Senior allies of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, have expressed fears that Benjamin Netanyahu’s new ultranationalist coalition in Israel will seek to dismantle the Palestinian Authority (PA), established after the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
The Palestinian social development minister, Ahmad Majdalani, said members of the government intended to destroy the authority, which administers a degree of self-rule in parts of the West Bank and is considered by Abbas as the institutional building block for a future Palestinian state.
“Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are aiming to destroy the authority as part of their ideology,” Majdalani said, referring to Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the heads of ultranationalist, anti-Arab parties who have emerged as highly influential ministers.
Majdalani suggested Israel would instead try to forge localised municipal bodies with no connection between them and no national attributes to replace the PA. “They want to create a new reality in the West Bank,” he said.
The Netanyahu coalition has announced it plans to massively expand Israeli settlements and eventually annex the occupied West Bank, an area of land where Palestinians have long sought to build a state.
The power of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in coalition talks and afterwards has left many Israelis wondering whether Netanyahu has enough clout to rein them in, or if he even wants to do so.
Israel last week imposed financial sanctions on the PA in response to the body’s spearheading of a successful UN drive to petition the international court of justice to rule whether Israel’s protracted control of the West Bank is a de facto annexation.
Smotrich, who serves as the finance minister and as the top administrator of the West Bank, told a press conference last week. “As long as [the PA] encourages terrorism, what is my interest in helping it exist?”
The PA provides educational, health, social and other services, and its security forces coordinate with Israel to thwart attacks on Israeli targets and keep Hamas in check. Originally envisioned by Israeli-Palestinian agreements as a transitional institution, its existence has lurched on indefinitely as any hopes for peacemaking that would lead to independence have broken down.
In response to a query, the Israeli foreign ministry denied that Israel has any interest in the collapse of the PA.
But two Israeli analysts, Menachem Klein and Zvi Barel, this week said they thought the Israeli government was bent on the destruction of the PA, with Klein speculating it might move ahead unless stopped by Washington. One possibility was that the effort would advance after Abbas, 87, left the scene, he said.
“The new government doesn’t want the old ideas of shrinking the conflict or managing the conflict,” said Klein, an emeritus professor of political science at Bar Ilan University and a visiting fellow at King’s College London’s department of war studies. “They want to determine the conflict in favour of settlement, annexation and shrinking the Palestinians to local bodies.”
Smotrich published a plan in 2017 calling for the destruction of the PA, establishment of local bodies and giving those Palestinians who refuse second-class status incentives to emigrate.
“There are many Arabs who want to get along with us and they can run things on a local, municipal level,” said Noam Arnon, a settler leader who said he supports “stopping” the Palestinian Authority.
The previous Israeli government had a different stance. While ruling out political negotiations with Abbas, it did help the PA by releasing money that had been withheld as a punishment for the authority paying stipends to families of those who carried out attacks.
The security establishment has been in favour of preventing a PA collapse on the grounds that continued security coordination is paramount, that Hamas could fill any vacuum, and that the PA presence relieves Israel of the burden of directly ruling the Palestinian population.
Financial crisis for the PA is chronic but other challenges are emerging. Its popularity has plummeted further given its inability to wrest concessions from Israel, which is offering no hope on the political horizon while deepening the occupation. With despair rampant among young people, a trend of independent armed Palestinian groups coalescing in the West Bank with public support is expected to continue. Their confrontations with Israeli forces could cause a major escalation, said Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, though he discounted the idea that Israel would try to eliminate the PA.
The latest sanctions would, however, hit hard unless donor countries stepped in, with further wage cuts for PA employees expected to reverberate through the economy, according to Rabeh Morrar, the director of research at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS).
Ziyad Shreim, the owner of a Ramallah grill restaurant, said he was on edge. “People don’t go out to eat when they have less money,” he said. Things were already slow because of tension and heightened Israeli restricttions on movement, he added. Shreim said he was worried he would have to lay off half his staff. “The future will be even worse,” he said.
