Last Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced he was again postponing legislative elections. He claimed the Israelis aren’t allowing voting in East Jerusalem and Hamas might repeat its victory of 17 years ago — i.e., he gave excuses to stay in power despite his unpopularity.
Abbas has long held himself out as the only thing standing in the way of a terror group like Hamas dominating the Palestinian political process. But that process has collapsed, exposing the failure of institutions from the PA itself to the Oslo Accords to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
With recent geopolitical tectonic shifts in the Middle East, these institutions no longer represent an inevitable status quo. There’s an opening for fresh thinking — and a new start for Palestinians who want to participate in burgeoning regional peace and prosperity.
For generations, the standard understanding of the Middle East peace process was that a durable solution to the Palestinian issue was a prerequisite to broader peace deals between Israel and its neighbors.
Meanwhile, the PA never truly engaged in good-faith peace negotiations with Israel, consigning the Palestinian people instead to perpetual victimhood based on the lie that if they just resisted long enough, Arab nations would eventually attack Israel again and establish a Palestinian state “between the river and the sea.”
