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The Futility of a Possible Palestinian Authority Return to Gaza
(The Hill) Nitsana Darshan-Leitner - Western leaders, including President Biden, are calling for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to assume control of Gaza the "day after" Hamas is removed from power. Yet pinning Gaza's future on the PA is a recipe for surefire disaster. The PA was the byproduct of the 1993 Oslo Accords and the wishful thinking that terrorists could be rehabilitated into becoming responsible statesmen. But Yasser Arafat's PA never ended its war against Israel. Since 1994, the State Department's USAID has sent more than $5.5 billion to prop up the PA. The CIA and other federal agencies have spent untold billions more to prop up the PA's numerous security agencies, but that training and the funds were merely used to facilitate and finance the mechanisms of terror rather than to combat it. Mahmoud Abbas - Arafat's successor and the current PA president - is corrupt, ineffective and a promoter of virulent antisemitic conspiracies. A year before the Oct. 7 attacks, Human Rights Watch published its findings that torture by the PA in the West Bank may amount to crimes against humanity. How then can anyone expect the PA to govern a war-torn Gaza? For 30 years, the PA has failed its benefactors and betrayed the Palestinian people. Fantasizing that the PA can solve the gargantuan problems of post-Oct. 7 Gaza is a mistake of epic proportions that will only guarantee continued bloodshed and misery. The writer is an Israeli attorney, human rights activist, and the founder of Shurat HaDin - Israeli Law Center, which has represented hundreds of terror victims in legal actions against terror organizations.