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Ihe Palestinian Authority (PA) was created by agreements negotiated in Oslo and signed in 1993 by Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, and Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But where Israel basically saw in it the pledge of a ” security cooperation in the territories evacuated by its army, the PLO projected its dreams of an independent state into such an Authority. Donors, led by the European Union, have maintained this illusion by massively subsidizing the PA with a view to ” two state solution “.
Rabin, assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995, was succeeded by a fierce opponent of the Oslo Accords, Benyamin Netanyahu, from 1996 to 1999, then from 2009 to 2021. Back at the head of the Israeli government for a few months, Netanyahu finds himself face to face with Mahmoud Abbas who, after Arafat’s death in 2004, succeeded him as president of both the PLO and the PA.
The confusion of legitimacy
Arafat had succeeded in containing the contradictions inherent in the interlocking between, on the one hand, the PA and its Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), elected by universal suffrage in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, and, on the other hand, on the other hand, the PLO, with its executive council, its central council and its national council, supposed to represent both the population of the occupied territories and the Palestinian diaspora. The management of these two levels of legitimacy was facilitated by Arafat’s charisma and his stranglehold on Fatah, the majority in the PLO, as well as by the refusal of the Islamists of Hamas to play the game of the PLO as of the PA.
Everything changed with the election of Abbas, head of both Fatah and the PLO, by 62% of the vote in 2005 as President of the Palestinian Authority and, the following year, with the victory of Hamas in the legislative, with 74 of the 132 seats of the CLP. Each of the rival movements availed itself of electoral legitimacy to claim its one and only “Authority”, until the 2007 rupture between the “Fatahstan” of the West Bank and the “Hamastan” of Gaza.
Cycles of talks between Fatah and Hamas, yesterday through the mediation of Egypt, today through that of Algeria, have not succeeded in getting out of this division now anchored in two Palestinian territories. The campaign led by Abbas on behalf of the PLO to obtain, in 2012, the recognition of Palestine as a non-member state of the United Nations, but with an observer status, has further aggravated the confusion, since the government of the The PA, even its administration, now claims a “State of Palestine”, now recognized by 139 states.
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