The Biden administration expects the Palestinian Authority to rule the Gaza Strip following the destruction of Hamas despite Israel’s skepticism about that prospect.
“We do believe that the Palestinian Authority is the representative of the Palestinian people,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday. “And a revitalized, reformed, revamped Palestinian Authority is the proper path forward for governance of a reunited West Bank and Gaza.”
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That prognosis would position the Palestinian Authority as the administrative heir to the promise of an independent Arab state offered by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947. And it portends a more pronounced divergence with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who put a spotlight this week on the “disagreement” about post-war scenarios.
“Yes, there is disagreement about 'the day after Hamas,' and I hope that we will reach agreement here as well,” Netanyahu said Tuesday. “Gaza will be neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan.”
Netanyahu's concluding remarks referred to Fatah, the faction behind Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s long tenure as president of the Palestinian Authority. Fatah and Hamas turned on each other two years after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a conflict that left Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah predominant in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Those two regions have long been regarded as the core of a prospective Palestinian state.
“We want to see the Palestinian Authority reuniting the West Bank and Gaza,” Miller said Monday.
Yet the Palestinian Authority holds little appeal in Jerusalem, where the group is regarded as “a failure” given its fraught relationship with Hamas. They also have drawn the ire of Congress, which passed a law in 2018 to restrict funding for the Palestinian Authority on account of its so-called martyr payments to the families of Palestinians who commit terrorist attacks in Israel.
“If the U.S. is saying that a ‘revitalized, revamped PA’ is what it's going to be, I think it's actually on the U.S. to explain what that looks like and how that happens,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Jonathan Schachter, a former Netanyahu adviser, told the Washington Examiner. “As it stands today, by U.S. law, through the Taylor Force Act, the U.S. can't even fund the PA for most things because they're paying for terrorism.”
President Joe Biden’s team shares those criticisms, “which is why we use terms like ‘revamped and revitalized,’” as a senior White House official acknowledged last week, but still has signaled that Netanyahu may have to change his tune.
“I just would ask anyone, ‘What is the alternative in the current moment?’” White House principal deputy national security adviser Jon Finer told an Aspen Security audience. “And right now, we think the PA is going to have to play an important role not just in the West Bank but ultimately in Gaza as well.”
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As U.S. and Israeli officials offered their divergent views, a top Hamas leader emerged to denounce the whole discussion.
“Any arrangement in Gaza or in the Palestinian cause without Hamas or the resistance factions is a delusion,” Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday.