Hope is not a strategy: The futility of a possible Palestinian Authority return to Gaza

More than three months have passed since the Oct. 7 attack against Israel, and officials have warned that eradicating Hamas and its military capabilities will take many months, if not longer. Hamas spent 17 years and untold billions of dollars establishing a terror mini-state inside and underneath the Gaza Strip. Destroying the hundreds of miles of terror tunnels, eliminating battalions of trained killers and searching for hostages, all the while trying to avoid civilian casualties, is a slow-moving deliberate process. But still, as the fighting rages on, the talk in many world capitals — especially inside the beltway of Washington, D.C. — is about what to do the “day after” Hamas is removed from power.

Most Western leaders, including President Biden, are calling for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to assume control of the Gaza Strip and its 2.2 million inhabitants. Pinning Gaza’s future on the PA is a recipe for surefire disaster.

The PA was the byproduct of the 1993 Oslo Accords and the wishful thinking that terrorists could be rehabilitated into becoming responsible statesmen. Then-President Bill Clinton, and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, hoped that an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict along with billions of dollars of American and European Union tax money could convince, and bribe, Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and the heads of the other Palestinian fronts to test drive self-governance and create a peaceful future of coexistence for their people.

The U.S. leader hoped that Arafat would abandon his AK-47 for the democratic principles of Washington, Jefferson and Madison. Yitzhak Rabin dreamed that Oslo would provide the Palestinian people with the rewards of living side-by-side with the Jewish state. Both men were wrong, and their optimism resulted in 30 years of incessant conflict and unspeakable suffering.

In 1994, as part of the Oslo Accords, Israel ceded governance of the Gaza Strip and major cities in the West Bank to the newly established Palestinian Authority. Arafat, the head of the PLO’s Fatah faction, was the self-appointed PA president for life and apparently had no intention of swapping land for peace, even after he was repeatedly offered the framework for a two-state solution, including East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. Arafat’s PA never ended its war against Israel, even though under the treaty they had become Israel’s partners for peace.

Since 1994, the State Department’s USAID has sent more than $5.5 billion to prop up the PA. The CIA and other federal agencies have spent untold billions more to prop up the PA’s numerous security agencies, but that training and the funds were merely used to facilitate and finance the mechanisms of terror rather than to combat it. It took legal action by the human rights NGO that I founded to help force the Congress to stop the PA from using American taxpayer money from paying stipends to the terrorists and their families as a reward for murdering Jewish civilians.

Mahmoud Abbas — Arafat’s successor, and the current PA president known by his nom de guerre of Abu Mazen — is 88 years old and serving the 19th year of a four-year term. He is corrupt, ineffective and a promoter of virulent antisemitic conspiracies. A pro-Palestinian pundit appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show “Real Time” recently commented that “Abu Mazen does three things every day, he sleeps, he smokes, and when he wakes up, he says something dumb about the Holocaust.” Abu Mazen has been a feckless leader of an authoritarian fiefdom where nepotism is rife, public funds are used to enrich government officials and their family enterprises, and the welfare of the Palestinian people is a distant afterthought.

PA corruption is one of the main reasons why Hamas is far more popular in the West Bank than Abu Mazen’s government. In 2006, the last time that the PA was in control of both the Gaza Strip and West Bank, Abu Mazan’s Fatah was trounced at the polls, with Hamas seizing 74 seats in the 132-seat ruling council. The next year, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a bloody coup, massacring Fatah loyalists. Hamas has ruled the Gaza Strip ever since and has brought endless suffering and bloodshed to its people.

The PA’s security forces either turn a blind eye to terror or play a complicit role in perpetrating attacks against Israeli civilians. Today, vast swaths of areas inside the PA are ungoverned. Hamas, along with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group controls West Bank cities like Jenin, and Hamas flags are prominently displayed in other towns and villages that the PA is supposed to govern.

The PA holds on to its power in the West Bank through the brutal tactics of violence and intimidation. A year before the Oct. 7 attacks, Human Rights Watch published its findings that torture by the Fatah-led PA in the West Bank may amount to crimes against humanity. In a scathing essay published in The Atlantic after Oct. 7, Gaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served as an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team at the 2000 Camp David Summit, claimed, “A staggering 87 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78 percent want Abbas to resign, and 62 percent believe that the PA is a liability.”

How then, one must ask of the U.S. State Department and the UK’s Foreign Office, can anyone expect the PA to govern a war-torn Gaza Strip and rehabilitate the lives of more than 2 million people who have been reared on intimidation, radicalization, terror, conflict and self-inflicted suffering?

Western diplomats have argued that the PA must assume a central role in governing the post-war reality because anything would be better than Hamas. But that is like saying one form of terminal cancer is better than another — neither guarantees anything more than continued misery and mortality. Israeli border communities, evacuated at the start of the war, will not agree to return home if the PA is placed in charge again. A post-Hamas Gaza will require capable hands to erase the legacy of the terror state from where the Oct. 7 attacks were financed, planned and executed. Professional politicians and capable and incorruptible civil servants will need to build a completely new government and social infrastructure in Gaza. Arab states that share diplomatic relations with Israel, and some that currently do not, will have to assume a proactive role in shepherding the population of Gaza out of its bloody past and toward a peaceful future.

For 30 years, the PA has failed its benefactors and partners in peace and, most tragically, betrayed the Palestinian people. Fantasizing that the PA will be Israel’s sheriff and can solve the gargantuan problems of post-Oct. 7 Gaza is a mistake of epic proportions that will only guarantee continued bloodshed and misery for all sides. Hope is not a strategy.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is an Israeli attorney and the best-selling co-author of “Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money Masters” (Hachette Books 2017).