Palestinian plan to stop annexation: Remind Israel what occupation means
The Palestinian Authority says it will cut the salaries of tens of thousands of its own clerks and police officers. It will slash vital funding to the impoverished Gaza Strip. And it will try any Israeli citizens or Arab residents of Jerusalem arrested on the West Bank in Palestinian courts instead of handing them over to Israel.
Desperate to deter Israel from annexing occupied territory, the Palestinians are taking a number of provocative steps to break off cooperation with Israel and force it to shoulder full responsibility, as a military occupier, for the lives of more than 2 million Palestinians on the West Bank.
While those measures may seem self-defeating, the Palestinian leadership sees them as powerful but reversible actions to get the Israelis and the international community to take them seriously and to back down — before, they say, it is too late.
“We are not nihilists, or fools, and we don’t want chaos,” said Hussein alSheikh, the Palestinian official in charge of relations with Israel and one of the two closest advisers to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. “We are pragmatic,” he added. “We don’t want things to reach a point of no return. Annexation means no return in the relationship with Israel.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is pressing for annexation in conjunction with the Trump administration’s peace plan, which at least ostensibly contemplates an autonomous Palestinian entity as part of what it calls a “realistic two-state solution”. Netanyahu has vowed to annex up to
30 per cent of the West Bank and could do so as early as next month.
But to the Palestinians, annexation flouts the ban on unilateral land grabs agreed to in the Oslo Accords in the
1990s and would steal much of the territory they have counted on for a state. For that reason, they say it would kill all hope of a two-state solution to the conflict.
In response to the annexation plan, Abbas renounced the Palestinians’ commitments under the Oslo agreements last month, including on security cooperation with Israel.
The strategy outlined by al-Sheikh, which builds on that declaration, aims to remind the Israelis of the burdens they would assume if the Palestinian Authority disbanded, and to demonstrate that they are willing to let the authority collapse if annexation comes to pass.
“Either they backtrack on annexation and things go back to how they were, or they follow through with annexation and they go back to being the occupying power in the whole West Bank,” al-Sheikh said.
If the possibility of statehood is stripped away, he said, the Palestinian Authority would be reduced to performing civil functions like running schools, hospitals and police stations, making it effectively an agent of the Israeli occupation.
“I will not accept that my role is a service provider,” al-Sheikh said. “I’m not a municipality or a charity.”
Israeli government and military officials declined to comment on the Palestinian strategy for this article.
The Palestinians have already begun to curb security co-operation and last week took one financial step and signalled another, either of which could lead to economic crisis and unrest.
On Thursday, al-Sheikh announced that the authority would no longer accept the hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly transfers from Israel that fund roughly half its budget: taxes that Israel collects on its behalf.
“Of course, it is our money,” he said. “But I was receiving it on the basis of agreements between me and them.”
Rejecting it would send the authority down a path to financial ruin, he said, forcing salary cuts, layoffs, agency mergers or even a government shutdown.
Jehad Harb, an analyst of Palestinian politics, said that forsaking the tax transfers could contribute to turmoil by harming people’s livelihoods while sapping the authority’s control over its employees.
“The people see the government as something that benefits them,” Harb said. “It provides salaries, education, health care and welfare. If it can no longer do any of those things, it will lose its legitimacy and the people will stop paying attention to it.”
Separately, al-Sheikh also said that the authority would slash the US$105 million it sends to the Gaza Strip each month in salaries and to cover utility fees and medical expenses. Any cuts would erode stability in Gaza, where the militant group Hamas is the de facto government.
Harb said that if history were any guide, such a move would create trouble for Israel.
“Halting the delivery of funds to Gaza will put pressure on Hamas, which likely will respond by confronting Israel,” he said.
Nowhere is the Palestinian strategy more carefully calibrated than in the area of security co-operation. Since last month, the authority’s 30,000 armed police and intelligence officers, who also protect Abbas from his political opponents, have stopped communicating with their Israeli and US counterparts. That rupture has prompted speculation about whether the result would be to unleash or permit a new wave of violence.
Al-Sheikh insisted the security services would continue to maintain law and order and fight terrorism, but acting on their own. “We will prevent violence and chaos,” he said. “We will not allow bloodshed. That is a strategic decision.”
But security coordination with Israel was a means to a political end, al-Sheikh said. “I want peace and two states,” he said. “But I’m not a collaborator with Israel.”