Why Security Cooperation With Israel Is a Lose-Lose for Abbas

In response to the Israeli military’s recent assault on the Jenin refugee camp that killed at least 10 people, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced he was immediately suspending security coordination with Israel. The decision was intended as a protest against the almost daily Israeli army raids on Palestinian towns and villages in the occupied West Bank that have killed at least 41 Palestinians just since the start of the year.

The ongoing Israeli offensive marks a major upsurge in an already bloody episode that has seen some 190 Palestinians killed in 2022—making it the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinians since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005. In the wake of the killings in Jenin, a Palestinian man shot seven Israelis to death outside a synagogue in the East Jerusalem settlement of Neve Yaakov. The uptick in violence came just as senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Director William Burns, were in the region for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

The decision to suspend security coordination with Israel was not one that Abbas took lightly or enthusiastically. Given the mounting Palestinian death toll, however, he had little choice in the matter. Security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, which Abbas has described as a “sacred” responsibility, has been a central pillar of the Oslo process since 1993. Moreover, it is vital to the survival of the PA itself—and, from Israel’s standpoint, the PA’s raison d’être.

Thus, despite Abbas’s repeated threats to cut security ties with Israel over the years, he has only ever done so once before—amid fears of imminent Israeli annexations in the West Bank following the release of the Trump administration’s peace plan in 2020—but quickly resumed cooperation following the election of Joe Biden as U.S. president. At the same time, however, PA-Israel security coordination remains hugely unpopular among ordinary Palestinians of all political stripes, who see it as a form of collaboration with the occupation and, for some, outright “treason,” and it has been a key sticking point in the PA’s on-again-off-again reconciliation process with Hamas. Moreover, maintaining security cooperation with the Israeli army while Palestinians are being killed in large numbers would be political suicide.

This dilemma highlights one of the central failings of the Oslo peace process over the past three decades: Whereas the primary role of PA-Israel security cooperation is to prevent attacks on Israelis, whether soldiers or civilians, there are no provisions or mechanisms in place to protect the lives and property of Palestinians, as a population living under military occupation since June 1967, from Israeli incursions, shootings, arrests, land confiscations, and evictions—all of which continue more or less unabated—or from the daily specter of Israeli settler terror attacks.

PA-Israel security cooperation represents a lose-lose situation for Abbas. To permanently cut security ties with Israel risks triggering sanctions and other punitive measures by Israel and, most likely, the United States—thus jeopardizing the PA’s very existence. On the other hand, continuing to cooperate with the Israeli military while the occupation grows more repressive and violent erodes what little domestic legitimacy Abbas has left.

Meanwhile, Abbas is trying to have it both ways. No sooner had he announced the decision than the Palestinian leader began walking it back, privately assuring U.S. officials that intelligence-sharing with Israel along with PA efforts to thwart attacks on Israelis would continue as before and that full coordination would be resumed once calm is restored.

The lose-lose nature of PA-Israel security cooperation—and of the Oslo process—highlights the increasingly precarious position of Abbas’s leadership and the PA itself. Although Israel’s military occupation, which after 56 years has never been more entrenched, can be maintained more or less indefinitely, the same cannot be said of the PA.

Once seen as the embryo of a future Palestinian state, the PA has been in steady decline for many years and is, in many ways, already in a state of slow-motion collapse. Even outside the question of security coordination, both Abbas and the PA are deeply unpopular among ordinary Palestinians, with some three-quarters of Palestinians saying they want Abbas to resign. Years of political and institutional stagnation, thanks in large part to the debilitating split with Hamas, along with the PA’s growing corruption and authoritarianism, have severely eroded its domestic legitimacy.

It is not just Palestinians who have grown disaffected with their leadership; the international community is itself divesting from the PA. A sharp drop in international donor aid, which has declined by around 85 percent since 2008, combined with the loss since 2019 of some $2 billion in tax transfers collected by Israel on the Palestinians’ behalf, have put the PA on the brink of financial bankruptcy. Although the restoration of limited U.S. assistance under the Biden administration has helped mitigate some of the damage, it is unlikely to staunch the hemorrhage.

In parallel with its dwindling political and economic prospects, the PA’s physical presence on the ground is shrinking as well. With the PA unable to protect Palestinian lives and property or to otherwise challenge Israel’s occupation, new militant groups have sought to fill the vacuum, particularly in the northern West Bank districts of Nablus and Jenin—large portions of which are now beyond the reach of PA security forces due to the militants’ growing local animosity toward Abbas’s leadership.

Yet another existential threat comes from the new, far-right Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Until now, successive Israeli governments (including previous Netanyahu governments) have sought to keep Abbas’s leadership as well as the Hamas authority in Gaza fragmented and weak while avoiding an all-out collapse. However, the new Netanyahu government, the most extreme in Israel’s history, for the first time includes ministers—namely National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom received key government portfolios with jurisdiction in the occupied territories—who are openly committed to dismantling the PA as part of their annexationist ambitions.

The absence of a political process or horizon for ending Israel’s occupation has added to Abbas’s frustration as well as the growing sense of despair among ordinary Palestinians. The recent procession of senior U.S. officials to the region—including last week’s visits by Blinken and Burns, both of which were planned prior to the latest crisis—is somewhat ironic given the Biden administration’s conspicuous disinterest in the Palestinians and the Israeli-Palestinian file more broadly. Both issues take a backseat to other regional priorities, such as confronting Iran and promoting Arab-Israeli normalization.

Apart from appealing for calm and calling on Abbas to resume security ties with Israel, the administration has shown little interest in pursuing genuine de-escalation, which would necessarily entail putting pressure on Israel as the stronger of the two parties. Having decided early on that there was little hope for a diplomatic process and despite numerous outbreaks of violence in both the West Bank and Gaza, the Biden administration has taken a decidedly hands-off approach. As the latest upsurge in violence demonstrates, however, there is no such thing as benign neglect—particularly in a conflict as vastly asymmetrical as the one between Israelis and Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the Israeli assault shows no sign of letting up, as demonstrated by yesterday’s deadly army raid on a Palestinian refugee camp near Jericho that killed five Palestinians. U.S. officials are keenly aware of the increasingly dangerous situation on the ground. “A lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance” to events of the Second Intifada more than two decades ago, warned Burns following his return to Washington. A new U.S. security plan calls on the PA to reassert control over Jenin and Nablus but makes no parallel demands on Israel to rein in its offensive.

Indeed, so long as the costs of the status quo continue to be borne primarily by Palestinians, the Biden administration is unlikely to expend political capital on the issue. In the past, the Palestinian leadership could justify the relatively high costs associated with its security cooperation with Israel as a necessary evil on the way to eventual Palestinian statehood and liberation. But with an Israeli government committed to dismantling what few vestiges of a two-state solution remain and a U.S. administration that has shown little interest in even going through the motions of a political process, that proposition is no longer sustainable.

The PA’s chronic weakness and dependency on both the United States and Israel make it virtually impossible for Abbas or a future successor to permanently sever security ties with Israel. Indeed, the only real threat to PA-Israel security cooperation would be in the event of the PA’s collapse. Given current trends, however, that day may not be so far off.