Phoenix Center for Research Holds a Dialogue Session on the Relationship Between the Authority and the Occupation, Between Incapacity and Separation

Phoenix Center for Research Holds a Dialogue Session on the Relationship Between the Authority and the Occupation, Between Incapacity and Separation

A dialogue session was held on Monday, 19/9/2022, at Phoenix Center for Research and Field Studies, as part of the Center's monthly program "Issue and Dialogue," titled "The Relationship Between the Authority and the Occupation, Between Incapacity and Subordination."

At the outset, Dr. Khaled Alyazji welcomed the attendees — writers, politicians, intellectuals, and faction representatives —

noting the importance of the dialogue's title, coming as it does amid the escalation of occupation crimes and the successive waves of resistance activity in various forms and tools witnessed in the West Bank, and pointing to the importance of discussing the manifestations of the Authority's decline and its fate, and, in contrast, the state of resistance action and confrontation operations with the occupation, their opportunities and risks.

In addition to the reality and developments of the occupation in the West Bank, ranging from separation from the Authority to forms of replacing it.

wishing the discussion the enrichment of the topics and themes proposed.

Mr. Nasser Elewa moderated the dialogue, noting that the session aims to attempt to anticipate the renewed nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the meanings, tools, tactics, and strategic construction it carries.

In addition to highlighting the transformations of the conflict, most notably that the conflict is no longer centered solely on the Gaza side, but has today also become centered on the other side, the West Bank, with the addition of the "pomegranate" of Jerusalem. This integration of resistance action requires formulating political equations at the level of the national program, forming a process of managing the conflict with qualitative equations.

Elewa noted that reality confirms the following equation: wherever the Palestinian Authority is absent, or the influence of its security arms weakens, resistance action develops and expands, warning against squandering the accumulated struggle embedded in Palestinian national action — whether due to conflicting programs and political divisions, or due to the policy of ignorance, experimentation, and spontaneity that has accompanied Palestinian national struggle over its past decades.

The participants presented a number of inputs, the most important of which, along with their key conclusions and findings, are presented below for each discussion theme.

First: The theme of the manifestations of the Authority's decline and its fate.

The participants affirmed the structural crisis afflicting the Authority on various political, partisan, security, and economic levels, with some tracing this crisis back to the stage of the Authority's founding under the Oslo Accords, which by its nature constituted a major flaw and division that affected the national project. While some believed that, given the danger of the Palestinian Authority's continuation in the equation of subordination to the Oslo Accords, its fate should not move toward the nihilistic option represented by dissolving the Authority and returning to square one, especially since there are many alternatives to the option of dissolving the Authority, perhaps the most prominent being transferring the Authority's function to the level of the administrative services sector.

and transforming the political role of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which must be reformulated anew in a way that guarantees the participation of all Palestinian political forces and communities, and the future political role of the Liberation Organization. Meanwhile, another current held that the predicament of the Liberation Organization is a deep structural predicament, resulting from a state of monopolization and exclusion that has sidelined the political structure of parties, factions, and popular and civil organizations — a matter that poses a challenge to the development of the structures of the political system, not to mention manifestations of dictatorship, one-man rule, the disabling of the legislative, executive, and judicial institutions, and the striking and weakening of societal, popular, and media oversight, and the spread of corruption. The political division and the state of monopolization in managing public affairs have also caused a decline, weakening, and erosion of the political role of the leadership of the Liberation Organization and the Authority, particularly in Jerusalem, Gaza, and the diaspora, and a weakening of the leadership's relationship with the Palestinians of '48, not to mention the contraction of the Authority's relations with Arab and international democratic parties and forces, and the erosion of the Authority's relationship with the official Arab system, in addition to the absence of agreement on the national program, the strategy of struggle, and unified leadership.

As for the theme of the fate and future of the Palestinian Authority, the attendees held that the set of structural and political crises would lead to the following scenarios:

First: the deterioration of the Authority's condition to levels of incapacity and political, security, and financial weakness, but it continues to perform its roles within a minimal framework and within the equation permitted by the Israeli occupation, which employs this weakness within the framework of imposing a policy of faits accomplis.

Second: the emergence of a state of vertical and horizontal division among the components of the political elite within the Authority, in the context of a struggle over succession within the framework of continuing within the current equation, which could turn it into a situation resembling the village leagues, or what is called "the leaders of civil enclaves."

Third: the disintegration of the Authority and the disappearance of all its institutions, and a return to square one in the relationship between the occupation system and the Palestinian people.

Fourth: agreement on changing the function of the Palestinian Authority within the framework of reactivating the Palestine Liberation Organization on the basis of partnership, consensus, and democracy, in a way that ensures the transfer of the political function to the Organization and commitment to implementing the decisions of the Central Council of 2015, and beginning to embody the institutions of the state in accordance with the UN resolution recognizing Palestine as an observer state.

On the state of resistance action and confrontation operations, between opportunities and risks, the attendees addressed this theme by reviewing the experience of resistance, with all its merits and shortcomings as a historical experience, focusing on attempting to understand and assess the current situation in the West Bank and Jerusalem, considering it a state of revolutionary waves represented by resistance operations and popular confrontation that come within the course of their objective development — a course that is still taking shape, and which is fundamentally based on the necessity of maximizing engagement with the enemy regardless of the forms and manifestations of its occupation practices, and independent of the relationship between the occupier and the Palestinian Authority and the security arrangements and other agreements between them — which places resistance action between two pressures: the lever of the occupier and the lever of the Authority.

The participants pointed to the importance of this wave of resistance action, which relies on the latent self-driven forces within Palestinian society, represented by the succession of generations and their mutual push in defining themselves as a state of citizenship and a state of resistance, in confronting the occupier. This process constitutes the driving force for the young generations, and the intermediate generations supporting them.

Between the two poles of this equation — objective foundations and subjective circumstances — confrontation operations develop between individual particularity and organized collective action, within non-traditional organizational frameworks that the Palestinian people have been experiencing for some time.

While acknowledging the positive development of resistance and confrontation operations, it is necessary to monitor the opportunities of this development against the risks surrounding it, and the participants summarized the opportunities as follows:

- The complexities of international and regional conflicts in the Middle East region constitute both a threat factor and a tangible window of opportunity for providing material and political support to the resistance action taking shape in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

- The disparities between the factions of national action and their various currents negatively affect the unity of resistance action, given the contradictions, inconsistencies, and narrow calculations of these factions, which the participants agreed suffer from multiple crises requiring development in thought and political performance and overcoming the state of division.

- The continuation of security coordination between the Authority and the occupation forces, despite the confusion surrounding it, constitutes a real danger to resistance action.

- The crimes and policies of the Israeli occupation and collective and individual punishments constitute a major pressure factor on resistance action and its environment and societal incubator.

- The concentration of resistance action within a geography confined to the West Bank constitutes serious risks represented by the emergence of structural and societal imbalances, whether in the geography of resistance action or in its incubating environment, through the loss of the contributions of other Palestinian communities and their active role in the resistance process.

The participants affirmed that the available Palestinian option in confronting the threats of the occupation requires continuous resistance action leading up to a third intifada, provided that its fate is not the same as its predecessors, in a way that ensures forging an equation that guarantees learning from past mistakes and developing comprehensive resistance action pathways across the various communities.

As for the reality and developments of the occupation in the West Bank, between separation from the Authority and forms of replacing it, the participants in the seminar addressed this theme from different angles and perspectives. Some considered that Israel views the West Bank as the complement to Greater Israel, and charts for it a creeping colonial security, defense, and settlement policy aimed at annexing it with as few of its population as possible; however, these policies are subject to a series of variables produced by the conflict with the Palestinians, and the regional conflicts in the area.

The participants' inputs also highlighted the complex relationship between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which has entered a state of erosion and decline for multiple reasons, foremost among them the absence of any horizon for a political settlement, not to mention the weakness of the Authority's security apparatus, which has pushed the occupation government and its security agencies to devise a new, distinctive policy based on the concept of the "heavy long arm" in dealing with what Israel considers security threats or potential sources of concern.

The participants also pointed to the occupation forces' adoption of a policy of direct administration and direct responsibilities for the various areas of the West Bank and their security divisions (A, B, C), as Israel has begun developing new political and security concepts in the stage of what is called preparing for President Abbas's absence, and the conflicts and divisions that would follow within the structure of the Palestinian Authority, its various apparatuses, and its political party, the Fatah movement.

The participants warned of the plans of the Israeli occupation amid the control of the extreme right over every joint of the occupation state, and its drive within an approach based on liquidating the conflict, and amid American and Western support and Israeli expansion within the Arab system, or what is called "Arab-Israeli normalization" — a variable that must be factored into any attempt to understand future Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, not only in the West Bank but also in the Gaza Strip and the areas of '48.

Prepared and Edited by

Mr. Nasser Ali