Robert Inlakesh
The Palestine Chronicle / December 17, 2024
Although the PA was intended to be the precursor organization to a Palestinian government of the incoming State of Palestine, it has instead been turned into a corrupted proxy force that works for Israeli interests and the economic endeavours of its top officials.
The Palestinian Authority’s security forces are conducting an operation to murder and arrest resistance fighters in the Jenin refugee camp, using armoured vehicles, raiding homes, arresting combatants, and shooting people dead in the streets. This campaign has been launched amidst fears that Israel will soon annex the West Bank.
As Israel continues to approve further confiscation of West Bank lands, illegal settlement expansion, encourages Jewish settler terrorism and paves the way to annexing the territory formally, the Palestinian Authority (PA) launches an armed crackdown on Palestinian anti-occupation fighters.
During the first days of its crackdown on the Jenin camp – besieging it and raiding the area with armoured vehicles – PA security forces murdered Palestinian teenager Rebhi Shalabi and senior Jenin Brigades Commander Yazi Jaayseh.
Replicating how Israeli forces usually assault the embattled refugee camp, the PA justified its actions by claiming that its human rights violations and field executions were geared to “maintain public security and order, establish the rule of law, and prevent sedition and chaos in the Jenin camp”.
In reaction to the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF)’s actions, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) stated that “the targeting of resistance groups by the authorities in Jenin aligns entirely with the aggression and criminality of the (Israeli) occupation”. Hamas also released a public statement asserting that it “is a full-scale crime that requires public mobilization to break the siege and support the resistance fighters”.
According to the United Nations humanitarian office, the PASF seized part of a hospital in Jenin, using it as a base and opening fire on Palestinians from inside the medical facility. The PA’s forces also placed eight men and teenagers under their detention, even pulling one of them out of the hospital while he was still on a stretcher.
While its recent crackdown on resistance fighters belonging to the Jenin Brigades has witnessed an uptick in its oppressive measures against its own people, for the purpose of serving Israel’s security wishes, the PA is no newcomer to torture and field executions. Regular violence has erupted over the past few years throughout the northern West Bank, between anti-occupation resistance groups and the PA’s pro-Israeli security forces.
Fighting Israel’s war
In a recent article published by the Washington Post, the assault on the Jenin refugee camp was described as marking “an unusual step for the Palestinian Authority”, leading to many inquiries about why such raids would be carried out.
The truth is that there is nothing unusual about this crackdown and it was extremely predictable, the only thing that is unprecedented is its scale. The mission of the Palestinian Authority security forces is to manage two different major files in the West Bank, the top priority being Israeli security and the secondary issue is domestic policing in the major Palestinian cities.
According to the Oslo Accords, signed between 1993-5, the Palestinian Authority has security control in Area A of the occupied West Bank. However, this is not actually how things work on the ground, as Israeli forces frequently coordinate their invasions of Area A and work alongside the PASF to ensure that they withdraw from the area in order to allow Israel’s army to assault any area they choose.
While the PA’s security apparatus under the former Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, had played a role during the Second Intifada – 2000 to 2005 – in bolstering armed anti-occupation groups in the West Bank, it was forced to undergo a restructuring with the aid of the United States, UK, Israel and Jordan.
Under PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected in 2005 and has since presented any democratic national elections, the PASF have provided Security Coordination with Israel’s occupation army.
The Palestinian Authority has announced the suspension of Security Coordination countless times, but refused to actually follow up with its announcements. It notably tortured well-known Palestinian Authority critic, Nizar Banat, to death, in June of 2021. In September of that same year, the Jenin Brigades would officially announce themselves as a resistance group.
Despite limiting their activities to the Jenin area and not launching armed assaults against Israeli forces – beyond local checkpoints and occasional symbolic gunfire towards illegal settlements – the Jenin Brigades would develop a strategy of simply defending their local areas from Israeli raids.
In 2002, Israel murdered around 500 Palestinians and crushed the armed resistance groups in the northern West Bank, during their “Operation Defensive Shield”. In 2021, this was the first year since that time that such resistance groups would re-emerge and begin to confront Israeli occupation forces, triggering a revolutionary current that would end up spreading to areas like Tulkarem, Tubas and Nablus.
On March 31, 2022, following a string of lone-wolf attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers that emanated from the West Bank, the Israeli military launched “Operation Break The Wave”, which resulted in the murder of hundreds of Palestinians throughout the territory, including countless civilians.
Suddenly, Israeli occupation forces began using drones and helicopters to carry out airstrikes in the territory, planting indiscriminate boobytrap bombs and increasing their raids, arbitrary detentions and field executions.
In early January, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken presented a plan to the Palestinian Authority that was designed to build a specially designated PASF unit to launch a crackdown against the newly emerging resistance groups. US security coordinator Michael Fenzel was behind the plot, which was dubbed the “Fenzel Plan”.
Following up on this issue, PA officials, along with their Israeli, Jordanian, Egyptian, and American counterparts, met in Aqaba, Jordan, to discuss the developments in February of 2023. They met once again in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, in March of the same year.
While the PA denied the rumours leaked through the Arabic press, that it was implementing the US’s Fenzel Plan and was seeking to train a Palestinian force in Jordan that would be specifically designed to violently repress their own people, they did begin to crack down on resistance groups.
Following the initiation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, launched in October of 2023, the Palestinian Authority has arrested dozens of fighters, killed countless others, shot dead civilian protesters and has been accused of torturing its critics.
It has also deployed bomb squads to the streets of the northern West Bank, to diffuse homemade explosive devices planted in the ground that are intended to target Israeli forces when they launch offensive raids. PA forces remove the explosives and the Israeli military later enters those areas through routes that have been cleared by those Palestinian Authority forces.
While the first iterations of groups like the Jenin Brigades were actually led by former and even current members of the PASF, many of whom were part of the loosely Fatah Party-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Israel began to assassinate and arrest these resistance fighters.
The Israeli intentions behind their specific targeting of the PA-affiliated fighters were done with the purpose of severing the ties between the PASF and resistance groups, making it easier to sow discord between the two sides.
At this point in time, the PA is seeking to gain two things from its pro-Israeli crackdown against its own people: The first is to prove its position and workability to the incoming US Trump administration, which had previously viewed it as useless and floated the idea of disbanding it altogether. The second is to strengthen their position in any possible upcoming Saudi-Israeli normalization deal.
The Palestinian Authority is deeply unpopular in the West Bank, with the vast majority of the population polled repeatedly expressing their desire for PA President Abbas to step down and even favouring the current authority’s collapse.
This is largely down to its widespread image as being deeply corrupted, as well as its well-documented human rights abuses, refusal to hold any democratic national process and its collaboration with Israel that aids in its illegal takeover of more land.
Although the PA was intended to be the precursor organization to a Palestinian government of the incoming State of Palestine, it has instead been turned into a corrupted proxy force that works for Israeli interests and the economic endeavours of its top officials.
Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker
