The Palestinian question no longer ends with the failure of the two-state solution, the death of Oslo, or even the rise of an extremist Israeli right that makes no secret of its ambitions in the West Bank. The more serious question now is the Palestinian vacuum itself: who remains within the official Palestinian sphere to protect the Palestinian idea from final collapse?
In September 2018, Jordan’s question about confederation sounded like a reply to a passing notion in an old political bazaar. At the time, King Abdullah II met the idea with decisive political irony, saying that Jordan hears about confederation every year and that his answer is: “Confederation with whom?”
The context was clear: remarks attributed to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas about an American proposal for a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation, and a firm Jordanian response that treated the matter as a red line, while upholding the two-state solution and a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Yet political time waits for no-one.
In 2018, the question concerned the form of the Jordanian-Palestinian relationship after the collapse of Oslo. Today, it goes to the very basis of Palestinian representation itself. It is no longer about confederation, federation, or constitutional engineering, but a Palestinian Authority that has passed its expiry date, a Palestine Liberation Organisation whose meaning has eroded, and a Fatah movement that seems unsure if it is a national liberation movement or an administrative framework for arranging the succession of an old man.
Dying in instalments
The situation needs calm but candid dissection. The two-state solution did not die in a single day, nor was it killed by one Israeli statement. It died in instalments, with every new settlement, bypass road, land confiscation, and Israeli government that saw in the weakness of the Palestinian Authority an opportunity to be politically brazen. It also died because the official Palestinian side that was supposed to carry it gradually turned into a machine of survival, rather than a project of statehood.
The Palestinian Authority came to Ramallah on the promise of a state but settled into the function of administration. It administers some of the population, not the land. It pays salaries when money is available, coordinates with Israel when security demands it and anger in the street erupts. It administers no real national project. It has neither the capacity for decision, nor the courage of review, nor the legitimacy of elections, nor even the imagination required to escape the impasse.
Talk of succession inside the Palestinian Authority is more revealing than reassuring. When Mahmoud Abbas appoints Hussein al-Sheikh as deputy chairman of the PLO, we are not witnessing a democratic transfer of leadership, but a closed-door arrangement, and when Yasser Mahmoud Abbas appears in Fatah’s Central Committee after a political life spent outside the direct meaning of partisan and factional struggle, the message goes beyond the name itself. It begins to look like a family inheritance within an authority that can no longer bequeath anything but its own crisis.
The problem is not Yasser Abbas Hussein al-Sheikh, nor even Majed Faraj or any other name in the narrow circle; it is that the great Palestinian question has been confined to a security man, a coordination man, a president’s son, and men of the entourage, while the Palestinian people remain outside the equation of choice, like an audience watching the funeral of their national project from afar.
No more backbone
The PLO, once the political home of Palestinians inside and outside the homeland, has become an old stamp of legitimacy used by the Authority when it needs cover. The Authority, which was supposed to be a transitional stage towards statehood, has turned provisionality into permanent residence. And Fatah, once the backbone of the Palestinian national movement, now prefers looking inward to recovering its people.
In contrast to the Palestinian vacuum, the Israeli right knows exactly what it wants: sovereignty over the West Bank. It wants an extremist government that feels no embarrassment in turning settlement into state policy and considers the Palestinian Authority a contractor for population management that can be weakened financially and politically whenever necessary, but kept alive just enough to serve Israeli security.
Israel wants the land without a Palestinian state; the Authority wants survival without a Palestinian project; the world wants crisis management without a Palestinian solution; and the Arabs want the question not to explode in their faces once again. The ordinary Palestinian, meanwhile, wants dignity, land, freedom, and leaders that do not take their cues from the 1990s.
