One of the greatest challenges posed to the more than decade-long rule of Mahmoud Abbas and his strategy of bilateral negotiations, diplomacy, and security cooperation with Israel came in late 2015 and early 2016. Young Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, most of them unaffiliated with any political faction, initiated a series of stabbings, shootings, protests, and clashes, resulting in the deaths of some thirty Israelis and more than two hundred Palestinians in a six-month period.1 The violence reflected a sense among Palestinians that their leadership had failed, that national rights had to be defended in defiance of their leaders if necessary, and that the Abbas era was coming to an end.
Abbas came to power with a limited window to achieve political results. More a drab functionary than a charismatic revolutionary leader like Yasir Arafat, he was seen as a bridge to recovery from the ruinous years of the Second Intifada. At the time of his election, in January 2005, Palestinians were battered, exhausted, and in need of an internationally accepted, violence-abhorring figure who could secure the political and financial support necessary to rebuild a shattered society. The Fatah movement was divided and discredited by the failure of Oslo, by corruption scandals, and by the abandonment of its liberation strategy before independence had been achieved. Abbas, who had led outreach to the Israelis since the 1970s, seemed a sufficiently unthreatening transitional figure. He had few serious challengers: Hamas abstained from the presidential election; Fatah’s founding leaders had been assassinated many years earlier; Marwan Barghouti, who had been in an Israeli prison since 2002, withdrew from the race. And the Bush administration, newly reelected, favored Abbas.2
No one expected these conditions to last. Palestinian fatigue from fighting Israel would wear off. The West Bank and Gaza would be rebuilt. Hamas wouldn’t stay out of politics forever. Continuing occupation would foment resistance. Leaders who suppressed that resistance would be discredited. And a new generation of Palestinians would grow up with no memory of the costs of the intifadas and no understanding of why their parents had agreed not only to refrain from fighting the Israeli army but to cooperate with it, under agreements that Abbas had negotiated.
For Abbas, political survival depended on making significant gains before any of this occurred. His approach entailed several gambles: First, that providing Israel with security, informing on fellow Palestinians, and suppressing opposition to the occupation would convince Israel’s government that Palestinians could be trusted with independence. Second, that after Palestinians had met US demands to abandon violence, build institutions, and hold democratic elections, the United States would put pressure on Israel to make the concessions necessary to establish a Palestinian state. Third, that after being invited to participate in legislative elections, Hamas would win enough seats to be co-opted but too few to take over. Fourth, that by improving the PA economy and rebuilding its institutions, Abbas would buy enough time to achieve statehood.
In all four respects, he came up short. Israel took his security cooperation for granted and its citizens did not demand that their government reward Abbas for his peaceful strategy. The United States did not apply the necessary pressure to extract significant concessions from Israel. Hamas won the legislative elections, took over Gaza, and refused to adopt Abbas’s political program (though the victory also strengthened foreign support for Abbas, as the international community sought to undermine the Islamists). And West Bankers, though dependent on the jobs and economic infrastructure provided by the Palestinian Authority, also resented it, and lost whatever faith they once had that Abbas’s plan could succeed. According to several opinion polls taken in 2015 and 2016, two-thirds of West Bankers and Gazans wanted him to resign.3
As Abbas’s failures mounted, Palestinians took matters into their own hands. They did so gradually at first, in areas outside PA control: Jerusalem, Gaza, Israeli prisons, and villages and refugee camps not under PA jurisdiction. Finally, in October 2015, the process accelerated, as violence and protests against Israel proliferated, even in parts of PA-controlled territory in the West Bank.
For Abbas, this presented a substantial threat. A true uprising could have made security cooperation with the occupier untenable, leaving him with limited means to suppress, marginalize, and imprison his only significant political challenger, Hamas, while opening the door for new contenders. By definition, violence would have represented a weakening of Abbas’s hand, since his principal asset was always his international respectability. If attacks had intensified, he could have been condemned internationally for not doing enough to stop them and discredited domestically for doing too much. If security had broken down, Israel would have found him increasingly irrelevant and been tempted to start empowering those it believed capable of quelling the unrest.
Yet the odds were still stacked overwhelmingly against those seeking to turn the clashes and violence into a sustained uprising. The attacks and protests were dispersed, unorganized, and uncoordinated, without a strategy or clear goals. Many Palestinians believed that enormous sacrifices could achieve results, but few wished to pay that price again. Protesters did not show up in numbers approaching those of the First or Second Intifada, and they did not turn against the Palestinian Authority, which together with Israel remained the greatest obstacle to overturning the status quo. Palestinians were certain that Abbas’s cooperative strategy would fail, but they had little faith that the alternatives would do better.
PA security forces mostly avoided the embarrassment of violently quashing protests against Israel and managed to keep their collaboration with it out of the public eye. The IDF appeared to have learned lessons from two intifadas and was taking pains not to exacerbate tensions by imposing closures or withholding permits to leave Palestinian territory or work in Israel. Huge numbers of people continued to depend on a PA whose existence would have been threatened by a new uprising.
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As Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem approached its fiftieth anniversary, it was hard to defend the notion that it was unsustainable. But sustainable is not the same as cost-free.
The violence of late 2015 and early 2016 was a resurgence of occupation’s costs, which, though unpleasant for Israel, remained the bearable price of holding on to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. For the Palestinians, the violence and protests were an announcement that although their crushed and divided national movement may not have been strong enough to achieve its goals, its constituents were not so weak that they would no longer pursue them.
—October 2015