The Palestinian Dream Is Dying—and It's A Nightmare for Israel

what a mess

The Palestinian Dream Is Dying—and It's A Nightmare for Israel

Just 30 years after the Oslo Accords set the stage for the formation of the first autonomous Palestinian leadership body to be recognized by Israel, the Palestinian National Authority (PA) stands on the brink of collapse, with dwindling territorial control, deteriorating popular support and no clear successor for its aging longtime leader.

And while Israel has also played an influential role in cultivating the conditions that have undermined the West Bank-based government led by 87-year-old President Mahmoud Abbas, deep uncertainties lie over what may come next for the peoples on both sides of a conflict that has commanded international attention for three quarters of a century.

"This is the worst point that I've seen the PA since its creation," Ghaith al-Omari, a former Palestinian National Authority official who previously served as an advisor to its negotiating team and is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, tells Newsweek.

"We often used to talk about the PA collapse as an abstract, a distant threat," he adds. "I think this is now a much more pressing concern. In many ways, we are witnessing the unraveling of the PA."

Should the PA collapse altogether, Omari predicts that, "at least for a couple generations, this will be the end of the Palestinian national movement."

With Despair Comes Death
Khaled Elgindy, also a former PA negotiations adviser who today serves as a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, agrees. With a growing gap between a fading generation of PLO founders and a rising population of disenfranchised Palestinians, Elgindy outlines a "kind of paradox, where everyone's uneasy about succession, but at the same time, the same people who are uneasy about succession are also uneasy about holding an election." Against this backdrop, Palestinians are increasingly losing hope that the PA will deliver upon its founding commitments.

"I think the level of despair that we now have among Palestinians in the occupied territories is a response to this realization that the dream of an independent Palestinian state has evaporated," Elgindy says, "and there's basically nothing left."

Though Israeli opponents to the Palestinian statehood project may be eager to celebrate such an outcome, he warns the accompanying hopelessness breeds even more violent eventualities.

"Imagine the mindset that goes into a 19-year-old who picks up a knife and tries to stab a soldier. We're talking about an act that operationally has zero value in military terms, and that will almost certainly result in his own death," Elgindy says. "And yet it is something that we see increasing, to car ramming, knifing attacks, shooting attacks, someone shoots an Israeli settler, the Israeli response is to level a section of a Palestinian refugee camp."

"Even when people know the consequences, the fact that they still engage in that sort of activity, I think speaks to the level of despair," he adds. "And we should be very, very afraid of despair, because people will do almost anything."

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