Mick Hartley

Could the Palestinian Authority perhaps take control of Gaza after Hamas is defeated? Nitsana Darshan-Leitner – Hope is not a strategy: The futility of a possible Palestinian Authority return to Gaza.

More than three months have passed since the Oct. 7 attack against Israel, and officials have warned that eradicating Hamas and its military capabilities will take many months, if not longer. Hamas spent 17 years and untold billions of dollars establishing a terror mini-state inside and underneath the Gaza Strip. Destroying the hundreds of miles of terror tunnels, eliminating battalions of trained killers and searching for hostages, all the while trying to avoid civilian casualties, is a slow-moving deliberate process. But still, as the fighting rages on, the talk in many world capitals — especially inside the beltway of Washington, D.C. — is about what to do the “day after” Hamas is removed from power.

Most Western leaders, including President Biden, are calling for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to assume control of the Gaza Strip and its 2.2 million inhabitants. Pinning Gaza’s future on the PA is a recipe for surefire disaster.

The PA was the byproduct of the 1993 Oslo Accords and the wishful thinking that terrorists could be rehabilitated into becoming responsible statesmen. Then-President Bill Clinton, and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, hoped that an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict along with billions of dollars of American and European Union tax money could convince, and bribe, Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and the heads of the other Palestinian fronts to test drive self-governance and create a peaceful future of coexistence for their people….

Since 1994, the State Department’s USAID has sent more than $5.5 billion to prop up the PA. The CIA and other federal agencies have spent untold billions more to prop up the PA’s numerous security agencies, but that training and the funds were merely used to facilitate and finance the mechanisms of terror rather than to combat it. It took legal action by the human rights NGO that I founded to help force the Congress to stop the PA from using American taxpayer money from paying stipends to the terrorists and their families as a reward for murdering Jewish civilians.

Mahmoud Abbas — Arafat’s successor, and the current PA president known by his nom de guerre of Abu Mazen — is 88 years old and serving the 19th year of a four-year term. He is corrupt, ineffective and a promoter of virulent antisemitic conspiracies….

The PA holds on to its power in the West Bank through the brutal tactics of violence and intimidation. A year before the Oct. 7 attacks, Human Rights Watch published its findings that torture by the Fatah-led PA in the West Bank may amount to crimes against humanity. In a scathing essay published in The Atlantic after Oct. 7, Gaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served as an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team at the 2000 Camp David Summit, claimed, “A staggering 87 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78 percent want Abbas to resign, and 62 percent believe that the PA is a liability.”

How then, one must ask of the U.S. State Department and the UK’s Foreign Office, can anyone expect the PA to govern a war-torn Gaza Strip and rehabilitate the lives of more than 2 million people who have been reared on intimidation, radicalization, terror, conflict and self-inflicted suffering? ….

For 30 years, the PA has failed its benefactors and partners in peace and, most tragically, betrayed the Palestinian people. Fantasizing that the PA will be Israel’s sheriff and can solve the gargantuan problems of post-Oct. 7 Gaza is a mistake of epic proportions that will only guarantee continued bloodshed and misery for all sides. Hope is not a strategy.