International Crisis Group

The Coming West Bank Instability | The Daily Beast

By Ali Gharib

Is the West Bank about to erupt into a dangerous unrest? According to the International Crisis Group, the answer is complicated. Ferment isn’t imminent, but the conditions for it are ripe, said the group in a new report out this week.

Protests began to rise last fall over economic conditions in the occupied territory, and spiked again this year as Palestinians took to the streets over the treatment of hunger-striking Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. While many predicted a third intifada—a mass uprising—the protests eventually subsided. If more, society-wide protests emerge, they could not only raise tensions with the occupying Israeli forces, but also bring down the Palestinian Authority, the territory’s limited self-government. Instability, in other words, remains a very real fear.

ICG identified the primary cause of the instability—as we have seen throughout the Arab Uprisings of the past two years—as the lack of the PA’s legitimacy. “[T]he latest demonstrations are a symptom of a much longer-term trend of Palestinian frustration with the absence of a political horizon—with the seeming interminability of an occupation soon to enter its 46th year and the sense that they have been cheated by the Oslo framework that many initially believed would bring about statehood,” said the report. That’s why the efforts to address the specific causes of protests—propping up the PA with just enough cash to get through its fiscal crisis or dealing with prisoner issues—act as mere band-aids. The threat of a future mass uprising won’t disappear until the larger issues plaguing the Palestinians do.

FULL ARTICLE (The Daily Beast)

Photo: Flickr/Olivier Pacteau

Buying Time? Money, Guns and Politics in the West Bank

Jerusalem/Ramallah/Brussels  |   29 May 2013

The West Bank is experiencing rising instability and insecurity that palliative measures can help contain but can neither reverse nor end in the absence of a broad political settlement.   

In its latest report, Buying Time? Money, Guns and Politics in the West Bank, the International Crisis Group examines political, economic and security conditions in the West Bank. The last year was the most tumultuous for the Palestinian Authority (PA) since Hamas seized Gaza in 2007. For now, the mood has quieted somewhat, but if relevant parties do not get beyond managing conflict triggers to addressing root issues, today’s superficial calm could well be fleeting.

The report’s major findings and recommendations are:

• Several factors argue against a looming escalation: the Hamas-Fatah split has rendered popular mobilisation dangerous to both the West Bank and Gaza regimes; Palestinians remain tired from the consequences of the second intifada; and, importantly, foreign assistance has helped reshape the West Bank’s political economy while giving most of its residents an interest in preserving the system.
• At the same time, many of the conditions for an uprising are in place: political discontent, the leadership’s loss of legitimacy, hopelessness, economic fragility, increased violence and an overwhelming sense that security cooperation serves an Israeli – not Palestinian – interest.
• The “collapse” of the PA is less likely to be a discrete event, and its “dissolution” less a matter of conscious intent, than a process: the gradual hollowing out of institutions that were never particularly strong.
• Steps such as regularising tax revenue transfers to the PA that Israel is obligated to make, as well as greater efforts by Israel to rein in settler attacks against Palestinians and to curtail incursions by its security forces into ostensibly Palestinian-controlled areas, could help stabilise the West Bank for now. But at some point Palestinians may well decide their long-run well-being would be better served by instability, and only by rocking the boat might they come closer to their desired destination. 

“There is an understandable temptation to renew negotiations as a way to address – or at least distract attention from – the deep causes of rising West Bank instability”, says Nathan Thrall, Middle East Senior Analyst. “But a breakdown in talks would risk accelerating the very dynamics that the negotiations are meant to forestall”.

“If aid money has bought time, time has not changed the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, cannot provide insurance against a deteriorating political-security situation and cannot purchase the kind of legitimacy the Palestinian leadership will need to control and guide its people”, says Robert Blecher, Middle East and North Africa Deputy Program Director. “The time that money buys comes at a price, since the progressive atrophy of the Palestinian political system inescapably will make any future peace process both less legitimate and more fragile”.

FULL REPORT