Through a series of new technical measures, the government simplifies the acquisition of land by Israeli Jews and expands the administration\u2019s scope for intervention in areas under Palestinian control. But where do we stand since the Oslo Accords, while Norwegian diplomacy\u2014self-satisfied for so long, and notably represented by diplomats such as Terje R\u00f8d-Larsen and Mona Juul\u2014has been shaken by recent revelations, and getting dragged into the Jefrrey Epstein quagmire with both figures reportedly mentioned in investigations, Juul having been compelled to resign from her post as ambassador in Amman? These developments have contributed to a crisis of credibility for Norwegian diplomacy, which had long been celebrated as a neutral facilitator in Middle East peace efforts. <\/p>\n
Let us briefly summarize the facts about OPTs current situation!<\/p>\n
The Palestinian Authority was created in 1994, following the Oslo Accords signed in September 1993 between the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat, and the Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin. It was conceived as a provisional body, tasked with administering certain parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending a final settlement of the conflict and the creation of a Palestinian state. Initially, its lifespan was meant to be limited to a few years. It still exists more than I three decades later.<\/p>\n
Yasser Arafat became President of the Palestinian Authority after his election in January 1996, during the first Palestinian presidential election. From that time, the Authority exercised its functions under Israeli occupation, without control over borders, airspace, water resources, or external security. The Oslo Accords fragmented the West Bank into zones with different legal statuses, severely limiting the Authority\u2019s real sovereignty. This institutional architecture established incomplete governance, dependent on Israel and international aid, where administration progressed faster than democracy.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
POST ARAFAT TIME<\/p>\n
After Yasser Arafat\u2019s death in November 2004, Mahmoud Abbas was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005. His presidential mandate was intended to last four years. One year later, in January 2006, the last Palestinian legislative elections to date were held. The ballot was won by the Hamas movement, which obtained the majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, defeating Fatah, the dominant party since the Authority\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, in 2005, Israel carried out the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, evacuating the Jewish settlers of Gush Katif and dismantling the settlements there. This operation, which removed several thousand settlers and dismantled their communities, marked a major turning point in Gaza\u2019s political and territorial landscape, and contributed to the deepening of internal Palestinian divisions.<\/p>\n
This victory triggered a major political crisis. Israel, the United States, and the European Union refused to recognize a Hamas-dominated government. Internal Palestinian tensions degenerated into armed clashes. In June 2007, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, while Fatah retained power in the West Bank. Since that date, the Palestinian territory has been politically divided, with two rival authorities, two administrative systems, and no unified political body.<\/p>\n
This rupture is not merely due to an ideological or electoral disagreement. It is part of a violent power struggle between two movements with profoundly different histories, structures, and social bases. Fatah, a historic pillar of the Palestine Liberation Organization, stems from the generation of nationalist guerrillas of the 1960s and 1970s. It gradually transformed into an institutional apparatus, embedded in the Palestinian Authority, marked by networks of loyalty, clan logics, and a strong personalization of power. Hamas, born during the First Intifada, developed in opposition to this elite, combining Islamist ideology, social action, and armed resistance, with a popular base rooted notably in refugee camps and certain conservative familial networks. After the 2006 elections, coexistence became impossible. Fatah-loyal security forces and Hamas armed brigades confronted each other directly, particularly in the Gaza Strip. Kidnappings, summary executions, and street fighting occurred, causing Palestinian blood to be shed by Palestinian hands. This violence was also fueled by old tribal rivalries, local family alliances, and cycles of vengeance, especially in areas where central authority was weak. Hamas\u2019s takeover of Gaza in 2007 was the brutal culmination of this internal war, sealing a political, territorial, and social fracture from which the Palestinian political system has never recovered.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
HAMAS VS FATAH<\/p>\n
Security services played a central role in this confrontation. Under the Palestinian Authority, these forces, partly inherited from the Arafat era, are multiple, fragmented, and largely politicized. They are dominated by cadres close to Fatah and placed under the direct authority of the presidency. Trained, financed, and supported in part by Western and regional actors, they are primarily designed to maintain internal order and ensure security coordination with Israel. After Hamas\u2019s electoral victory, these services became an instrument of political struggle, seeking to contain, weaken, and then neutralize the Islamist movement. In response, Hamas developed its own armed and security forces, outside any unified chain of command. The clashes of 2007 were thus also a war between rival security apparatuses, each seeking to impose itself as the sole legitimate authority by force.<\/p>\n
This internal struggle is aggravated by the contrasting regional support enjoyed by the two camps. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are politically, financially, and security-wise supported by Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Western powers, which view Mahmoud Abbas as a moderate partner compatible with the diplomatic process. Hamas, for its part, receives variable but decisive support from Iran, Qatar and, at times, Syria and Turkey. These external supports reinforce Palestinian internal polarization, transform the political rivalry into a regional issue, and reduce the scope for reconciliation, each camp being inserted into antagonistic geopolitical alliances.<\/p>\n
In this regional context, the majority of Arab states\u2014and Turkey\u2014have aligned themselves, in varying degrees, with the positions promoted by Saudi Arabia and Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood movement, with Iran remaining the principal regional power that supports Hamas and opposes this axis. The consequence has been a deepening of Palestinian fragmentation, as external patrons fund and legitimize rival factions, making reconciliation increasingly difficult and turning the Palestinian cause into a proxy arena for broader Middle Eastern rivalries. In particular, Qatar and Turkey are regularly accused by European states of supporting Brotherhood-linked political movements, which exacerbates tensions with the backers of the Palestinian Authority and complicates diplomatic efforts to reunify the Palestinian political landscape.<\/p>\n
The divergences between Fatah and Hamas are embedded from the start in their founding documents. Fatah is situated within the ideological framework of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose Palestinian National Charter was adopted in 1964 and amended in 1968. This charter defines Palestine as a territory extending from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and affirms the resort to armed struggle as a means of national liberation. It adopts a radically hostile vision of Zionism, which it regards as a colonial project, but it does not develop a religious doctrine or a structured theological antisemitic discourse. Over time, and notably from the 1990s onwards, Fatah officially accepted the principle of a negotiated solution and recognized the State of Israel, even if this recognition remains contested by part of its base and weakened by the persistence of maximalist rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Hamas, by contrast, adopted in 1988 a founding charter explicitly Islamist, in which the conflict with Israel is presented as a religious struggle. This text contains openly antisemitic passages, drawing on stereotypes and conspiratorial references, and denies any legitimacy to Israel\u2019s existence. Palestine is defined as an inalienable Islamic land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, excluding any territorial compromise. The slogan \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d fits within this vision, asserting exclusive Palestinian sovereignty over the entire space between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, which implies the disappearance of the State of Israel. In 2017, Hamas published a new political document, distinct from its original charter, in which it softens certain formulations, claims to distinguish Jews from Zionism, and accepts the idea of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, without, however, recognizing Israel or explicitly renouncing armed struggle. This document does not formally annul the 1988 charter, which continues to serve as an ideological reference for part of the movement.<\/p>\n
It is because of this ideology, its refusal to recognize Israel, and its claimed resort to violence against civilians that Hamas has been classified as a terrorist organization by Israel since the 1990s, by the United States from 1997, by the European Union in 2001, as well as by several other Western states. Fatah, as a movement, is not classified as a terrorist organization by the European Union or the United States, even if some of its armed factions, such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs\u2019 Brigades in the early 2000s, were occasionally designated as such by certain countries. This legal and political distinction contributes to the international recognition of the Palestinian Authority, while sustaining a lasting fracture with Hamas, perceived as a political and military actor but fundamentally illegitimate by a large part of the international community.<\/p>\n
The Palestinian Legislative Council gradually ceased to function. Mahmoud Abbas\u2019s presidential mandate expired in January 2009, but no new presidential election was organized. From that date, he governed by decree, in the absence of an operational parliament. General elections, regularly announced and then postponed, were finally cancelled in April 2021, officially due to Israel\u2019s refusal to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to vote. This decision marks a symbolic breaking point between the Palestinian Authority and a large part of the population, which sees it as a lasting confiscation of power.<\/p>\n
Over the years, the Palestinian Authority has increasingly been perceived as a stagnant structure, undermined by corruption, clientelism and the repression of political opposition. Its role has largely been reduced to administrative management and security coordination with Israel, while its popular legitimacy has collapsed. It has been unable either to reform itself from within or to impose a renewed democratic framework.<\/p>\n
It is in this context of institutional weakening that Israeli policy in the West Bank has experienced a notable acceleration. Under successive governments of Benjamin Netanyahu, notably since his return to power in December 2022, Israel has adopted a series of measures aimed at strengthening its civil and administrative control over the occupied territory.<\/p>\n
One of the central axes of this strategy concerns land acquisition in the West Bank. Until recently, direct land purchases by Israeli citizens were limited by a set of rules inherited from previous legal periods, notably the Jordanian administration, and by Israeli military procedures that strictly regulated land transactions in the occupied territories. The new decisions taken by the Israeli government aim to lift or circumvent these restrictions by reclassifying these rules as obsolete or discriminatory. Concretely, this means that Israeli citizens can now more easily acquire parcels of land in the West Bank, including through companies, associations, or indirect legal mechanisms, without passing through the administrative filters that previously limited such operations. At the same time, the opening and centralization of land registries allow the Israeli administration to identify, contest, or reclassify Palestinian property titles, often old, incomplete, or not recognized by the Israeli legal system. This evolution significantly increases the risk of dispossession, because any land whose ownership is not judged perfectly documented may be declared public domain or transferred under Israeli control, before being allocated to settlements or Israeli individuals. It is therefore not merely a matter of voluntary purchases, but a structural process that transforms land law into a political instrument, facilitating colonial expansion without resorting to a massive officially proclaimed expropriation.<\/p>\n
These decisions, presented as technical or administrative, produce major political effects. They consolidate colonization, normalize Israeli presence, and further reduce the Palestinian Authority\u2019s ability to exercise effective governance. It is not a proclaimed annexation, but a gradual process that increasingly integrates the West Bank into the Israeli system, to the detriment of any Palestinian statehood prospect.<\/p>\n
The failure of Palestinian democratization and the deepening of Israeli colonization thus feed on each other for nearly twenty years. An Authority without elections since 2006, led by a president in office since 2005 without a new popular mandate, proves unable to confront a structured and determined Israeli policy. Between internal political paralysis and the continuous erosion of territory, the Oslo promise born in 1993 now appears largely emptied of its substance. And Epstein files \u201csaga\u201d Scandinavian involvement will not help!\u00a0<\/p>\n
*Author is a former member of the UN senior staff<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Through a series of new technical measures, the government simplifies the acquisition of land by Israeli Jews and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-289661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}