PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: The cost of a failed Palestinian leadership
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
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Jonathan Adler
Welcome to the +972 Podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Jonathan Adler, Senior Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
Before we dive in, a quick reminder that what we do would not be possible without you, our readers and listeners. If you believe in our mission and would like to support our work, head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of +972 or make a one-off contribution.
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Jonathan Adler
As we confront the daily horrors of Israel’s devastation of Gaza, it has been difficult to take stock of the wins in the global movement for justice in Palestine, or to feel that they make any difference as long as the bombs keep falling.
Yet these successes are real and significant. On the international legal front, the world’s highest courts have affirmed the illegality of Israeli apartheid and the plausibility of its genocide. The vast majority of countries now recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, and arrest warrants for Israeli leaders loom over every trip abroad. Perhaps most important has been the transformation in global public support for Palestinian rights and accountability for Israeli crimes.
And here, there is no going back. This is a moment, Omar Rahman argues, of both peril and possibility for Palestinians, who have witnessed unprecedented loss, but also maintain unprecedented international support. But the official Palestinian leadership has never been more weak and fragmented, incapable of taking advantage of this moment. Omar, a Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs and a longtime contributor to +972 Magazine, is the co-editor of a new collection of articles that assess the state of Palestinian politics since the October 7th attacks. His own contribution narrows in on the Palestinian leadership crisis. What he says is no longer merely a political deficiency, but a national emergency.
Omar, thank you so much for joining me on the +972 podcast.
Omar Rahman
Thanks so much for having me, Jonathan. It’s good to be back with you and with 972.
Jonathan Adler
Thank you.
Last month, for the first time in a decade, the Palestinian political party Fatah held internal elections as part of its general Congress in Ramallah. It came as no surprise that 90-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, was unanimously re-elected as the party’s leader. But perhaps more interesting was the news that his 64-year-old son, Yasser Abbas, secured a spot in Fatah’s senior leadership body, known as the Central Committee.
And just this past week, on June 3rd, the committee held its first meeting, where it elected Hussein al-Sheikh, Mahmoud Abbas’s right-hand man and the vice president of the state of Palestine, as deputy leader of Fatah. So Omar, what was the significance, if any, of the Congress and these elections?
Omar Rahman
Yeah, significance, if any. I think that’s an important caveat. I mean, I think, to be honest, the significance is just the continuity of this moment internally within Fatah, despite the severe challenges — the existential challenges — Palestinians face outside those doors of the Congress. The genocide that has happened in Gaza and is ongoing, the annexation that is moving faster than ever in the occupied territories, the settler terrorism against Palestinians in the villages surrounding Ramallah, yet in this room, it’s business as usual. And there’s a complete disconnect to that world outside, it’s just myopia, navel gazing, and a total lack of concern with all of that. It’s not addressing any of that.
Electing Yasser Abbas, Mahmoud Abbas’s son, is not the white knight that Palestinians need to come save the day. It does nothing. So I think what we’re seeing, really, is a continuation of a process that Abbas has been pursuing since he took office, which is the consolidation of power, the monopolization of control of Palestinian politics within every institution he is running, with every hat that he wears. I think that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. I mean, this is a Fatah General Congress, the first one in 10 years, I think since 2016. What they’re doing really is electing the Central Committee, which is the executive body of Fatah. But there’s no primaries held for the delegates.
It’s Abbas choosing who will attend, who is nominated, and who will win. Essentially what he’s doing is, you know, stacking loyalists and marginalizing any dissenters. It’s something he did in the 2016 General Congress. It’s something he did in the 2018 Palestinian National Council meeting, which was the first one held in a very long time, which is the highest legislative body of the PLO. And it’s, this is essentially the trajectory we’ve been on.
As you mentioned, I think, more importantly at this point, I think what he’s after is securing the succession process. You know, he wants to ensure who succeeds him at every level. And that person, it seems, is Hussein al-Sheikh, his right-hand man. He created two new roles, I think last year. So the vice president of the state of Palestine is a new role, and now he occupies that. The VP of the Palestinian Authority, he takes control for 90 days if anything happens to Mahmoud Abbas. He was put in as secretary general of the Executive Committee of the PLO, as well as Vice Chairman of the PLO, and now it’s Fatah. So, he’s the deputy now of Fatah.
So, every hat that Mahmoud Abbas wears, he has put Hussein al-Sheikh in a position to succeed him, should he pass away. I think that is, you know, a big part of this. But again, I think all this is you know this is political theater, it’s to also show that you know something is happening even though nothing is happening — to give the impression of political change. But again, in reality it’s business as usual, nothing’s happening — it’s jockeying for power and there’s just no connection with the reality on the ground. Even to the threat to the PA itself, which is acute in this very moment. I didn’t hear any strategizing for challenging what Israel’s doing now at any level. I think one takeaway is don’t expect any plan or vision or strategy from Fatah or from the PLO going forward. I think that’s the major takeaway.
Jonathan Adler
You touched on this a little bit already, but just to step back a moment, can you talk just a bit more about who the Palestinian leadership actually consists of today? What role do these figures like al-Sheikh and Yasser Abbas and others on the Central Committee and other parties, what role do they play behind the scenes as they’re waiting in the wings for an opportunity to succeed Mahmoud Abbas and lead Fatah?
And then, you know, at the same time for Hamas, which is also going through an internal elections process to choose a new political leader, who remains at this point after Israel’s assassination campaign?
Omar Rahman
On the Fatah, PA side of things, this is a really a one-man show, although, it’s sort of — I once described it, I think, for 972— as a triumvirate with Mahmoud Abbas at the top, Hussein al-Sheikh as one side, as his right-hand man, and Majid al-Faraj, who’s the head of the security, who was also in this meeting a couple of days ago, elected to the central council of Fatah. So that’s kind of who sits at the top.
And then, you know, Abbas throughout his tenure as president has really, again, stacked the positions around him with loyalists. He’s put people in positions of power who don’t have general support in their own right, so they don’t really pose a challenge to him. I think that’s been kind of the overwhelming modus operandi for Mahmoud Abbas. When it comes to his son, Yasser Abbas, I think prior to this, he held, you know, the Special Envoy role to Lebanon. And actually, there was, you know, quite a bit of controversy around that corruption stuff. I mean, I think they were selling off, you know, properties that the PLO owns in Lebanon with no oversight into where that money goes and how it’s distributed and that kind of thing. There was some, I think, some challenge between the PLO ambassador in Lebanon, and his son.
And so a lot of this, again, is like jockeying for control, for legitimacy, this kind of thing. So I think that’s the situation on the Fatah side. It’s the absence of politics really in Palestine. The West Bank is a one party rule of Fatah and everybody’s subservient and subordinate to that and all the other factions that once existed are really dependent on Mahmoud Abbas and on the PA. I mean, he holds control over the security apparatus and he holds control over the purse strings and through manipulating those two things, he’s brought everything else to heal and created total subservience to him, in which he’s unchallenged.
On the Hamas side, I have less clarity over specific personalities and who’s left and who’s challenging, so I don’t want to misspeak on that front. I recognize that Hamas is, as an institution, historically, a much more functional, dynamic institution — it’s much more robust than Fatah, which has become very sclerotic over a long period of time. And that’s allowed Hamas to withstand a lot of repression and assassination and imprisonment of its leadership. And I think that in spite of the genocide, in spite of two and a half years — almost three years now — of just unrelenting attack against Hamas, it remains intact to a degree.
Jonathan Adler
Of course, the fragmentation and corruption in Palestinian leadership that you’ve already talked about itself is nothing new. You talked about the 2016 Central Committee elections. Back in 2022, you wrote a great piece for 972 about Hussein al-Sheikh, whose nepotistic rise at that point you described as “emblematic of much that is wrong with the Palestinian leadership.” Could you step back a little bit and explain how Palestinian politics was really hollowed out over the past 20 years? This is something that you asked in the Middle East Council paper. You know, how did it arrive at a point where it was structurally incapable of responding to such a moment as October 7th?
Omar Rahman
Yeah, that paper is part of a collection of essays that me and the Palestinian scholar Mouin Rabbani put together for the Middle East Council. The chapter that I wrote is about the Palestinian leadership crisis before October 7, and after October 7. I would say that, the crisis in Palestinian leadership — you can go way far back, you can go decades back, you can go to at least as early as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the exile of the PLO — but what I really focus in on is the effect of the Oslo Accords on Palestinian institutions and Palestinian leadership. What I kind of point to there is that one effect of Oslo, again, with the creation of the Palestinian Authority, is you have these two institutions and the PLO leadership at the time, Yasser Arafat, helmed both institutions and kind of conflated the two and really divested a lot of decision-making power from the PLO, which is the highest representative institution of Palestinians and channeled it to the PA.
I think he did that because he was trying to give himself more control. When he stewarded the Palestine Liberation Organization for decades, he was dealing with multiple factions that all had a say. It was really about navigating between those factions and trying to build consensus constantly. When he started to pursue the Oslo Accords, there was a lot of opposition within the PLO, right? He kind of had to manipulate and orchestrate endorsement of that from the PLO. I think he felt that he would have much more control over the PA, and therefore, he marginalized the PLO, I think, to the great detriment of Palestinians, because that is their representative body.
And that is the vehicle for their struggle for liberation, and the PA is not that. The PA is set up as a temporary entity. It wasn’t supposed to last more than five years. It’s part of the Oslo Accords structure. It has limited jurisdiction in segments of the occupied territories where Israel has kind of given it limited autonomy over certain aspects of rule. And therefore, it is not a national representative institution. And I think this has had a massive impact on Palestinian politics writ large. I think what we’ve seen is the liberation struggle, which is contained within the PLO or is the mandate of the PLO, has been subsumed by the PA’s mandate, which is this kind of autonomous governance — it’s the security coordination with the Israelis, that kind of thing. And so ultimately, what’s come out of this is the PA has been turned into this arm of Israeli apartheid, and the PLO has withered into this kind of hollow skeleton institution.
So I kind of trace all of that and how Oslo severed the Palestinian refugees and the diaspora from the institutions, how the collapse of the Oslo process collapsed the legitimacy of these institutions, how the 2007 rupture between Fatah and Hamas ended the democratic process that was kind of fledgling in the Palestinian territories. As a result of that, authoritarianism sets in. This starts off the process of Abbas really monopolizing power and hollowing out institutions. His own leadership style differs greatly from Yasser Arafat. He’s much more exclusionary. He’s not inclusive. He doesn’t bring in everybody and listen to them. He’s much more repressive, both on the whole and within Fatah itself, he marginalizes a lot of people. And again, the less legitimacy he has because of all this, the more he relies on repression, the less space there is for political contestation. So this kind of cycle is just a race to the bottom. And as a result, we’re in this position in which there is no politics happening anymore.
I think again, this Fatah General Congress is a reflection of the fact that there is no politics anymore among Palestinians. I think that’s sort of where we’re at. And, again, I get into the Hamas side: If you look at October 7th, you know — this rupture — a lot of people kind of look at what the motivations for Hamas were in carrying out October 7th. What I’m kind of looking at is how did they carry it out? Why are they, you know, carrying out such a momentous decision unilaterally? And that’s, again, because you have this split and everybody’s operating in their own direction and there’s no kind of consensus building for a strategy, for a way forward. One of the consequences of that is Hamas took a highly consequential decision for all Palestinians unilaterally and with full knowledge that Palestinian politics is in disarray and there is no leadership and that it has its own severe shortcomings when it comes to international diplomacy and its ability to steward the aftermath of what it has wrought and what it has brought on the Palestinian people.
Jonathan Adler
I’d like to turn to October 7th now and the past two and a half years. As you argue in the paper, the attacks were a rupture that sort of underscored the complete lack of any unified national strategy. How exactly did the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah respond to the attacks? And what can be said that they achieved or failed to achieve in the past two and a half years?
Omar Rahman
Well, I think there’s just been an absence of a response from the Palestine Liberation Organization, basically from Mahmoud Abbas, let’s say, because he wears all the hats of leadership on that side. He wasn’t responsive. He was not in public. He was not leading a national strategy to challenge the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip and the existential challenge that his people were facing. There was no PNC meeting, Palestinian National Council meeting, after October 7th. There’s been no organized movement to prevent Israel from carrying out what it’s doing or to mobilize international public opinion.
All of that has happened in spite of Mahmoud Abbas. It’s happened as a result of what Israel’s doing in the activities of, you know, Palestinian activists and supporters that are mobilizing public opinion internationally and trying to affect politics in their own countries and stuff like that. None of it, very little of it has been a result of what Mahmoud Abbas and the political leadership in Ramallah have done, or really what Hamas and its leadership have done in Qatar or anywhere else. I think they were responding to the fallout of the decision they made trying to negotiate with the Israelis and with other interlocutors like the Qataris and others trying to survive the assassination attempts against them from the Israelis, but they weren’t directing or stewarding the Palestinian National Movement in the aftermath of this. And so nobody really has stepped into that void. That’s why I think you’ve seen a collapse really of the Palestinian National Movement in the absence of this. There is nobody stepping in to guide this.
Jonathan Adler
To play devil’s advocate just for a moment, I want maybe to ask you to sort of make the case for Palestinian leadership. In other words, how much does the question of leadership actually matter given Israel’s maximalist and genocidal ambitions, as well as its history of assassinating or imprisoning popular Palestinian leaders and thwarting any Palestinian attempt at building a unified national movement? Particularly, over the past two and a half years, what could an effective leadership have hoped to accomplish?
Omar Rahman
It would have an immense impact. Again, I’m not saying that the Palestinian Liberation Organization, if it was functioning properly, would be able to stop Israel from carrying out a genocide. But what opportunities do exist, it would be able to seize them. It would be able to mobilize and organize and direct the Palestinian national response. What you’ve seen in the absence of a unified, coherent leadership is a fragmented response from Palestinians and Palestinian supporters in the diaspora, and that has not been enough.
And so the Palestinians today have a lot of assets — legal assets and support and diplomatic access — but it’s not really being used. One thing I forgot to mention was there also is, you know, Palestinian diplomats, PLO diplomats that are doing important work. I don’t want to disregard the work that’s being done at the United Nations and in other places. There are, you know, a handful of dedicated diplomats that are doing important work. But overall, the direction I don’t think is coming from Ramallah to really take advantage of as much as possible.
We’ve seen this for a long time. If you look at, for example, the ICJ — the International Court of Justice — ruling against the Israeli apartheid wall in 2004, there was no real response from the official Palestinian leadership to that. A year after that ruling, you saw civil society, Palestinian civil society, organize and make a call for Boycott Divestment Sanctions, and that’s what launched the movement. That movement, although it has grown significantly, has never been really adopted fully or supported by the Palestinian leadership.
In fact, you sometimes have the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah working in opposite directions of civil society, whether we’re talking about the anti-apartheid movement, or we’re talking about BDS. When other states and institutions look for the official Palestinian address and for direction and guidance from the Palestinians, they don’t necessarily look to BDS, right? They look to Ramallah. They look to the PLO leadership, the state of Palestine leadership, and they’re getting a much different message from those guys. They’re getting, “Well, we need to focus on reviving the peace process and two-state solution,” and all this kind of stuff. They’re not getting, we need to focus on the rights-based discourse and mobilizing pressure against Israel.
In the aftermath of October 7th, you’re seeing the same thing. What were they actually trying to do? Where were they playing a role? Well, when the Arab states were trying to get a ceasefire and started talking about, “Well, we’ll bring the Palestinian Authority in there to re-govern Gaza and all that kind of stuff.” That’s what the Palestinian Authority was looking at. Well, we’re going to be part of this situation in which you’re just kind of, you know, extending the Oslo framework back to the Gaza Strip. And that’s the extent of it, right? It’s not a movement to really counteract what Israel has done and what it’s doing on the ground and what it’s doing in Gaza.
So the Palestinian leadership, the official Palestinian leadership, is not playing that role. I think it needs to be much more like, let’s say — the ANC, which was in the African National Congress — which is, let’s say, a unified body that is pursuing a strategy and a vision, right? And everybody else, whether they’re doing activities in Australia or in France, can look to that for guidance and direction in the pursuit of this cohesive national objective. That doesn’t exist anymore on the Palestinian side. There is no real vision, consensus vision anymore. There is no national strategy. There is no plan.
The erosion of Palestinian politics, the lack of dynamism of Palestinian politics, for all the reasons I outline in the paper and I’m trying to do now, is to say that none of that stuff is forthcoming as long as the Palestinian political situation, the Palestinian house, is in such disarray as it is now. I think that is gonna work to the great detriment of the Palestinian liberation movement overall.
Jonathan Adler
No, of course, yeah, if there was an effective PLO, perhaps that would be the sort of Palestinian equivalent of the ANC. But as you mentioned earlier in the conversation, the hollowing out and the tying of the PLO to the PA and one-man rule under Abbas, I think, as you know, it has been detrimental for having that kind of unified body. On that topic, there’s been a long and ongoing debate on whether and how the PLO should be reformed. I want to ask you, where do you see that possibility today? If not the PLO, are there signs of other efforts to build new representative institutions? I’m thinking of perhaps the Palestinian National Conference that took place last year in Doha or other grassroots or civil society efforts.
Omar Rahman
Well, when it comes to reform, that’s a word that has been sort of co-opted by the international community to mean one thing. We may mean another in terms of actual reform. Well, they actually just really use it as a cover to do nothing, right? So they call for Palestinian authority reform, basically, because they don’t want to address the real problems at hand. It’s not an issue of reform. But for Palestinians, it’s about revitalizing the national institutions and bridging the gap between these factions, creating reconciliation, clarifying representation, all those types of things. I think that’s what’s meant when we talk about reform.
The problem is the Mahmoud Abbas-led institutions are obstructionists to reform. They don’t want to see reform. They want to have unchallenged control over these institutions and a maintenance of the status quo. They’ve been very effective in obstructing any type of revitalization of the Palestinian National Movement and its institutions. I think there’s no clear way out of that. If there’s been no effective challenge to their control, in spite of this genocide and everything else that’s happening, I’m very pessimistic that anything’s going to to break their stranglehold over it. When the elections were about to be held for the last time, which was in 2021, I did a lot of writing on the elections and the importance of it. I don’t think that was a real popular opinion amongst my peers — my Palestinian peers — who saw, many of them saw, this as kind of doubling down on the Palestinian authority. But the way I looked at it is you have to find some type of avenue for breaking the stranglehold of the obstructionists in power. The only way to do that, as far as I can see, is through a coup d’etat or a popular revolution, which doesn’t seem to be in the offing, or through building an alternative institution that can challenge the PLO that’s controlled by Abbas.
Despite efforts, and you kind of named one, and it wasn’t actually meant to create an alternative to this, but what was happening in Qatar and what I’ve seen taking place since October 7th, which is civil society, both in the occupied territories and in the region and in the West and elsewhere, have tried to come together to create a more representative national council that can push for PLO reform. None of it has really been successful. So the third, I think, option or pathway to this would have been PA elections, for reinvigorating Palestinian politics, for bringing youth and different voices back into the political system, or at least into the public square.
I think in that election, they have reestablished the rules. So there was coalition governance on the table for Palestinians, which would prevent any one party from ruling. It would have reconstituted dormant institutions because the PLC was dissolved by Mahmoud Abbas, so that would have reelected the PLC. But it would have gone beyond that because the rules were written so that every member of the PLC, the Palestinian Legislative Council, would have automatically become a sitting member of the Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s representative body. Just by doing that, you would reinvigorate the PNC, which is important. You would bring Hamas officials into the PNC for the first time, which is important. So I think you would have jumpstarted PNC representation, and you would have restored unity to the governing and the representative bodies of the Palestinian authority and the PLO.
Although that’s not a silver bullet, there are serious limitations for that, that was the only foreseeable pathway I could have seen to Palestinian political reform and breaking the stranglehold that Abbas and others have over the political system. I think there was an opportunity to do that and that failed. And maybe you know, it’s hard to say in the shadow of a genocide that something like that still has potential, but maybe it does. Maybe it is the only other pathway because there are a lot of people that want to see the PA disappear, right? Palestinians and Israelis, right? Smotrich and these guys on the Israeli side. But a lot of Palestinians want to see the PA disappear. I mean, I would like to see the PA disappear. But what replaces the PA?
I think this is a very important question. Because you’re not going to turn the clocks back to 1992 or 1985, in which Israel bears responsibility for the occupation and for the Palestinian livelihood. You’re not going to do that. In fact, in a situation in which you have a genocidal Israeli government, a genocidal Israeli society in the moment, everything is off the table because if you wipe away those type of institutions which are providing for the basic needs of the Palestinians, the Palestinians can’t survive without somebody providing those needs and Israel is not gonna provide those needs. The Palestinians are under occupation. They can’t provide for themselves. They can’t import goods. They can’t function as a society. I mean, that’s part of the dependency of an occupied people.
So I think Israel’s very willing to see that pressure mount on the population, just like it is in Gaza, so that it can force the population out. I think that’s the type of situation we’re in. So people need to be very careful about what they wish for.
Jonathan Adler
To pick up on that last point on the potential sort of collapse or disappearance of the PA: As you mentioned earlier in the conversation and in your last response, it’s not just Palestinians who would like to see the PA go away, but also the Israeli government, and this Israeli government in particular. Could you talk a little bit about how the Israeli government has targeted or undermined the PA over the past years, and how that sort of changed with this current government? And how likely do you see the outcome, not of a coup or popular revolution that brings down the PA, but an Israeli government that decides as part of its annexationist agenda, just to do away with the semblance of Palestinian autonomy altogether?
Omar Rahman
Yeah, the relationship of Israel to the PA is obviously a very long story. It’s a story that begins before the Oslo Accords in terms of what Israel has always tried to create among the Palestinians, which is a docile, dependent, semi-autonomous leadership that controls the Palestinians on behalf of Israel. It always failed in that regard until the PLO came in to do the job, and Israel has succeeded in turning the PLO into the leadership it always sought among Palestinians, into the entity it always sought. Today, when it comes to the current government and its relationship to the PA and what it desires, there’s always been a split within Israel between those who see a significant value in the PA for the role I kind of just mentioned, right? And then those who, usually for ideological reasons, see the PA as a threat to Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of the land from the River to the Sea.
Smotrich and Ben Gvir are among that crowd, right? The religious Zionists for who, the rallying cry of sovereignty is everything, right? And when you have this thing called the Palestinian National Authority, that presupposes that there are other claims to that territory that they see as a challenge. So they’ve always wanted to collapse the PA. As Smotrich has been put in a position of power, he’s been dedicated probably more than anything else he’s done to doing that, to collapsing the PA and extending sovereignty — Israeli sovereignty — over the entire occupied territories.
I don’t know if this current Israeli government, if it loses power in the next elections, if we move back to a leadership that values the PA more. I think that appears to be the bet that the current PA leadership is making, right? Because there’s no other explanation for the type of naval gazing they’re doing right now, and this focus all internally on who holds what position and when the actual apparatus is on the verge of being disintegrated. It makes no sense. It’s like moving deck chairs on the Titanic while it’s collapsing, right? That seems to be what’s happening among Fatah leadership and Palestinian Authority leadership at the moment, instead of looking about how to survive — how to ensure that the passengers survive — which is the Palestinian people and the Palestinian nation on their own land.
None of that is happening.
Jonathan Adler
If we’re thinking about other actors or contexts besides Israel that will shape the future of the PA and the PLO and sort of Palestinian politics more generally, of course you have to consider the broader regional context, which you also have deep expertise in. So over the past three months, Palestine has again been sidelined in the news amid the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Israel’s devastation of Lebanon. I’m curious what implications you think the shifting regional context might have over the medium or long term for Palestinian politics and leadership.
It certainly seems clear, at least to me, that President Donald Trump won’t get his wish to see Saudi-Israeli normalization or a wide expansion of the Abraham Accords. But at the same time, it also seems like there’s a lot of anger in Gulf countries towards Iran. And I’m sort of wondering how you see all this playing out with regards to Palestine.
Omar Rahman
Yeah, it’s a really good question. The war will likely put more strain on the US-Israeli relationship. That’s something that is in motion. But that could take years, I mean, maybe months — by November — but I think for it to have any real impact on policy, it could take years. And that’s unfortunate, very unfortunate for the people that are suffering on the ground in Gaza and elsewhere. At the same time, I do believe that — and this is a mixed bag — that there is growing recognition, and this was before the war, too, but growing recognition of the threat to regional stability posed by Israel and its extremely aggressive military posture in the Palestinian territories and in Gaza, and that they have no intention whatsoever of ever resolving this situation with the Palestinians, which is going to be a perpetual source of regional instability that other states don’t want to see. So that’s one aspect of it.
The fact that they view them not only as a threat, obviously, to the Palestinians or to the Lebanese or even to the Syrians, but now a threat really to Gulf interests and interests throughout the region and potentially Turkish interests. As Israel has become more belligerent and hostile to all of its neighbors, you’re seeing regional realignments taking place that could have an impact on constraining Israel and challenging it. But I think the most important dynamic is going to continue to be the US-Israeli relationship, the European-Israeli relationship, because it is very hard for other states to put the type of pressure on Israel that will bring it to heel, that other partners of Israel can put in.
I said it’s a mixed bag earlier because, you know, other states are continuing even to double down on their relationship with Israel. So when it comes to the UAE and potentially Bahrain and maybe others, even prior to October 7th, I was saying the Abraham Accords won’t expand because there are fundamental flaws that the rest of the region is recognizing to Israeli-Arab normalization. One of them being the type of tension building that has led to the war we’re in, and how it will negatively impact the interests of those states, including the UAE, yet they’re continuing to double down on that relationship.
Again, I don’t know if the war itself will, how much impact it will directly have on the situation in the occupied territories, but it’s certainly an inflection point for the entire region. And Israel is not necessarily on the winning end of this long term in its strategic position, but the Palestinians are absent. They’re not at the table at all. They have no voice in these political dynamics whatsoever. It’s not like it was in the 60s and 70s and 80s where Palestinians didn’t have a ton of leverage, but they had some type of voice and impact on regional politics. And that’s simply not the case anymore.
Jonathan Adler
So I’d like to begin to end by moving away from the official Palestinian parties, away from Israel and the regional context, and turn to the Palestinian people themselves. In almost every public opinion poll, Palestinians point to national unity as a sort of primary demand. Could you talk a little about the main obstacles in achieving that demand and what you see as the points of unity around which a coherent Palestinian national movement could one day be rebuilt? I know you said you’re pessimistic about seeing the PA disappear, but if we’re sort of leaving that aside and thinking more imaginatively…
Omar Rahman
I’m pessimistic that national unity, especially institutional unity, is in the immediate offing for the reasons I mentioned earlier, which is you have obstructionists in charge that don’t want to see that and are subservient and dependent to external interests that don’t want to see that either, namely Israel, but also, you know, Israel’s Western backers. If this genocide that’s been taking place for more than two and a half years hasn’t galvanized people, to throw off this leadership, to overcome the kind of apathy and fear, I’m not sure what will at this point. But, that being said, one of the things I was working on prior to October 7, and that I had hope for was that the dynamics on the ground were pushing Palestinians — all Palestinians between the River and the Sea — together. Israel’s erasure of the Green Line had already created more interaction among Palestinians socially, economically — and I’m talking about Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the occupied territories. The one thing that was remaining really was a more political unification between those two sides.
I didn’t see that necessarily happening institutionally, although what I saw was that the Israelis were preventing a Palestinian state from being realized permanently, it seemed like. Therefore, at some point, the Palestinians in the occupied territories would have to alter their vision and objective for a political future. Maybe that’s in one state with equal rights or something to that effect. But Palestinians also that were citizens, are citizens of the state of Israel, were also being increasingly alienated from their own political objectives within Israel, which was to secure equal rights, to be equal citizens of the state, were also being obstructed by Israel. So you were kind of seeing this movement in which identification, national identification was moving towards, “We’re Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, but we’re Palestinians.” This was a national identification that Israel tried very hard over decades to subvert. I saw that as a potential.
Now we have this inflection point in the form of October 7th and the devastation of Gaza and the unleashing of this genocidal Israeli government on the Palestinian people across all territories and the fear that and trauma that has struck within the communities inside of Israel and those in the West Bank. I don’t know if we’re moving farther or closer away from the trajectory that we had been moving in prior to that. But I think there is an opportunity for Palestinians to coalesce. They I guess have to overcome their fear of Israeli reprisal and I think that fear is very genuine and warranted, because I think Israel is looking for the pretext to extend its campaign to Palestinian citizens of Israel and to those in the West Bank.
That’s why when the Palestinian Authority clamps down on the resistance movements in the West Bank, you know, a lot of people cry foul, and I think they have every reason to cry foul there, right? But there is a logic to that aspect of it, right? Because Israel is looking and trying to provoke an uprising in the West Bank so that it can pursue a full-on ethnic cleansing campaign. I think that mirrors what’s happening in Gaza to an extent. At the same time, where that analysis falls short is that the Palestinian Authority is not doing anything at all to come up with an alternative strategy short of armed resistance to challenge the Israelis, right?
There is a logic to preventing armed resistance that is detached from a political strategy. One of the things that I criticize Hamas for on October 7th, besides all the other things that you could criticize them for, is that action seems detached from a viable political strategy and a political leadership, unified political leadership that can execute that strategy in the aftermath of that. None of that exists. Israel has a strategy and it’s executing it. Israel is obviously the far stronger military party there, so you’re always going to lose in that confrontation unless you’re using arms in order to tip the balance politically, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I don’t know if that answers a question on where there are points of unity, but certainly there are opportunities and assets, positive dynamics that are happening internationally that generations of Palestinians decades ago could never have dreamed of. It’s coming at the cost, an incredible cost on the ground. But if Palestinians can fix their own house, if we can fix our own house and get our house in order, I think there are a lot of opportunities to change things.
Jonathan Adler
That’s a great place to end. This has been a really excellent and generative discussion. Omar, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Omar Rahman
Thanks for having me.
