The Palestinian Authority: The Next Arab Failed State?

Kobi Michael, Yoel Guzansky

Politics, Middle East

Despite unprecedented international support, the PA is unraveling.

After twenty years of support, with combined agencies providing the highest per capita funding ever given to a state or population, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has failed to construct the infrastructure required to establish a functional, sustainable quasi-state. Beyond the longstanding exogenous concerns of Hamas seizing the Gaza Strip in 2007, and Israel’s actions in Area C and in the policy arena (which certainly bear some burden of responsibility), we explore the future potential of this ongoing failure, following Michael Eisenstadt’s observation about the “four Fs”—fawda (chaos), fitna (extreme, violent internal strife), falatan (lawlessness) and fassad (corruption). It is vital to consider the role of a failing state in the context of a region struck by upheaval and harmed by a rise in the number of failing states, especially considering the risk of weak states generating yet more no-man’s-land in the regional and global struggles between Shia and Sunni Islam, or perhaps even between moderate Sunnis and Salafi-jihadist Sunnis.

After its 1994 formation in the Oslo Accords as a semi-state entity, the PA has seen two decades of turbulence. In 2016, 95 percent of West Bank residents are living under PA control in Areas A, B and B+; one hundred thousand Palestinians live under Israeli control in Area C. From the Palestinian perspective, after its foundation the PA certainly represented the foundation of a future Palestinian state. Hamas’s 2007 seizure of the Gaza Strip resulted in a divide with the West Bank, precipitating a severe political crisis. The shifting reality demonstrates the emergence of not only two separate political, geographical and cultural entities, but of rival elements, given Hamas’s opposition to a PA presence in Gaza and its efforts to undermine the PA in the West Bank. Despite this, it is clear that by the time of the Hamas takeover, the PA had failed in some of the most basic state functions.