Transcribed from the 21 March 2021 episode of The Fire These Times podcast and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the whole conversation:
Palestinians have become quite demobilized. It’s not just the geographic fragmentation, although that plays a large role. It’s also the social fragmentation that has emerged because the Palestinian Authority plays a very particular role in dividing society.
Joey Ayoub: Today we’ll be talking to Dana El Kurd. Our topics of discussion range from authoritarianism within the Palestinian Authority to the role of the US and the legacy of the 1994 Oslo Accords. We spoke about the 2011 Arab Spring and links to Palestine. We spoke more broadly about how authoritarianism impacts society long term, and even got into the Abraham Accords. We spoke about how regional authoritarians such as Hezbollah, Assad, and Iran are perceived in Palestine. We got into generational shifts, with examples from Lebanon and Palestine, and we got into her argument as to why re-forming the PLO should be something that Palestinians and their supporters start thinking about very seriously.
Dana El Kurd: My name is Dana El Kurd, I am an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and a researcher at its sister institution, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. I received my PhD in political science in 2017, and wrote the book Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine.
JA: Let’s start with an introduction to the book. How did the study come about and what was the topic?
DK: The topic is how international involvement, particularly American involvement, has impacted the Palestinian Authority and its relationship to Palestinian society. I was motivated by a couple of questions. I’m a political scientist, and I’m a Palestinian, so I’m interested in the case itself. But I’m also interested in the more general dynamics that can be applied to other cases. I specialize in authoritarianism and its effects.
In the Arab Spring and its aftermath, we saw political openings; a lot of external intervention, military and otherwise; and societies becoming highly polarized. That was happening when I was starting grad school, so I wanted to understand where this polarization was coming from, and why it was so vehement. Take the various Egyptian opposition groups: there was a shared goal—the outgoing regime was the target—but they couldn’t get past their infighting. So these polarized dynamics weren’t just at the level of the political elites; you could see it in the wider society and the discourses people were using about each other.
I started to think that long-standing authoritarianism may really have a profound impact on societies in ways we aren’t considering. I wanted to figure out how that worked, or in poli-sci speak, to “disentangle the causal mechanisms.” That was the first motivation, and the second motivation was my interest in the case itself because I’m concerned about the Palestinian issue and the trends we see in Palestinian mobilization, or lack thereof, and how we move past that.
JA: To situate and contextualize the conversation: the book focuses a lot on the Oslo Accords and the time since, and their impacts on Palestinian society and politics. Let’s paint a before-and-after picture. People have likely heard of the Accords, but I don’t think their direct and indirect impacts are that well known.
You write, “Before 1994, Palestinians were highly politicized and organized despite a sustained loss of land under the occupation.” Since then, and due the authoritarianism of the PA, and obviously due to the occupation, “civil society organizations became less effective, more isolated, and reported lower levels of trust among members.”
Can you expand on this?
DK: The Oslo Accords were sold as a way to gradually give Palestinians self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. They were and continue to be under direct military occupation, but there wasn’t an entity between them and the Israeli occupation. They were quite heavily repressed, but there was still sustained mobilization. Palestinian civil society and grassroots organizations were quite embedded and had a lot of popularity with Palestinian society, and were quite accountable to Palestinian society. And even if these organizations weren’t explicitly political they would engage in political actions and be a focal point for organizing.
After the Oslo Accords we saw something very different. The idea of the Oslo Accords was that the Palestinians would be able to establish a state in the Palestinian territories by 1999. This came after the First Intifada, and to many this was seen as a victory: these people who had been under military occupation finally brought the occupier to the negotiating table. But from the start, the Oslo Accords were quite exclusionary. Western governments only engaged with a certain subset of the Palestinian political spectrum. There’s a recent book out called Promoting Democracy by Manal Jamal that gets into the process at the start of the political settlement.
The Oslo Accords were not fully accepted by everyone, but most people saw it as an opportunity to finally be free of military occupation. Things like the existing settlements, which of course have metastasized at this point, and the right of return of refugees, the status of Jerusalem—all these things things were left on the table for future negotiations. But people still had some hope that what was agreed to would come to pass. Many people returned to the West Bank and Gaza at that point. Many Palestinians abroad gave up their lives to come back and try to rebuild the country.
The leadership-in-exile of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which the Palestinian liberation movement considered the representative of the Palestinian people, also entered the West Bank and Gaza, actually came to historic Palestine for the first time. The Oslo Accords allowed for the creation of a governing apparatus in the West Bank and Gaza called the Palestinian Authority, intended to build state institutions and ministries and things like that, and then divided the territories, particularly the West Bank, into Areas A, B,and C, and the Palestinian Authority was only allowed to function in certain areas. The idea was eventually to get access to all of these areas, but that never happened. Israel never really intended for that to happen.
Today, most Palestinians—fifty-five percent—live in Area A, about eighteen percent of the territory. Then about forty-one percent of Palestinians live in Area B, which is about twenty percent of the territory. So sixty-two percent of the territory, which is considered Area C, one percent of Palestinians live there. The Palestinian Authority is allowed to function in Area A. In Area B they have to share control with the Israeli army, or, remove themselves at sundown. In Area C they are not allowed to function at all. And Jerusalem is considered completely outside the scope of this; the PA is not allowed to function at all in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was once the focal point of a lot of Palestinian mobilization. There was political leadership, there were institutions that helped other parts of the Palestinian territories mobilize around shared objectives. Many members of the unified national leadership of the uprising during the First Intifada were from Jerusalem. But since 1994 and this geographic fragmentation, Israel has been eradicating Palestinian life in Jerusalem: cutting off suburbs with the segregation wall, closing down Palestinian civil society organizations, increasing settlements in what remains of Palestinian Jerusalem, home demolitions, all these things.
The Palestinian Authority, even though it was supposed to have some level of control in some parts of the territories, is essentially beholden to the Israeli occupation. The occupation is constantly making incursions in all these areas, and settlements continue to expand. There’s not any respect even for the fragments that they were given. Maybe your listeners have seen the maps of the West Bank that are often referred to as “Swiss cheese,” because there’s no territorial continuity.
The other thing that was signed along with the Oslo Accords peace process was the Protocol for Economic Relations. This made the Palestinian economy subservient to Israel’s: anything coming in and out has to be approved by Israel; Palestinians have to use Israeli currency; Israelis collect taxes on Palestinian imports—and this is supposed to be returned to the Palestinian Authority, but they often withhold it for political purposes even though those taxes are a major part of the Palestinian Authority’s revenue.
I look at it in different phases, but particularly after what I consider the consolidation of the Palestinian Authority after the 2006 elections, Palestinians have become quite demobilized. It’s not just the geographic fragmentation, although that plays a large role. It’s also the social fragmentation that has emerged because the Palestinian Authority plays a very particular role in dividing society.
JA: Let’s get a little more into the role of the PA (not to remove focus from the Israeli occupation—we’ll talk about that too). But first would you mind explaining some of the terms? PA, Fatah, PLO? People can be confused, because these tend to be used interchangeably, especially in the last decade or so.
This is a project that pretends at self-determination, and pretends at sovereignty, but can’t hold the occupier accountable and is penned in by the United States and its Western allies. The Palestinian Authority caves to their external patrons and those pressures at the expense of public accountability.
DK: Too many acronyms. The Palestinian Authority was the governing apparatus that was created out of the Oslo Accords. But the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was founded in 1964 and was considered the representative of the Palestinian people. It has many different institutions within it—an executive committee and a legislative body—but it’s supposed to be representative of Palestinians within historic Palestine as well as Palestinians outside of historic Palestine, and encompasses a number of different political parties.
Fatah is one of those political parties, a member of the PLO. It is the most popular, historically, among Palestinians, and was considered the most powerful within the PLO prior to 1994. Yasser Arafat was from Fatah; he also served as the chairman of the PLO. When the Palestinian Authority was created, the PLO was supposed to remain the umbrella organization, but it quickly fell into disuse. The Palestinian Authority took precedence and became the main negotiating body. Yasser Arafat had returned to the Palestinian territories, and he ran for elections and won by eighty-eight percent—so he became the president of the Palestinian Authority.
Maybe these things have become interchangeable because when they’ve had parliamentary elections—particularly the 2006 parliamentary elections—these free and fair elections were not respected. We can get into this in more detail. But essentially Fatah retained control of the Palestinian Authority even though they did not win those elections and do not have a mandate to govern. So for a lot of these reasons, there is a conflation sometimes, because the PLO has been sidelined. Now there are calls to do elections for the legislative body of the PLO, because that was also sidelined. The PA became the bigger institution in town. That’s why there’s some confusion over the terms.
JA: I wanted to get into the 2006 elections. Even in sympathetic pro-Palestine media, I don’t often see too much analysis of the role of the PA, the de facto governing entity at least in Area A. It is implied that because Israel controls the territory of the PA, and the territory of Hamas in Gaza, their role isn’t as important. Again, I don’t want to dismiss the overarching Israeli occupation. But important facts tend to get ignored.
The 2006 elections gave Hamas a victory. Since 2006, the PA didn’t really allow free elections, and we’re now fifteen years later and there may be elections in July from what I understand. Crucially, though, because of its organic ties to Palestinian society, the PA has managed to achieve something that the Israeli occupation prior to 1994 didn’t seem to have achieved.
In terms of the processes, how did they manage to do that? And how would you describe the situation now?
DK: The PA was able to accomplish this fragmentation and polarization in conjunction with Israeli repression and Israeli geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian territories. They were empowered by external patrons, especially the United States, who encouraged them from the outset to be exclusionary—and sometimes it’s not just encouragement, it’s pressure. It’s direct involvement to force them to be exclusionary. And the Palestinian Authority was embedded in Palestinian society in ways that the Israelis weren’t.
Israelis prior to 1994 had sometimes attempted to put up collaborationist institutions as a front, and tried to get Palestinians to engage with them, but it didn’t work as well as when the PA started playing this role. To be clear, exactly as you said, I am not dismissing the Israeli occupation at all. It is the root cause. And I don’t think the PA is an evil entity or anything. I know that some of the leadership benefits from the status quo. I know that there is corruption. But a lot of people who took part in this state-building project thought this was their best option.
We have to recall also that this was after four or five years of a grueling uprising. Yitzhak Rabin was using a “break their bones” policy. People needed another option, and they tried to maintain, in some aspects, a semblance of independence. But in the end this is a project that pretends at self-determination, and pretends at sovereignty, but can’t hold the occupier accountable and is penned in by the United States and its Western allies. So the Palestinian Authority caves to their external patrons and those pressures at the expense of public accountability.
They fragment Palestinian society in a couple of ways. They increase insularity within groups, and grievances between them, by being selective about who they repress and who they co-opt. When popular committees emerge in villages, for example if they mobilize around the issue of the wall or around the issue of land theft and land confiscation, the Palestinian Authority would try to get involved. They try to come into the protest for photo ops. They try to speak to the organizers to get them to “coordinate” with the Palestinian Authority’s official committee on resistance against the wall. Some of these activists are even hired away from their villages and begin working for the official committee. Now they’re not working on the ground in their village, they’re working in Ramallah.
That’s just one example of how some of this co-optation is used. This breeds a lot of resentment between groups that decided to work with the Palestinian Authority and groups that didn’t, and even within the groups themselves, between leadership and rank-and-file membership. Many people I spoke with were frustrated at what they saw as their leadership falling for the Palestinian Authority’s co-optation.
And there’s a second aspect: a segment of the population is reliant on the Palestinian Authority for employment. Of course there is also the straightforward repression, which is often at the behest of and in coordination with the Israeli occupation, to prove that they are “good partners”—there will be no more unrest, Islamists won’t win elections—and to continue the negotiation process. But this really pushes certain groups to the margins. Certain groups feel like they can’t engage in politics or represent their views, so there’s more insularity and less coordination among groups. And more turn to armed resistance and those kinds of strategies, instead of nonviolent or more shared strategies coordinated with broader segments of the Palestinian population.
JA: Would you say this is a form of NGOization? Or is it a different phenomenon?
DK: NGOization is coming concurrently, but I wouldn’t say it’s exactly the same. Aside from all the forms of co-optation and repression that I just described, the concept of NGOization was discussed by Tariq Dana and Manal Jamal and a number of other Palestinians, and I think they are using a term coined by Arundhati Roy about a similar dynamic in India. Essentially, it refers to how grassroots organizations that used to be responsive to society are now more in the business of competing for grants from international donors.
Again we have this dynamic where they are beholden to the external patron rather than people they are attempting to serve, but I wouldn’t characterize this as exactly the same as what’s happening with the PA. Rather I would characterize both as what we would call in the poli-sci literature a principal agent problem. There’s also the aspect of NGOization where activism or advocacy becomes a profession; it’s a living for a certain subset of the middle or upper-middle class.
All of the things I just described make Palestinians quite directionless—the institutions which once channeled their grievances don’t exist anymore.
JA: Since the publication of the book, we’ve now seen the Abraham Accords. They’re even vaguer than the Oslo Accords—that’s obviously on purpose. The PA were not even consulted in the first place, and aren’t even part of it—again, by design. The signatories don’t even seem to know how to package it for domestic, regional, or international audiences. It’s all over the place, depending which day you read their statements. I don’t say this to diminish that these accords have already brought about their fair share of negative consequences, but just to note how much more internationalized this story is getting, and not for the better.
Would you have added anything to your book if you had finished it after the Abraham Accords? Did they confirm or add to anything that you were discussing in the book?
DK: If I had waited on it and seen the Abraham Accords unfold, maybe I would have touched upon the regional dimension and how it poses new challenges to Palestinians. Transnational authoritarian dynamics are expanding and changing in character because of the Abraham Accords, the lead-up to them, and their aftermath, and these impact Palestinians’ regional allies and the public sphere in many of these countries. This poses an additional obstacle to how even the Palestinian diaspora will be able to engage in the future.
So I may have touched on that—but that’s the topic of my next book. It will be looking at transnational authoritarian dynamics, and particularly the role of Israel in facilitating a lot of these practices or dynamics. It’s still a work in progress and still quite early, but I have been in the region a couple years since finishing my PhD and I’ve done some fieldwork and some ethnographic work on dynamics that have been unfolding, and it’s been interesting to see how civil society organizations have been impacted by the growing closeness between Israel and some of these countries. I want to tease out what that means for how people hold their governments accountable and how people can organize with one another effectively or not.
JA: To go back a bit—it is 2021, and I am trying to have a 2011/Arab Spring angle in these episodes. You started the conversation with the Arab Spring being part of your own motivation. How would you assess the impact of the Arab Spring on Palestinian politics?
I don’t think we should morally compromise ourselves by supporting Iran or Hezbollah or Assad. Palestine is an issue of self-determination for an indigenous Arab population. The other movements in the region are also calls for and attempts at self-determination, and most people recognize you can’t support one without supporting other manifestations of the struggle.
DK: I think the Arab Spring could have had a big role in Palestinian politics, especially considering how unifying the Palestinian issue was for the initial protests. In the lead-up to the Arab Spring there is quite a bit of evidence that shows how many activists turned to the idea of democracy and were socialized to these ideas via their work on pro-Palestinian activism. We see this especially in the context of Egypt.
The Arab Spring was an opportunity to exert regional pressure on the Palestinian issue, but unfortunately that didn’t come to pass. Palestinians themselves were quite supportive of the Arab Spring uprisings, and very sympathetic, for example, to the [August 2013 anti-coup] sit-in in Raba’a Square—even though there was some element of polarization around the Islamist parties. People who criticize Hamas also criticize the Muslim Brotherhood. But in the end Palestinians were quite supportive of democracy movements in the region.
It’s not like the Palestinians had mass protests or anything similar. But for a brief moment there was hope that the Palestinian question would be revitalized and put center stage for the rest of the region. There were many indications that that could have come to pass had the Arab Spring not been usurped.
JA: We know that authoritarian groups and governments throughout the region, from Syria to Lebanon to Iran, tend to bring up Palestine quite a lot. It’s a central part of their own rhetoric and narratives, for their own purposes. It seems, from the outside, to have worked with at least a percentage of the Palestinian population (though probably a minority), especially the political elites. Of course the situation with Hamas is complicated and I don’t fully understand it, but in the early days there was support for the uprising and revolution in Syria; there were even reports of Hamas in Syria in some sort of advisory role. And with the PA it’s even more complicated.
My question isn’t necessarily What does Hamas or the PA think about the revolution? That doesn’t interest me as much. But how have these authoritarian groups been perceived, as far as you can tell, within these dynamics that we’ve been discussing so far?
DK: Regarding these counter-revolutionary authoritarian groups, the tankie rhetoric is not really as widespread as what some pontificators on Twitter and other social media might claim. In Gaza, Qassem Soleimani billboards went up and were immediately vandalized. We poll Palestinians just like we poll the rest of the Arab world in a number of different regional surveys, and Iran is not particularly popular among the Palestinian public. But when you ask the question of how Palestinians see these events—I remember there was an outpouring of support for [the victims of the] Raba’a [massacre], and that wasn’t just from an Islamist subsection of the population. People genuinely felt for what happened to the democracy movement in Egypt. And people were very sympathetic to Syrians.
I don’t think we should morally compromise ourselves by supporting Iran or Hezbollah or Assad, or even staying quiet about them in order not to lose potential allies. I’m speaking for myself but I also think this is a widespread sentiment. Palestine is an issue of self-determination for an indigenous Arab population. The case of Palestine is against settler-colonialism. The other movements in the region are also calls for and attempts at self-determination, and most people recognize you can’t support one without supporting other manifestations of the struggle.
You’re right, there is a division between some parts of the political elite and the rest of the Palestinian public. But I would say that’s not very representative.
JA: I’ll read something you tweeted recently: “Have we considered the social impacts of long term authoritarianism? On what it normalizes, how it impacts people’s sense of shared humanity? There is work on the impact of authoritarian legacies and attitudes, but it really is only scratching the surface. The wider picture is much worse.”
Can you expand on that? And what brought this about?
DK: I was lamenting the conditions I see around me. Authoritarianism clearly impacts social ties; it clearly impacts the mindsets of people who live under particular types of it. You see it in how people engage with each other. People who grew up in Ba’athist Syria engage differently. Or under Mubarak. You can’t just get rid of these years of socialization.
There is actually research on this. There’s a recent special issue in Comparative Political Studies that shows how people who grow up under certain types of authoritarian regimes are less likely to be supportive of democracy. But these studies just scratch at the surface; they’re looking at a particular attitude. I think it goes beyond an attitude for or against democracy, or how much. It’s also about how people engage with each other.
When you have a society that has spent thirty or forty years under a particular regime, socialized in a particular way, their institutions are set up to discourage critical thinking and discourage people trusting each other. How do you get past that? There are generational issues. I don’t know how you can rebuild the social ties and the critical thinking between people who have been ripped apart by repression and inundated by disinformation and propaganda.
The answer seems to be to focus on young people, make sure that they are getting better ideas during their formative years, and figure out what spaces there are for them to build those better ideas. I’ve seen student activism in places you wouldn’t think there was any, and ways that people are socialized into having more democratic values in unlikely places. I’m not an activist; I’m just an academic. For me, my personal role is to try to analyze these patterns, and try to figure out what’s working and what’s not, try to engage in public-facing scholarship so that people benefit from my findings: figuring out what spaces are effective in breaking these patterns. How do you break through government propaganda? What initiatives have been most effective?
JA: It’s one of the underlying themes of this podcast as well. I was fourteen when [Lebanese prime minister Rafic] Hariri was killed in 2005. Everything that’s happened since, the assassinations, the war, the other war, the Arab Spring and everything that followed, all of that was in my teenage years and my twenties. Maybe I’m thinking like this because it’s been exactly ten years since the Arab Spring, and there’s symbolism behind a decade, or because I’m turning thirty.
But I am very worried about how people like us, millennials, tend to be dismissive of the things that Gen Z-ers have to go through. I’ll stick to Lebanon. I have this memory of my early activist days: I was participating in something called Save Beirut Heritage; we were just trying to preserve this nice building that was being destroyed (that happened a lot in the privatization of Beirut). I was sixteen or seventeen; I remember this old lady in her fifties or sixties telling me, Don’t bother, don’t waste your time. Basically saying they’re going to destroy it anyway. That had an impact on me, and in retrospect it had a role in deradicalizing me—making me less politically active than I might have been otherwise (until a few years later anyway).
Since the uprising in Lebanon, the revolution of 2019, we have seen pretty good developments happening in student circles: progressive and secular and feminist and all of these things, winning seats and vote percentages that as far as I can remember didn’t really happen before—definitely not while I was at the American University of Beirut. We had some success with the secular club, which is still ongoing. But I don’t see people around my age thinking that this really matters. We tend to be very cynical about their future, because we are understandably cynical about our own immediate future.
That worries me, due to the potential of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They need to be supported right now, and they need to be told that they are part of something that is bigger than them. It’s happening—but not as much as I think it should be.
In an era without the internet, the Palestinian diaspora was much more connected to what was happening on the ground than it is today. We have all this technology and we are still seeing a huge disconnect, because the PLO and its institutions that used to organize Palestinians no longer exist.
DK: Perhaps in the specific context of Lebanon we can take a more optimistic outlook on their politics in the future. You did have those protests. There were young people engaging in and witnessing those protests. But regions in the Arab world differ. Our generation was socialized on the Arab Spring; maybe people slightly older than us witnessed the Second Intifada, for example—these things are very powerful. What I’m hearing from activists in the Gulf, for example, is that they are concerned that the young don’t have a living memory of some of these events, so they’re going in a very different direction.
They are consuming neoliberal discourse about “tolerance,” instead of what we consumed growing up. Whether it’s the Lebanese example, where there is an opportunity and we just need to support them, or whether it’s the Gulf, where the circumstances are quite bad and we need to take a more active role in facilitating an alternative viewpoint for these kids, the strategies differ. But the idea is for them to see their own agency, to try to change the narrative and not have another generation witness such horrifying failures and have this cynicism.
JA: To be clear, I don’t think that because they have better politics than we did then necessarily their lives are going to be easier. There are very difficult things happening right now in Lebanon. It’s probably going to be difficult for the foreseeable future. That’s just the fact of the situation. This is very Lebanon-specific: my best guess is that the sectarian regime is a dying one. It’s very fragile, just objectively. It relies on violence and clientelism, and at some point neither of these two really work, especially in the long term. But it being fragile or weak does not mean it doesn’t have a lot of violence up its sleeve. That’s my worry: that they will have to deal with more violence than I had to deal with.
I didn’t deal with much violence. Between 2010 and 2013 in Lebanon, there wasn’t that much, especially compared to the rest of the region. Since 2019 it’s been increasing, and there is a trend—obviously with Lokman Slim’s assassination—of it going in a certain direction. Hopefully it doesn’t. But in terms of the long term impacts of authoritarianism, and the generational angle: I saw how it affected my parents. They are the war generation (which is a shit title); they are the ones for whom their formative years, from their teens until their thirties, were the war. And they did not really do a good job at explaining what they went through in order for us to move on from it.
That goes back to the structure. It’s not just them. It’s an institutional situation in Lebanon: Just don’t talk about the war. Obviously the warlords are still there; they are still in power. It’s not the same with regard to our relationship to the next generations—it’s the same warlords, but a lot of these warlords may have passed away by the time these younger folks are my age. They’re pretty old right now. I’m hoping. This is definitely something that deserves its own in-depth look.
We’ve mentioned the role of the US in all of this. From what I can tell, the second highest percentage of this show’s audience comes from the US (just because it’s in English). I would guess a lot of people listening are vaguely liberal, progressive, or leftist. They know the role of the US isn’t exactly good; that’s pretty basic. But I’m not sure they fully understand, just as I didn’t, the details or the extent of that. The role of the US is pretty big. So would you mind getting into that a bit more?
DK: I’m going to talk about it in the context of Palestine, but the US plays an outsized role in a number of countries. That might be changing; there might be other regional actors expanding their activities. But at the time I was writing, and specifically in the case of Palestine, the US is quite central to my analysis and to the book’s argument, because it was at the helm of creating this dynamic between Palestinian society and its leadership, and often pushed the PA to engage in ways that they were unaccountable to their public.
The 2006 election was an example of that. Even before the 2006 election there had been a lot of pressure on the PA. We saw this through the WikiLeaks dump, the Palestine Papers. There had been a lot of pressure on them to repress their political opponents, even before the Islamists won any elections. The US and the UK were telling the PA to arrest people, to make sure that they don’t have space to organize.
But then the 2006 elections happened—free and fair elections by all monitoring standards—and Hamas won. But the US imposed sanctions, put severe pressure on the Palestinian economy and the Palestinian public. They would create these “stop-gap” aid mechanisms to get aid to the Palestinian people but not through proper channels. They would literally deposit money in the personal bank account of Mahmoud Abbas. What better example to illustrate how much they diverted the ability of the Palestinian public to put pressure on its own leadership?
When the outgoing party, Fatah, did not accept those elections but overturned them, there was violence between the Palestinian factions, and it led to Gaza and the West Bank being separated and governed by two different bodies—which continues to this day. And the US is at the crux of this, at the crux of pressuring the PA. But they even get involved in managing the nitty-gritty of the Palestinian Authority’s repressive apparatus. They control who gets promotions, who gets ahead with its bureaucracies; they control how aid money is spent; they conduct trainings with the security forces. From the onset of the Oslo Accords until today, there are many ways the US has been interjecting between the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian public.
JA: There are questions about how much this will change under Biden compared to under Trump. We have seen early indications that the answer will be: not much. We know that the administration has recently openly opposed the International Criminal Court decision to investigate the “Palestinian Situation.”
I always regret asking how much worse things can get, because it does always get worse…I don’t personally believe in Joe Biden or anything like that, but I think there might be some potential in a significant and increasingly vocal percentage of the Democratic Party which is way more progressive than the people at the top. Think of Ilhan Omar and AOC and all the others, but also Jewish Voice for Peace or If Not Now—it’s definitely different than it was when we were amazed that Bernie said anything. My expectations are very low, that’s why I’m a bit surprised at times.
Would you say there might be some potential there?
DK: I also recognize there is a shift in the Democratic base, but the American system is quite slow-moving. And there is a lot of disenfranchisement in the United States. It’s not a one hundred percent responsive or representative system. There are segments within the Democratic Party and within American politics as a whole that have an outsized role. I don’t see that changing in four years, especially with the conditions that the United States find themselves in. People might have very good ideas—within the American Jewish community there are very positive, unprecedented shifts—but are you going to sell it to the American people to care about X while the economy is collapsing?
Obviously Biden is better than Trump. Trump was a disaster, and has created precedents that even Biden isn’t going to overturn. Absolutely horrendous. But it has always come down to whether or not Palestinian leadership will exercise their own agency and actually change the status quo. They have had opportunities, when they were cornered, up against the wall, and they could have had a lot of support and legitimacy for saying No. But the farthest they went was ending security coordination for a little bit. They’re not fully seizing the opportunities to break free of this patron dynamic.
The calls to re-form the PLO could fall into that: being able to exercise agency instead of waiting for an American administration to change a little bit or the American public to “come around.” Not that that’s not important. But we could exercise agency in some small way. There hasn’t been enough forethought, foresight, forward thinking to take those steps. They’ve just been perpetuating the status quo and I don’t know what the end result is going to be.
JA: We were supposed to be seeing two upcoming elections—the Israeli one and the Palestinian one. I don’t see much change coming on the Israeli side, obviously. But is there anything that you think could happen in the upcoming Palestinian elections, assuming they do happen? I haven’t seen that much optimism. Maybe from your side you’ve seen something that I’ve missed.
DK: Elections aren’t the be-all and end-all for resolving any of these problems. Making it a political contest over elections when there are underlying issues that need to be resolved first is actually quite problematic. Gaza and the West Bank continue to be separated, why are we discussing elections? However, elections within the legislative body of the PLO might be a better thing to demand.
I’ve been saying this for a little bit, and a lot of Palestinians have been saying it for a while: The PLO needs to be revived. The trajectory that the Palestinian cause has been on is that it has been completely cut off from the vast majority of Palestinian experience. It’s become an issue of just Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. And obviously they are bearing the brunt of what’s happening—I’m not saying they shouldn’t be at the crux of deciding what happens. But there are the issues of people in Jerusalem; there are Palestinian refugees and their right of return. All of these issues that once were encompassed in the PLO’s objectives and demands have been completely sidelined.
That has been a weakness for the Palestinians themselves and the Palestinian leadership. In an era without the internet, the Palestinian diaspora was much more connected to what was happening on the ground than it is today. We have all this technology and we are still seeing a huge disconnect, because the PLO and its institutions that used to organize Palestinians no longer exist.
A lot of people have been asking for this, and I think that elections within the PLO might be a way forward. But I don’t think that elections are necessarily the way to resolve the existential issues within the Palestinian Authority—especially given that the Palestinian Authority has expended a lot of effort to make sure that opposition won’t be able to win. So I’m not very optimistic about those elections either.
JA: Dana, thanks a lot for your time. This has been very informative.
DK: Thanks for the opportunity.
