Palestinian Authority fears being sidelined in Gaza by Trump and UAE
Looming over the Palestinian Authority’s battle with anti-occupation armed groups in Jenin are fears that US President-elect Donald Trump is amenable to sidelining the PA’s current leaders in a future post-war Gaza Strip in favour of the United Arab Emirates and its Palestinian allies.
Those concerns led the PA to launch a bigger raid on the city of Jenin as opposed to a smaller operation in the Tulkarm refugee camp that American officials originally floated, one Egyptian official, one former senior Israeli official, and one former senior US official told Middle East Eye this week.
The PA launched its operation at the beginning of December. Since then, fighting has killed at least 16 Palestinians, including six members of the PA’s security forces and at least eight Palestinian residents of the city, including a father and son.
The PA’s concerns about being sidelined in the post-war Gaza Strip come amid signs that Hamas and Israel may be inching closer to a ceasefire in the decimated enclave.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said earlier this week, “we’re very close” to a deal. The US has voiced similar optimism in the past, only for the talks to collapse.
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The PA has been at the centre of the Biden administration’s plan for post-war governance of the Gaza Strip since the war erupted after the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel, even as Israel has rejected a role for the PA.
But Trump’s return to the White House in less than two weeks has injected new uncertainty into the PA’s future.
'Infuriated by the Emiratis'
During his first term in office, Trump downgraded diplomatic relations with the PA by shutting down the US consulate to the Palestinians in Jerusalem and also closing down the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's office in Washington DC. The PLO is a coalition of Palestinian groups led by the PA.
The Biden administration did not reverse either of these Trump-era moves.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, loathed the PA and attempted to stifle any US cooperation with the authority. Those tensions culminated in Trump cutting aid to the PA.
The PA requested that the US suspend all assistance after Trump signed the Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act, which raised Palestinians' concerns they could face lawsuits in the US. Some American funding, however, continued to trickle through to the security forces.
Middle East Eye reported on Monday that the PA recently requested hundreds of millions of dollars in additional security assistance from the US amid the Jenin operation.
The former senior US official said the PA is likely to face an uphill challenge obtaining any such funds from an incoming Trump administration.
Regional officials say the PA’s rulers face an even rockier road with a second Trump administration because the war in Gaza has provided an opening for their top Arab Gulf critic, the UAE, to push for a Palestinian leadership change.
“Abu Mazen has been infuriated by the Emirati proposals. The operation in Jenin is the PA’s answer,” the Egyptian official familiar with the matter told MEE, referring to the 89-year-old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas by his Arabic monicker.
'Suicide mission'
The UAE has publicly offered to send peacekeepers to the Gaza Strip to replace Israeli troops when the war ends. It has conditioned the offer on a reformed authority that would not exercise security control in the decimated enclave at the beginning of the mission.
The full-text of the Emirati proposal was reported by Al-Araby Al Jadeed.
In addition to that plan, the Egyptian official told MEE the PA had seen several proposals to manage Gaza through private security contractors. Israel has already considered several proposals for private western security firms to provide security for aid convoys in the Gaza Strip.
“The PA is on a suicide mission in Jenin. It has utterly humiliated and discredited itself,” Tahani Mustafa, the International Crisis Group's senior Palestine analyst, told Middle East Eye.
“[But] the PA is worried that if there is a new administration in Gaza and it’s not them, all their funding will be channelled away. Their ultimate fear is that the centre of political gravity will shift from the West Bank to Gaza and leave them high and dry.”
One former senior Israeli military official told MEE that despite Israeli media reports praising the operation in Jenin, the security establishment saw it as a general failure.
“My assessment is that they will fall to the Palestinian street,” the former official said.
Fight for relevance
The PA was borne out of the Oslo peace talks in the early 1990s. Its leadership comes from the PLO, which waged a decades-long violent struggle against Israel. In return for limited self-governance in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the PLO recognised Israel’s right to exist and renounced armed resistance.
The PA is largely seen as ineffective, corrupt, and an Israeli collaborator among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The PA is dominated by the secular Palestinian party, Fatah. In 2007, fighting broke out between Fatah and Islamist Hamas after the latter swept to power in Palestinian legislative elections the year before. In the end, Hamas consolidated its hold over Gaza and Fatah in the occupied West Bank. Efforts to reconcile the two have failed.
But the Egyptian official and a Fatah official told MEE that the PA’s motivation to prove it is a strong security partner to the upcoming Trump administration is driven by an even more byzantine level of rivalry and intrigue.
Within the Palestinian secular elite, there is a rift between Abbas, who has governed in the West Bank without elections since 2006, and Fatah’s former strongman in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan.
The latter resides in the UAE and is an emissary for the UAE's ruling al-Nahyan family. Dahlan was expelled from Fatah but retains some support in Gaza and the occupied West Bank through the Fatah-Democratic Reform Bloc.
MEE reported in July that the United States, Israel and the United Arab Emirates were working on a plan to create a national committee of Palestinian leaders to run Gaza, which would eventually lead Dahlan to succeed Abbas.
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