The PA’s insinuations can be turned against itself

The Palestinian Authority is using the last dregs of its rapidly declining influence to instigate further divisions in Palestinian politics, this time using Israel’s genocide in Gaza to purportedly prove its point. Following Israel’s massacre targeting displaced Palestinians in a refugee camp in Mawasi, the PA issued a press statement that holds Israel fully responsible for the genocide, while also blaming Hamas. Nothing better for the Israeli narrative that having the PA – funded by international donors and working against Palestinian interests – partly blame a resistance movement for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

“Give Hamas’ evasion of national unity and offering pretexts to the occupation state, the Presidency considers that Hamas shares the legal, moral and political responsibility for the ongoing genocidal war against the Strip along with all the ensuing suffering, destruction and killing,” the PA’s press statement partly stated.

But the PA should take an introspective look at itself. From security coordination to quash any legitimate anti-colonial resistance in the Occupied West Bank, to imposing sanctions on Gaza and detaining those who protested against its actions, the PA is the embodiment of evading national unity and offering pretexts to Israel.

Not only has the PA kept silent for most of the genocide, it also provided no political endeavours to protect Palestinians or to urge the international community to act. On the contrary, the PA merely attempted to assert its presence by stating that it would be ready to assume its responsibilities in Gaza in the genocidal aftermath; never mind that it can barely keep up with the Occupied West Bank and the Resistance there, which has now organised to the point that it is openly recognising and challenging the entire spectrum of colonialism and colonial collaboration.

How can the PA blame Hamas for disrupting national unity, when its statement encourages not only division, but also Israel’s excuse for exterminating Palestinians from Gaza under the pretext of eliminating Hamas? Why is the PA intimating that the genocide started on 7 October, when this latest phase is directly linked to the Zionist colonial project that manifested how deadly it is in the 1948 Nakba? How about turning back to very recent history and grappling with the realising that the two-state compromise, which the PA is so fond of referring to, contributed to the current genocide in Gaza; not only because the paradigm is unfeasible, but also because it never intended for decolonisation to happen?

The PA has neither moral nor political ground to stand on. All it has is an internationally donor-funded stage from which it performs its internationally-approved scripts, and heaps scorn on itself from the Palestinians themselves, who know that the PA only looks after its own survival. Palestinians in Jenin will remember how PA leader, Mahmoud Abbas, showed up briefly for press reasons – the only visit to the camp in a decade. Of course, security coordination is sacred, so Abbas states, and Abbas has no qualms about offering Palestinians as fodder to the Israelis rather than have the security services protect Palestinians from colonial violence. If there is an entity that evades Palestinian unity, it is the PA, which knows it cannot survive without the backing of genocidal Israel and the complicit international community. Which, in turn, should also illuminate the PA as the partly responsible party for genocide.

The PA’s insinuations can be turned against itself