The PA’s delusions are dangerous for Palestinians

“Whoever believes that he can impose a new deal of the century, or displace our Palestinian people and seize any inch of our land is delusional,” said Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas at the 38th African Summit in Addis Ababa on Saturday. Such words would have resonated well had Abbas been a revolutionary leader, but he isn’t. He’s a willing accomplice of Israeli colonialism.

As things stand, Abbas’s words stand our precisely because his actions depict otherwise. He can take the podium and attempt to wrest away the anti-colonial struggle from the Palestinian people, but the Palestinians know that while the genocide was raging in Gaza, Abbas was focused on making Jenin vulnerable to Israel’s raids. And he did nothing while Israel continued to “seize” much more than an “inch” of Palestinian land for illegal settlements.

When the PA targets the Palestinian resistance and collaborates with the colonial occupation state, it is delusional to call the coloniser delusional.

Abbas, of course, has no new approach. And while there is no matching Israeli-US culpability in destroying Palestine, the PA-Israeli and PA-international community collaborations are also part of the colonial process that enables Israel to appropriate Palestinian territory through various forms of forced displacement.

The hypocrisy in Abbas’s speech is astounding.

He called out US President Donald Trump’s call to displace Palestinians as a tactic to divert attention away from the genocide and the annexation of the occupied West Bank. However, Abbas failed to mention that under cover of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the PA aided Israel in its raids of the Jenin refugee camp, thus contributing to the forced displacement of the Palestinian people.

Last month, the PA did its utmost to suppress news of its crackdown on the Palestinian resistance in Jenin. Now that 26,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by Israel from Jenin, the PA’s official news agency Wafa is reporting on Israel’s violations, without mentioning the PA’s role in laying the groundwork for them.

And, of course, while Abbas portrays himself selectively as championing the Palestinian resistance, while failing miserably to do anything of the kind, the two-state paradigm remains his only constant. That alone should be enough to pit the PA against the Palestinian resistance. The two-state “solution” was never viable because the intent was never to create two states. And yet, despite it becoming defunct, Abbas is still urging world leaders to participate in the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution and to attend yet another peace conference scheduled for June this year.

In essence, Abbas is urging world leaders to continue denying Palestinians their right to land, liberation and political autonomy, just as the PA does with the Palestinian people on behalf of Israel. The international community determined that Palestinians should be pawns in the two-state diplomacy but that doesn’t mean there is legitimacy in the paradigm. The 1947 UN Partition Plan and what happened afterwards are ample proof of this.

Is Abbas really rejecting the forced displacement of Palestinians or going along with it?

Constantly repeated, the two-state paradigm also urges the international community to remain complicit in Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their land (by all means, one can now add). Diplomatic dissociation is not a novelty. However, even by the PA’s low standards, Abbas’s speech at the African Summit is nothing but an open call for colonisation, if we read his words and analyse his actions.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250218-the-pas-delusions-are-dangerous-for-palestinians/