Israel must disband the Palestinian Authority for diplomacy’s sake

Michael Rubin | American Enterprise Institute

There Can Be No Arab-Israeli Diplomacy When Palestinians Believe That Concessions Are Temporary and Reversible

In 1993, after months of behinds-the-scenes negotiations, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) negotiator Mahmoud Abbas reached agreement on the Oslo Accords. President Bill Clinton presided over as signing ceremony at the White House culminating with a reluctant handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

At the time of the deal’s announcement, Arafat and the PLO hierarchy were resident in Tunisia, where the group had been expelled a decade earlier as part of a deal to remove them from Lebanon. While Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had formed the PLO in 1964, there was initially very little Palestinian about it. Arafat was born in Cairo and was an Egyptian citizen serving in the Egyptian army when Nasser chose him for his new role.

Israel, meanwhile, took control over the Old City of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War. Until that point, Egypt controlled Gaza and Jordan, the West Bank and Old City. During their control, neither Cairo nor Amman declared a Palestinian state.

In 1987, the First Intifada erupted. Palestinians were frustrated, and a traffic accident was the spark that set society alight. The First Intifada was a largely grassroots affair.

Many of the Palestinians participating spoke Hebrew, worked in Israel, and/or served time in Israeli prisons; they understood how Israelis thought. As I detail in Dancing with the Devil, a history of U.S. diplomacy with rogue regimes and terrorist groups, the First Intifada also served as a spark for ambitious young diplomats to set themselves apart and make their mark inside the State Department.

Behind the scenes, Dennis Ross, for example, was already urging negotiation with the PLO. Always a bit of a political chameleon, Ross made the transition from the George H.W. Bush administration to Bill Clinton’s team. Ross argued that the best opportunity for peacemaking would be to engage the PLO’s exiled leadership. Arafat might be odious, but convincing one dictator was easier than negotiating with grassroots Palestinian activists.

In essence, Ross’ team brought Arafat back from political exile and made him the pivotal man, never mind he had not fought in the First Intifada, he spoke no Hebrew and, aside from his own fevered conspiracy theories, he had no idea how Israelis thought.

The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority in exchange for Arafat’s recognition of Israel and foreswearing terrorism. Once the Palestinian Authority established itself, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank, it would begin negotiating final-status issues such as claims to Jerusalem and the “right of return.” Settlement would come in direct talks, not in end-runs to the United Nations or other governments.

In 2000, Clinton believed he had achieved a comprehensive peace deal. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had hashed out an agreement. Clinton invited everyone to Camp David to dot the I’s and cross the T’s; he was furious when Arafat, soon after arriving, backtracked from commitments Palestinian negotiators had made in his name, and even angrier when Arafat refused to make any counter offer or enunciate adjustments he would demand.

Over subsequent years, partisans from one side or the other spun reality to castigate the other side, often putting their own polemics and ideology above reality and fact. What they cannot deny, however, is that Arafat betrayed his commitment to resolve disputes with Israel through diplomacy rather than terrorism.

Hamas apologists like to claim the group’s grounding in Gaza is the result of 2006 Palestinian elections; they ignore that Hamas then turned on other Palestinian groups in a violent and murderous coup to consolidate their Islamist dictatorship.

Bodies of Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian Islamist Hamas militants lie on a main road near the Gevim Kibbutz in Israel, close to the border with Gaza strip, October 7, 2023. Photo: AFP

Hamas rejected the principles of Oslo, both rejecting Israel’s right to exist and openly supporting terror. Even the most ardent flat-earthers cannot deny Hamas’s role on October 7, 2023, the greatest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Israel was within its rights, then, to return to the status quo ante and end the Palestinian Authority. After all, it had openly rejected its core principles. That Arafat, and later Abbas, were from a different political movement than Hamas is irrelevant. All Palestinian political activity rests on a platform created by Oslo.

Now that Australia, Canada, and several Western European states are unilaterally recognizing Palestine, despite the open Palestinian embrace of terrorism and Hamas rejection of Israel, Israel should officially end the Palestinian Authority and expel its leaders en masse back to Tunisia.

It should expel Hamas across Gaza’s border into Egypt. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi may not want them settling in Egypt, but he can convene other Arab and European states to determine where they might go.

This would not be ethnic cleansing; rather, it would be rescuing diplomacy. After all, while Australians, Canadians, and Europeans may believe they can unilaterally relieve the Palestinians of commitments they made to an agreement the Europeans themselves did not sign, what they actually signal is a disdain for diplomacy that unravels centuries of progress in which treaties matter.

There can be no future Arab-Israeli diplomacy when Palestinians believe that concessions are temporary and reversible. Beyond the Middle East, what leaders from Anthony Albanese to Emmanuel Macron to Mark Carney now signal to India and Pakistan along their Line of Control, North and South Korea on the Demilitarized Zone, Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands, is that no agreement matters, only the virtue signaling of the Western chattering class.

Israel should draw a line in the sand and define itself as the one country that will continue to abide by its agreements. It should end the Palestinian Authority and allow its resurrection only when it unequivocally recognizes Israel as a Jewish state and disarms.

Of course, if the Palestinian leadership fails to do so, Israel and the United States can do what they should have done back in 1993: deal with the Palestinian grassroots rather than radicalized implants. Let non-Hamas Gazans, local families, clans, and tribes, negotiate their peace. The region would be better off for it.

Michael Rubin is a former Pentagon official whose major research areas are the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and diplomacy. He is author of “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter, 2014). He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute AEI. His major research area is the Middle East, with special focus on Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Kurdish society.

The article first published at aei.org

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