The PA wants its repression hidden in plain sight

The Palestinian Authority cannot help making a fool of itself. Its recent decision to suspend Al Jazeera’s broadcasts, ostensibly because the news outlet was “broadcasting inciteful content, spreading misinformation, and interfering in internal Palestinian affairs,” is an example of the scale of the repression of his own people which PA leader Mahmoud Abbas wishes to conceal from the rest of the world. While Palestinians in Gaza have been facing genocide, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank – Jenin being just one major example – have been subjected to ongoing raids by Israel occupation forces and their collaborators, the Palestinian Authority security services.

A weakened authoritarian and illegitimate rule cannot extend its stranglehold except by force. In recent years, however, the PA’s collaboration and complicity with Israel has been recognised openly as yet another part of the framework against which anti-colonial resistance is necessary. The PA only had two platforms to stand on when it came to the Palestinian people: subjugation through force and exploitation of the Palestinian anti-colonial resistance to score occasional points when necessary. Both are crumbling fast.

Abbas only made Gaza relevant in terms of the PA’s hypothetical return to the enclave. Other than that, over a year of genocide only elicited very weak occasional statements. Hunting down the Palestinians involved in resistance in the occupied West Bank, on the other hand, was imparted as security and stability, even though the PA knowns it can offer neither, not for the Palestinians nor for itself. Palestinians have been tortured by the PA’s security services in the name of restoring law and order. The PA tramples on the law in order to preserve it.

The minute that Israel decides that it doesn’t need the PA any longer, Abbas and his inner circle will have nothing to stand on.

Whatever illusion of power the PA thinks may materialise, it is far more likely that the opposite will happen. And the PA will have contributed to any impending violence by fragmenting the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle in several ways: maintaining the purported ideological divide between Gaza and the occupied West Bank; clinging to the international imposition of the two-state compromise even as genocide rages on; and accepting the parameters of illusory state-building even as Israel continues to colonise what remains of Palestinian territory and Ramallah looks on impotently, wasting both time and Palestinian lives.

Banning Al Jazeera, therefore, will not solve the PA’s dilemma of wanting to engage in violence while retaining a diplomatic veneer.

The PA has, after all, been stepping up its oppression of the Palestinians ever since the murder of Basel Al-Araj by PA security agents in March 2017 and, a few months later, the issue of the cybercrime law that targeted journalists.

The PA’s raids, separate from those conducted by Israel, reported Al Jazeera, have killed Palestinians in Jenin. If the PA is so certain of its role in maintaining security in the occupied West Bank, why not let a news outlet report the details? If the PA treats legitimate anti-colonial resistance as “terrorism” and “lawlessness”, surely it can only be a feather in its cap that it complies with the mainstream narrative when it comes to the Palestinian struggle?

And what does the PA think it will achieve by suspending Al Jazeera when so many Palestinians are eyewitnesses to Ramallah’s brutality? It wants its repression to be hidden in plain sight.

All the masks have fallen; the PA’s attempt to cling to power by withholding the right to information only exposes its fragility. There is no bigger incitement against Palestinians than the one that comes from within, and Ramallah’s incitement is no exception.

The PA wants its repression hidden in plain sight