Gaza ceasefire: The PA's race to prove itself to Trump as rivals line up
There has been much shock and awe among many Arabs in recent weeks at the brutal repressive campaign dubbed "The Protection of the Homeland" that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has launched against Palestinian resisters to the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
The campaign's ultimate failure led the Israelis to intervene again this week by bombing the Jenin refugee camp, killing around 12 Palestinians.
Before the Israeli strikes, PA forces had already killed at least 10 Palestinians, including two children, and injured many others. They have arrested and tortured dozens, handing over many to the Israeli occupation forces, burned down homes and destroyed roads.
They are currently besieging the Jenin refugee camp, which was attacked before the PA campaign by the Israeli military, which failed to suppress the camp's resisters.
The Israelis committed a massacre in 2002 in the camp to crush its resistance, killing dozens.
Proudly imitating regular Israeli practice, the PA is blocking the delivery of food and medicine to camp residents.
It has also killed the young Palestinian journalist Shatha Sabbagh (which the PA denies, though it stands accused by the young journalist's family of her murder) and arrested the physician heading the emergency room department in Jenin Hospital, Qasim Bani Ghura, whom it is currently subjecting to torture.
Meanwhile, despite the resignation and opposition of a few Palestine Liberation Organisation and PA officials in protest, PA mercenaries continue another repressive campaign in Nablus and Tulkarm bolstered by the Israeli occupation army.
But this is hardly new.
The PA was created by Israel and Yasser Arafat in the wake of the Oslo Accords precisely as a repressive apparatus subcontracted by Israel to repress any and all resistance to the Israeli occupation - a task it has never shied away from performing.
Brutal repression
Among the more illustrious episodes of the PA's brutal repression was the abduction, torture, and murder of Palestinian dissident Nizar Banat by its security forces in 2021 and the crackdown on any peaceful demonstrations against its collaboration with Israel.
Many blame unelected PA President Mahmoud Abbas for the repression as if he were its first instigator.
They point to his infamous defence of PA "security coordination" with Israel as "sacred", forgetting the record of Arafat in repressing resisting Palestinians since his arrival in Gaza in 1994.
In November 1994, Arafat's police indeed killed at least 13 unarmed Palestinians and wounded 200 others for demonstrating against the Oslo Accords.
In early 1995, while visiting Gaza, then-US Vice President Al Gore praised Arafat for establishing military tribunals to try Palestinians opposed to Oslo.
The Oslo Accords were followed by the Cairo Agreement of May 1994, which created the 9,000-strong Palestinian police force whose main task was to "act to prevent terror against Israelis in the areas under their control".
This "security" arrangement was renewed and extended in the Oslo II agreement of September 1995, celebrated in Washington, DC, and blessed by then-President Bill Clinton and the EU ambassador who presided over the ceremony, wherein the Israeli apartheid regime subcontracted "responsibility for public order and internal security" to the Palestinian Police in what was termed "Area A" of the West Bank.
EU and US hypocrisy
The US and the EU financed and trained this repressive force and have continued to do so.
When Banat was murdered in 2021, EU trainers and funders of Banat's killers were"shocked and saddened", while the US State Department said that Washington was "disturbed": "We have serious concerns about Palestinian Authority restrictions on the exercise of freedom of _expression_ by Palestinians and harassment of civil society activists and organisations."
This time around, neither the US nor the EU expressed "shock" nor seem to have been "disturbed" at all by the murderous PA repression that they fund and call for.
In light of the US and EU's principal roles in abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, it seems that both powers have given up their erstwhile hypocrisy.
During its weeks-long siege of the Jenin refugee camp, the PA asked for more US funds to train its mercenaries to repress the Palestinian people. In mid-December, the PA requested $680m "to boost the training of its special forces and bolster its supply of ammunition and armoured vehicles".
In the meantime, the Americans have pressured the Israelis to transfer AK-47s, ammunition and armoured cars to PA forces to continue their repression, but the Israelis intransigently refused despite their support for the repression.
Ever since the British occupation of Palestine began in December 1917, there has been no dearth of Palestinian collaborators with the foreign occupiers of their country.
This is hardly a Palestinian exception.
It has been the norm across the colonised world - extending, in the case of settler colonies, from New Zealand to Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Kenya, as well as to South Africa, Rhodesia, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique and Indonesia, and in the case of colonies and protectorates, India, Korea Vietnam, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, the Philippines, Malaysia and others.
Post-Hamas Gaza
Given the continuing intensification of Zionist settler colonialism and Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people, the US, the main sponsor of Israeli apartheid and extermination, has been reassessing who among the many Palestinian collaborators offering their services to Israel and the US would be best suited to carry on the mission of repressing Palestinian resistance.
This reassessment has caused panic in PA circles, who are doing their best to impress the incoming administration of Donald Trump and show that they are up to the task.
Trump, like President Joe Biden, remains on the fence, however, and is contemplating other plans, including sidelining the PA completely and in favour of the United Arab Emirates and Palestinians allied with it.There appears to be no final agreement yet among the different US elites and decision-makers as to which Palestinians would be optimal for the job and which Arab country or countries would be best to oversee their performance along with the US and Israel.
There are many available options, some of which have been proposed since the US-sponsored Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza got underway in 2023.
Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, the UAE, even Saudi Arabia and the US have been named in various plans as part of the team to govern or at least finance the governance of Gaza with or without the PA after the Israelis defeat Hamas - a military goal that became more and more illusory and far-fetched for the genocidal Israeli military.
This is all the more obvious in light of the Trump administration's coercion of Netanyahu to sign a ceasefire agreement with Israel.
The Israelis, for their part, proposed themselves as the sole post-Hamas governor and occupier of Gaza.
'Better oppressors'
During his first term in office, Trump made it clear in his "deal of the century" that there was no need for a Palestinian political class to function as a fig leaf for the Israeli occupation; all that is needed is a Palestinian security force and Palestinian businessmen.
After the US-Israeli genocide, Trump may decide it is time to fully execute his plan.
This is precisely why, in anticipation of his second term, the PA political class is in a race to prove its mettle before it is thrown out once and for all.
It is also why all of its rivals are queuing up to offer their services to the US and Israel and why many within the PA are vying to replace Abbas as better collaborators and enforcers of Israeli apartheid.
For the Palestinian business class, a main beneficiary of Oslo, its work with Israel and Israeli businesses in the middle of the ongoing genocide continued as usual, as do plans for it to profit from an illusory post-Hamas Gaza, the ceasefire agreement just signed notwithstanding.
Abbas himself attended the World Economic Forum meeting in Saudi Arabia in April 2024, also in the middle of the genocide, to ensure continued investments in the West Bank and a post-Hamas Gaza under the yoke of Israeli apartheid.
Some of the Arab countries allied with Israel, the US and the PA recently sent secret missives to the PA, cautioning that its repressive campaign could backfire and lead to the overthrow of the PA itself.
That possible fate, however, will have to wait for Trump to decide which Palestinians (if any), given the availability of an abundance of potential collaborators, will be chosen as the better oppressors of the Palestinians on behalf of the Palestinians' genocidal Israeli enemy.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.