Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reminded us once again last week why he and his Palestinian "government" in the West Bank may need be sidelined for sake of peace in the region: because they are corrupt, ossified and obstructionist in every way.
At a meeting of the PLO Central Council, Abbas called on Palestinians to "keep the ground aflame with popular resistance" against Israel – advocating violence, if not terrorism. Abbas' main foreign policy deputy, PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat, led the council in declaring support for "heroic" Hamas-led attacks against Israeli troops and civilians across the Gaza border, while condemning Hamas for negotiating a truce with Israel.
The resolution also savaged the Trump administration for seeking to "destroy the Palestinian national project" and called for ratcheting up BDS campaigns against Israel.
Abbas' actions appear to be driven by his marginalization, with Israel and the U.S.'s Middle East team clearly planning to bypass the PA in favor of a plan to enhance security and economic prospects in the Gaza Strip. This marginalization is also driven by Abbas' self-inflicted wounds, sourced in the fecklessness and growing radicalization of Abbas and his aging coterie.
Abbas has fled from real negotiation and compromise with Israel at every opportunity over the past 15 years. He has espoused maximalist positions, stoked hatred of Israelis and Jews, inculcated a culture that denies Jewish history and national identity, venerated terrorists, and pushed the criminalization of Israel internationally. He has driven most Israelis to the realization that there is no reasonable peace deal with the Palestinians to be had at this time.
Abbas walked away from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's outrageously generous territorial offer in 2008, refused peace talks with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu even after Netanyahu froze settlement construction in 2009, and left U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry out in the cold when he tried to negotiate peace in 2014.
At the United Nations, he has called Israel "brutal," "aggressive," "racist," "apartheid," "horrific" and "colonial," and has accused Israel of numerous crimes, including ethnic cleansing and genocide. He has repeatedly called on the international community to unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood and to "compel" Israeli withdrawals, without the Palestinians having to compromise at all.
In recent years, Abbas has sworn that he will never recognize Israel as the national state of the Jewish people, never forgo the "right of return" to Israel of Palestinian refugees, never accept Israeli security control of the Jordan Valley and other key air and ground security assets, never allow Jews to live in Judea, and never accept Israeli sovereignty in any part of Old Jerusalem.
Since 2015, Abbas has added to this fanatical portfolio a campaign of wholesale denial of Jewish national rights in this land. He has proposed repeated UNESCO and other international resolutions that explicitly dismiss Jewish history in Jerusalem and Zion.
And he continues to rant dangerously about nonexistent Israeli "aggression and provocations" against Al-Aqsa mosque and Christian sanctuaries in Jerusalem – another way of inciting Palestinian violence against Israel.
It is no wonder that the emerging U.S. peace initiative seeks to bypass Abbas and his PLO rejectionists, and perhaps to initiate a long process in which Palestinians act to replace their overstaying rulers – effectively, dictators focused on their own survival in power – with more reasonable leaders.
Abbas, of course, lost the Gaza Strip to Hamas dictatorship in 2007, and Hamas has no intention of submitting to Fatah-led PA dominion ever again. Hamas has established a de facto standalone Palestinian state in Gaza, one that will never make peace with Israel, but can be contained and managed, and perhaps, with Israeli (and Arab state) support and if Hamas cares to do so, developed for the betterment of Palestinians who live there.
This relegates Abbas to the back burner, marking a major shift in the diplomatic arena and explaining Abbas' efforts to torpedo the nascent Israel-Hamas arrangements for fear of being further sidelined.
But Abbas has left himself with zero leverage on Israel, the U.S., the international community, and even the Sunni Arab world. As long as he clings to the rhetoric of resistance and Israel-bashing (while suckling corruptly at the teats of generous international financial aid) he and his Fatah party remain irrelevant. Saboteurs, not partners, of peace.
To this end, the Trump administration's hard-nosed approach to the Palestinians, including cutting aid to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, is useful. As Dr. Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz write in their important book "The War of Return," the everlasting Palestinian refugee-dom and self-imposed victimhood have been fostered and coddled for too long.
UNRWA is a root problem. It perpetuates the Palestinian dream of returning to homes in Jaffa and Haifa, ultimately destroying the Jewish state.
"When 70 percent of people who live in Gaza believe that they are refugees, and are stamped by the U.N. as such, you cannot fault them for thinking that their 'right' of return is internationally sanctioned," Wilf says.
"This is a continuation of war against Israel. PA officials pay lip service to a two-state solution, but in reality are convinced that masses of refugees will return.
"The world literally has no problem telling the Jews that they won't have it all. Why not tell the Palestinians? Why continue to fund a U.N. agency with more than $1 billion every year, feeding the delusion of return?
"And how will positive change in Palestinian leadership come about when Palestinians have no sense of their true [lack of] power, because they think that the world is with them at any cost, indefinitely? They have no incentive to compromise with Israel," Wilf says.
Change also must come in Israeli policy. The IDF Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has been UNRWA's main defender in recent years, believing that the international aid dollars flowing through UNRWA buy quiet in the territories.
But Wilf disagrees.
"Unfortunately, defense establishments don't know how to deal with narratives, such as ending the ultimately corrosive and corrupting 'right of return' narrative. They know only how to maintain order, even if that means purchasing calm at the cost of a war that will go on for decades," she says.
Such shortsightedness must be replaced by a longer view, which means phasing out UNRWA.
This was proposed recently by Dave Harden, who led the U.S. assistance mission to the West Bank and Gaza for more than a decade.
While acknowledging UNRWA's good work in tough places, Harden suggests a 10-year exit strategy for the agency in the West Bank and Gaza. In Jordan, the exit could come sooner, through a 10-year block grant to Jordan for Palestinian refugee resettlement. And in Syria and Lebanon, refugee operations could be immediately shifted from UNRWA to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.
It is high time that the PLO receive the "tough love" once reserved uniquely for Israel. And Israel's defense establishment should get behind the move to ditch UNRWA.
