The future of Palestinian politics after Israel's war on Gaza

The resignation of the Palestinian Authority’s government last week has raised speculation about the next phase in Palestinian politics, especially concerning a possible role played by the PA in running the Gaza Strip after Israel's war ends.

Last Monday, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced that he submitted his cabinet's resignation to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

“The decision to resign came in light of the unprecedented escalation in the West Bank and Jerusalem and the war, genocide and starvation in the Gaza Strip,” Shtayyeh said.

Shtayyeh also cited the economic strangulation of the PA through withholding tax revenues, saying Israel has “sought to transform the PA into an administrative and security authority without any political content”.

"The resignation of the Palestinian Authority's government last week has raised speculation about the next phase in Palestinian politics"

Back in January, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after meeting Abbas in Ramallah that the Palestinian leadership was committed to reforming the PA to “take responsibility for Gaza” and unite with the West Bank.

A day after Shtayyeh’s resignation, the White House’s spokesperson Mathiew Miller told journalists that the US welcomes the steps taken by the PA “to reform and revitalise itself”, stressing that Blinken had encouraged Abbas to take such steps in phone conversations.

The PA announced that a technocratic government will replace Shtayyeh’s government, which will continue in office until the end of March while the new one is being formed.

Last week, the current minister of social affairs in Shtayyeh’s government, Ahmed Majdalaini, said in statements to the media that the resignation of the government came as “a response to an international orientation supporting the establishment of a single Palestinian Authority over all of the Palestinian territories”, to “open a political path towards the end of Israeli occupation”.

ِA day before Shtayyeh made his government’s resignation public, Hamas’s senior leader Mousa Abu Marzouk told the Egypt-based Alghad satellite channel, that Hamas would agree to form a technocratic government to run the Gaza Strip after the war.

A long-demanded reform

The potential role of the PA in the aftermath of the current war on Gaza intertwines with years-long inter-Palestinian discussions about the need to reform the PA, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and end the political division between Fatah and Hamas.

In 2018, the Palestinian Central Council, an emergency sub-body of the PLO’s parliament, the National Council, called to hold general elections for all levels of the Palestinian political system as a starting point to ending the political division and reuniting the West bank and the Gaza Strip under one leadership.

In late 2021, Abbas scheduled elections for the first time since 2006 to be held in May that year. In April, he then called the elections off, saying that they wouldn’t be held unless Israel allows the PA to organise voting posts in Jerusalem.

"The potential role of the PA in the aftermath of the war on Gaza intertwines with years-long inter-Palestinian discussions about the need to reform the PA, the PLO, and end the political division between Fatah and Hamas"

In June that year, a wave of protests against the PA erupted in the West Bank after Palestinian dissident and candidate in the cancelled elections, Nizar Banat, died under being assaulted during his arrest by PA security forces in Hebron. The unrest led to increasing pressure by the US and the EU to reform the PA.

“The resignation of Shtayyeh’s government and the call to form a technocratic government is a response to international pressure, especially by the US who were the first to call for a technocratic government,” Ramzi Rabah, a member of the PLO executive committee and senior leader of the left-wing DFLP, told The New Arab.

“The announcement is that it will be a transitory phase, but in Palestine, a transitory phase can very well become prolonged and permanent,” said Rabah. “The Oslo accords, which created the Palestinian Authority, were supposed to be transitory for a period of five years to end with the establishment of a Palestinian state, and here we are thirty years later stuck with the PA with no Palestinian state in sight,” he pointed out.

The key question is what the role of the technocratic government will be, noted Rabah. Will it be to implement reforms, oversee the rebuilding of Gaza and prepare for elections, or will it be business as usual until a new government comes into office?

“If it is the latter, then it will take us to a very dark episode, because it will be a renewed form of going back to the Oslo paradigm, where the PA would be a mere administrative body that runs municipality-like services and security in isolated ghettoes, while Israel continues its plan of annexing more West Bank lands and expelling Palestinians, which is the US vision for the day after the war,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Palestinian factions’ representatives have been holding talks in Moscow since last week. On Thursday, the Secretary General of the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP) said that Palestinian leaders had agreed on continuing their series of meetings in Moscow “to solve all issues”.

He also said that the factions agreed that the Palestinian government should take its responsibilities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip “in the framework of a national consensus”.

“The aim of the Moscow meetings is to breach the gap between Palestinian points of view to achieve a unified national vision for the future,” Rabah pointed out. “The political division is the reason for the the current deadlock and lack of vision for the future of Gaza and Palestine,” he added.

Palestinian political divisions

The last time Palestinians voted was in 2006 when Hamas won a majority in the PA’s legislative council enabling it to form a government.

The US and EU boycott and suspension of aid to the PA in response to the election result provoked a political crisis which ended with Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip by force the following year, and the emergence of two Palestinian governments in Gaza and the West Bank.

Several rounds of talks and agreements signed led to the formation of a single Palestinian government, with Hamas maintaining large influence over administrative bodies, services, and internal security in Gaza – all under an Israeli blockade.

"The announcement is that it will be a transitory phase, but in Palestine, a transitory phase can very well become prolonged and permanent"

Meanwhile in the West Bank, the PA continued to pass laws by presidential decrees which reshaped the judicial branch, linking it further to the president and tightening government control over NGOs. The legislative council was also officially dissolved by the constitutional court.

“The degree of collapse in the Palestinian system, all of which is directly resulting in the PA’s inaction towards the current genocide in Gaza, demands a reform much deeper and more extensive than a mere change of government and the formation of a technocratic one,” Isam Abdeen, a leading Palestinian legal expert and former advisory to the Palestinian legislative council, told TNA.

“There is no way that this government shift will lead to a reform, because it is unconstitutional itself,” said Abdeen. “Under the Palestinian constitutional law, a government only resigns in specific described cases, none of which is met now, and a new government can only take its mandate from the legislative council, which makes even the resigning Shtayyeh government illegal,” he explained.

“The concentration of power in the hands of a few has been wrapped with an absolute lack of transparency that encouraged corruption, and this has been enabled by the donor countries, including the US and the EU, and part of the Palestinian NGO community who has tolerated it and in some sort played the game,” Abdeen remarked.

"This  absence of power balance gave rise to social movements, who have also been cracked down on," he noted.

Without real reforms, the change in government under current conditions will lead to a greater concentration of power, and shrinking space for civil society and social movements.

“All of this makes the reform of the PA practically impossible without general elections,” he added.

Qassam Muaddi is The New Arab's West Bank reporter, covering political and social developments in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Follow him on Twitter: @QassaMMuaddi