Palestinian Authority: Protecting the “Homeland,” or a New Zionist Bantustan
Image by Planet Volumes.
Since the 1993 Oslo Accord, Israel has invaded Jenin Camp numerous times. The City of Jenin and the nearby camp are in what is considered as Area A of the Accord. Area A, which comprises approximately 18% of the West Bank, or 18% of the 22% of historical Palestine, is supposed to be under the full control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). This means that the PA runs both civil affairs and security within this area.
In the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp, Israel has conducted repeated raids since the infamous massacre of April 2002. Most recently, at the end of May, the Israeli army raided the camp murdering several Palestinians before bringing in American-made and U.S. funded bulldozers digging asphalt roads, infrastructure facilities and demolishing homes.
Dismissing the PA responsibility in Area A under the Oslo Accord, the Israeli army operates freely, invading and arresting Palestinians in any city, town, or refugee camp across the West Bank. Last August, the Israeli army launched large-scale incursions on cities and town designated as Area A, killing dozens of Palestinians. In Jenin Camp, the Israeli military completely cut off the area from the outside world—blocking communications, barring outside journalists, and restricting access to food and water. After at least a week of raids, over 30 Palestinians were murdered and dozens were arrested without charge. According to a U.N. report, in the last year, more than 630 Palestinians were murdered by Israel in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Furthermore, attacks by Israeli Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had surged significantly since the election of Israel’s most racist government. According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, at least 1,423 settler attacks were documented last year, averaging four per day. During the peak of the olive harvest season in October, Zionist colonists’ terror spiked to a record 32 attacks. Emboldened by government officials and a pervasive sense of impunity, these Jewish colonists went on vandalizing homes, torching vehicles, poisoning livestock, and olive groves—an enduring symbol of Palestinian resilience and a critical source of livelihood—were deliberately set ablaze or uprooted.
What makes these terrorist acts particularly egregious is the blatant complicity of the Israeli military. Israeli forces have a track record of enabling colonist violence, stand by or join in these brutal attacks. It should be understood that the systematic, and racially motivated violence by Israeli Jewish zealots is part of a calculated Zionist strategy to instill psychological fear and achieve the “voluntary” ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Palestinian villagers who attempt to defend their properties, face arrest or are met with live fire by soldiers. This stark dual legal system—where settlers act with impunity while Palestinians endure harsh military rule—epitomizes the apartheid conditions documented by leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Last week, the Israeli army has waged a wide military campaign in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, Tubas, towns outside Ramallah, and Qalqilya in the West Bank. In Hebron, Israeli forces started to bulldoze a new colonial road south of Hebron, uprooting trees, razing and confiscating Palestinian land for the benefit of new Jew-only colonies.
Now juxtapose this with the PA initiated security operation, “Protect the Homeland,” aimed at disarming Palestinian fighters inside Jenin refugee camp. It is difficult not to view the PA’s activities in the camp as an extension of Israel’s efforts, which have failed to crush the resistance since 2002.
Protecting the homeland for the PA should mean defending Palestinian towns from the invading occupying army, safeguarding Palestinian farmers from settler attacks, and resisting the construction of colonial roads and the expropriation of Palestinian land—not disarming the only forces challenging the Israeli occupation and its racist policies.
The PA’s malleable collaboration with Israel poses a fundamental question about the future of current Palestinian leadership. As frustration with the status quo grows, demands for a new strategy that prioritizes resistance and self-determination over accommodation are destined to gain traction. Grassroots movements reflect a desire for leadership that is more accountable to the Palestinian people and less beholden to Israel and International donors.
Ultimately, the PA’s collaboration with Israel highlights the profound challenges facing Palestinian governance under occupation. Breaking free from this dynamic will require not only internal reform but also a reinvigorated national movement capable of uniting Palestinians, in the homeland and diaspora, around a shared vision for justice, freedom, and self-determination.
By subcontracting Israel’s suppression of Palestinian resistance to the occupation and settler violence, the PA’s current trajectory not only undermines Palestinian aspirations for statehood but also risks transforming the “Homeland” it purports to protect into Zionist run Bantustans.
Palestinian security forces are seen during the clashes between Palestinian security forces and resistance fighters in the Jenin refugee camp west of the city of Jenin, on 21 December 2024 [Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]
by Dr Ramzy Baroud
RamzyBaroud
December 23, 2024
Following a ten-day siege, the Palestinian Authority began a violent raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank on 14 December. The PA security forces used tactics similar to those used by the Israeli occupation forces in their routine attacks on the area.
The camp, which is a mere half a square kilometre in size, hosts an ever-growing population of 24,000 refugees, mostly the descendants of Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the great catastrophe, the 1948 Nakba.
The raid began with a tight siege, followed by an attack from multiple directions that resulted in the killing of an unarmed youth, Rebhi Al-Shalabi, 19, then a 13-year-old boy, Muhammad Al-Amer. The PA forces also killed Yazid Ja’ayseh, the commander of the Jenin Brigades, who had evaded Israeli assassination attempts for his leadership role in unifying all Palestinian Resistance fighters under the umbrella of a single group.
Unsurprisingly, Israel is largely pleased with the PA’s action against the Palestinian Resistance, although it expects more. “The Palestinian Authority has been acting resolutely against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters over the past several weeks, army and Shin Bet sources said, but the Israeli officials expressed the hope that their effectiveness could be enhanced,” reported Haaretz.
Indeed, Israel has attempted to subdue Jenin 80 times in the past year alone, killing more than 220 people, Al Jazeera has reported, citing Palestinian Ministry of Health sources.
By attacking Jenin, the PA is helping the Israeli army in more than one way.
It is killing and detaining anti-Israeli occupation Resistance fighters, for example; consuming the energy and resources of the Resistance; and allowing Israel to spare thousands of soldiers so that they may carry on with the genocide in Gaza.
For many, especially supporters of Palestine around the world, the PA’s action is confusing, to say the least. Those surprised by the anti-Resistance policies of Mahmoud Abbas and his Ramallah-based authority, however, are driven by the erroneous assumption that the PA is a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and that it behaves in ways consistent with the collective aspirations of all Palestinians.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years, the PA has ceased to play any role that deviates from the interests of a small clique of a pro-US and pro-Israel wealthy elite who have enriched themselves, while millions of Palestinians continue to suffer an Israeli genocide in Gaza, and a violent system of apartheid and military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The most telling and recent example is that, less than 70 kilometres from Jenin, illegal and violent Israeli Jewish settlers have burned the Bir Al-Walidin Mosque in the town of Murda, near Salfit. The PA security services did nothing whatsoever to confront the armed Jewish militias, nor any of the hundreds of settlers’ pogroms carried out against Palestinians in the West Bank in the past year and before; nor, of course, did the occupation army.
How did the PA turn from a supposed national project — at least in theory — into another branch of the Israeli occupation?
It could be argued that the PA was structured from the day of its establishment in 1994 as a body whose existence catered solely for the benefit of the Israeli occupation. There is much evidence to substantiate this claim, including the arrests, torture and killing of dissenting Palestinians soon after the creation of the PA.
Palestinian demonstrators hold a banner and Palestinian flags in the center of Jenin city during the clashes between Palestinian security forces and resistance fighters in the Jenin refugee camp west of the city of Jenin, on 21 December 2024 [Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images]The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became directly involved in supporting the PA from the very beginning, expanding its role as early as 1996 following a series of retaliatory Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets in major cities. It was then that CIA director George Tenet became an important player in shaping the policies of the PA security forces, preparing them for massive crackdowns on Palestinian Resistance groups. This involvement was a condition of US financial support under the Bill Clinton administration, the kind of support that sowed the seeds of the Fatah-Hamas conflict, which reached its zenith in the summer of 2007.
READ: Israeli cabinet directs military to enhance security, intelligence coordination with PA
The involvement of the US — and other armed forces of US client regimes in the region — became even more apparent under the leadership of Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who helped train, prepare and equip the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (NSF), producing several battalions of young recruits (between 20 and 22 years old) to fight fellow Palestinians in the name of restoring law and order.
That supposed restoration of “law and order” began in earnest as early as 2005 and continues to this day. Interestingly, this is the same language that the PA is currently using to justify its war on the Jenin refugee camp. A spokesman for the PA security forces, Anwar Rajab, told Al Jazeera recently that the objective of the raid on Jenin is to “pursue criminals” and lawbreakers, and to “prevent the camp from becoming a battleground like Gaza.”
Equating Resistance fighters with criminals and linking that supposed criminality to the Gaza Resistance is the typical PA discourse on legitimate resistance against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is a discourse that took the US and Israel years to craft and perfect, making the PA arguably the greatest achievement of the occupation state and Washington in recent decades.
This behaviour and language can be traced to a famous statement by Dayton himself who, in a 2009 speech, celebrated the US’s greatest creation in Palestine: “And what we have created — and I say this in humility — what we have created are new men… upon the return of these new men of Palestine, they have shown motivation, discipline and professionalism, and they have made such a difference.”
Indeed, the “new men of Palestine” are making all the difference required by the US and Israel; they are fighting the very Palestinian Resistance that is defending Jenin against the Israeli onslaught, Nablus against the pogroms of armed settlers and Gaza against genocide.
None of these “new men” — whose numbers are counted in the tens of thousands — have lifted a finger to help their fellow Palestinians as they continue to starve to death in the Gaza Strip, are tortured and raped en masse, and are burned alive in Jabaliya and Khan Yunis while fighting and dying in their thousands without any assistance from the Ramallah Authority.
To say that the PA has betrayed Palestinians, however, is inaccurate.
The PA was never set up, financed and armed by the US and Israel as a liberation force; it was always intended to be an obstacle to Palestinian freedom. We are witnessing the final proof of this claim. It is taking place in Jenin now; in fact, all over the occupied West Bank.
Of course, the PA will not be able to crush the Palestinian Resistance, which the supposedly mighty Israeli army has failed to subdue over the course of many years. But the question remains: how long will the PA be allowed to serve the role as the enforcer of the Israeli occupation and the protector of illegal Jewish settlers, while simultaneously promoting itself as the guardian of Palestinian rights, freedom and statehood?
READ: Tribal coalition calls on Palestinian Authority to halt attacks on resistance
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
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