assembly in November 2012—a decision Fayyad opposed so vigorously that he reportedly broke a bone in his hand while pounding his fist on a conference table—Israel imposed debilitating financial sanctions, leading to a new round of demonstrations against Fayyad, cynically fueled by Fatah.3 Above all the United States and Israel failed to show the Palestinian people that Fayyad’s program of strong cooperation would advance them toward independence.
Many of the obstacles Fayyad faced were structural, not personal. Any Palestinian prime minister, especially one who is not on good terms with Fatah, has to manage the same inverse relationship between domestic support and closeness to Israel and the United States. Fayyad bore responsibility for collecting the Israeli tax transfers and Western aid on which the Palestinian Authority depends, both of which were regularly withheld for reasons outside his control. The prime minister has never been responsible for overall Palestinian strategy; instead, decisions over whether to fight, file suit against, negotiate, or cooperate with Israel lay with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Abbas. In the end, Fayyad resigned because he became a scapegoat for the deeper problems of the Palestinian national movement and the political malaise induced by the PLO’s indecisiveness.
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Since the failure of Oslo and the end of the Second Intifada, the PLO has had the ability to choose between one of two broad strategies, both of them within the bounds of its 1993 commitment to nonviolence: defying Israel or cooperating with it. On the one hand, Palestinian leaders could have taken up a domestically popular but potentially dangerous strategy of challenging Israel more aggressively. This approach could have involved encouraging popular protest (and risking violence); reconciling with Hamas by disregarding US and European preferences to exclude it from decision-making; or taking steps toward internationalizing the conflict, for example by ignoring US calls for restraint and joining UN organizations at which claims against Israel could be pursued. Any of these moves could have put additional pressure on a complacent Israel and the feckless international community to at least begin reassessing the status quo. But they might also have spurred retaliation and large reductions in foreign aid.
On the other hand, Palestinian leaders could have opted to cooperate more with Israel and Western powers. This strategy might have included returning to the incremental, confidence-building steps on which the Oslo process was based. Much before 2013, the PLO might have considered entering sustained public talks even in the absence of Israeli commitments to freeze all settlement construction or to agree to the pre-1967 lines as the basis for negotiations.4 It could also have launched discussions on arrangements—such as the establishment of a state with provisional borders—that fell short of a conflict-ending agreement but would have given the Palestinians more territory, sovereignty, and international recognition. But Abbas feared that such steps would take pressure off Israel to agree to a final settlement, open him to severe domestic criticism, and further weaken the legitimacy of the PLO and Fatah. Fayyad’s resignation was no doubt a reminder for Abbas of the perils of cooperating too closely with the West.
Faced with two unappealing options, Palestinian leaders tried to stand on a less perilous middle ground, threatening to edge slowly toward confrontation through steps that were not large enough to risk substantial costs but that were too small to win much domestic favor. They offered mild support for popular protests (even as they worked behind the scenes against them), took half steps toward reconciling with Hamas, feinted at and eventually inched toward challenging Israel in international agencies, and, prior to 2013, refused to negotiate peace without an Israeli settlement freeze and commitment to the pre-1967 lines, even while still holding “exploratory meetings” and secret talks.5
Fence straddling of this sort had its own price. The PLO had essentially chosen not to choose, and, in so doing, continued its slow enfeeblement, leaving Palestinians increasingly dissatisfied and allowing greater room for other events and actors to shape the conflict. Indeed, much of the protest activity in the months preceding Fayyad’s resignation—from hunger strikes by Palestinian prisoners to demonstrations against the Palestinian government and Israeli settlers—reflected an attempt to fill this leadership void. In the absence of a clearly articulated PLO strategy, calls for bolder steps toward confrontation only grew.
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The PLO’s indecision allowed the public to pull it—gradually and grudgingly—toward defiance, though with such reluctance that it hardly appeased its critics. Likewise, by refusing to engage in greater cooperation, the PLO was forgoing the potential benefits of doing so, such as having prisoners released from Israeli jails, acquiring weapons for PA security forces, regularly receiving tax transfers and foreign aid, gaining greater international sympathy, enduring fewer Israeli incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas, and expanding PA jurisdiction in the West Bank. Equivocation and vacillation left no one happy.
There was, furthermore, little reason for West Bank leaders to be so hesitant about committing to one of these strategic directions. Joining additional UN bodies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization, for example, might have provoked some backlash, but the PA would collapse only in the highly improbable event that the United States, European countries, and Israel wanted it to. Instead, all three parties believed that the PA’s relatively intransigent but peaceful leadership was much more attractive than any of the alternatives. This was illustrated repeatedly. Israeli and Palestinian leaders negotiated with one another by pointing a gun at the PA’s head, but each side knew that the other would not actually pull the trigger. In November 2012, Israeli leaders spoke of annulling the Oslo agreements and forcing a PA collapse if Abbas pursued an upgrade in Palestine’s status at the UN General Assembly. Abbas did just that and, not surprisingly, the Israeli threats turned out to be empty. The next month, Abbas threatened PA dismantlement in response to a planned expansion of Israeli settlements around Jerusalem, but this talk also turned out to be hot air. When the Palestinians used what Israelis referred to as the “nuclear option” and the “doomsday weapon”—joining the International Criminal Court, in 2015—Israel swallowed it and kept pushing for heightened cooperation with the PA.6
Similarly, a Palestinian decision to increase cooperation with Israel and Western donors could have prompted some domestic criticism, but nothing that would have brought down the government. In January 2012, Palestinian objections to the PLO’s direct talks with Israel barely reached a murmur. Even if Palestinian leaders had agreed to break the taboo of refusing a state on provisional borders, domestic opposition might have been far less than expected: in effect, Palestinians were already living within a state, as decreed by the UN General Assembly, with provisional borders, as set by the Oslo Accords. Nor would the de jure creation of a state with provisional borders have been likely to harm Palestinian interests by removing what little pressure Israel faced to reach a final agreement; so long as no peace accord had been reached, there would almost certainly have been continued protests against land confiscations and the separation barrier; calls to sanction and boycott Israel; and legal challenges to settlement construction, home demolitions, displacement of families, and restrictions on movement. Such agitation would be manageable for Israel if there were greater cooperation with the PLO, but it has also proven manageable without it.
Indignation against “negotiations for the sake of negotiations”—as many have come to view talks—distracted Palestinians from the costs of inaction. During the years that Palestinian leaders refused to enter formal, direct talks, Israel advanced settlement construction in the West Bank, consolidated control over East Jerusalem, and further isolated Gaza. The PLO gained nothing in return. If it had come to the table, it might not have been able to slow Israel’s advance, but it likely would have gained some concessions.
Of course, Palestinian leaders were not exclusively to blame for the standstill. Most were responding to the contradictory demands of their constituents. West Bankers seemed to want to have it both ways: to wage a more effective resistance to the occupation but without reducing living standards or suffering the effects of another intifada. The West Bank leadership indulged the contradiction, failing to communicate clearly to its people—and possibly even to itself—that these two objectives were at odds with each other.
There was little incentive for Palestinian leaders to pull the national movement out of this tangle, since the public had already made its preferences known, protesting vociferously against stalled salary payments and increases in the cost of living while expressing only muted criticism of intermittent negotiations, security cooperation with Israel, and the Palestinian Authority’s recurrent antagonism toward popular protests. And so the PLO leadership continued to muddle along, even after it no longer had Fayyad to blame for the choices it was not making.
—April 2013