There is a peculiar fiction that Western governments, NGO grifters and U.S. State Department interns cling to with near-religious devotion—that the Palestinian Authority is hapless, corrupt but ultimately well-intentioned.
This is nonsense. The P.A. is functioning exactly as designed.
The P.A. has never wanted peace, coexistence or state-building. Its mission has always been to advance the conflict without bearing the costs of open warfare. It outsources violence, launders incitement and weaponizes ambiguity. Understanding this explains how its tactics make sense and weave together into a coherent governing doctrine.
Its strategy is permanent irresolution. It seeks to keep the conflict alive and itself lavished with international subsidies. Every tactic serves to wage war while posing as a victim, rather than a belligerent.
The P.A.’s parent organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was a terror virtuoso. The P.A.’s innovation has been to bureaucratize and outsource it. By maintaining formal security coordination with Israel while financing and glorifying attacks on Jews, the P.A. enjoys plausible deniability abroad and revolutionary credibility at home.
Its “pay-for-slay” program is a clear example; it is a budgeted system that rewards violence with salaries, pensions and honorifics. Murder a Jew, and your family receives a stipend. Murder several, and the stipend increases. Serve a longer sentence for terrorism, and the payout grows accordingly. It is an actuarial table for homicide.
Western governments periodically decide this is unacceptable and scold the P.A., which then makes all the correct reform noises until Western money resumes and everything returns to normal. We are cycling through one of these charades right now.
Beyond spreadsheets, the P.A. has turned to bulldozers. Across Judea and Samaria, illegal Palestinian construction deliberately targets Jewish archaeological sites. Ancient synagogues, Hasmonean fortresses, burial caves, ritual baths and remnants of the Second Temple period are paved over, vandalized or rebranded as exclusively “Palestinian” heritage.
The aim is to erase the stubborn fact that Judea and Samaria have always been Jewish land. If stones vanish, then so does memory. If memory vanishes, legitimacy follows. This is narrative annihilation, and much of the world is so historically illiterate that it will accept almost any lie if repeated with sufficient confidence and frequency.
As befits a criminal syndicate, the P.A. treats its contractual obligations the way a real estate agent treats fine print: selectively, cynically and only when it serves its interests.
The framework of the Oslo Accords is invoked whenever Israel is accused of violating its spirit. Yet when Oslo demands something of the P.A.—ending incitement, dismantling terror networks and preparing its population for compromise—it dissolves into thin air.
Security cooperation exists until it becomes inconvenient. Incitement bans are theoretical. Final-status talks are always deferred, invariably Israel’s fault. Why Israel continues to honor aspects of Oslo under these conditions remains a deep mystery.
The P.A. wants a state in the abstract, not in practice, because a real state would require ending the conflict rather than embalming it. Conflict, after all, is its most renewable resource.
If its leaders were even notionally serious about peace, then they would begin by improving the situation for the next generation. Instead, P.A.-approved textbooks glorify martyrdom, erase Israel from maps and frame Jews as alien interlopers. Violence against Jews is taught as a sacred act, and compromise as an act of betrayal. This is state policy.
Its governing style is one of weaponized stagnation. It won’t hold elections because it knows it will lose to Hamas. It doesn’t reform institutions because corruption keeps it in power. It can’t build an economy capable of sustaining independence since dependency is politically safer.
A prosperous, functioning Palestinian state would produce citizens with expectations. A permanently aggrieved population produces martyrs, slogans and international sympathy.
Every year, Western officials express frustration at the P.A.’s lack of progress, as though this inertia were accidental or merely underperformance. It is neither. The P.A. survives precisely because nothing improves. Failure is the governing model.
Unable to defeat Israel militarily, the P.A. has embraced lawfare instead. International courts, U.N. agencies and human-rights forums are flooded with complaints, resolutions and investigations designed not to resolve disputes but to delegitimize Israel.
Agreements that require bilateral negotiation are bypassed, and commitments to resolve disputes directly are ignored. Instead, the P.A. internationalizes every grievance, weaponizing institutions never designed to adjudicate a century-old territorial conflict. The West applauds this as “non-violent resistance.”
And still, the West treats the P.A. as though it were indispensable. Western leaders fear that criticizing or weakening it would strengthen Hamas, as though a choice between polite terrorism and impolite terrorism were meaningful. Infuriatingly, Western policymakers refuse to acknowledge that the P.A. wants Israel gone, and if it can’t have that, it wants any resolution postponed indefinitely.
Meanwhile, the P.A. maintains its most valuable asset: moral camouflage. By speaking of peace in English while preaching blood in Arabic, it placates both foreign donors and domestic hardliners.
Once these facts are acknowledged, the P.A.’s actions—the evasion, the incitement, the payments, the paralysis, the obsession with symbols over substance—look rational. It is not a failed peace partner; it is a highly successful conflict manager. Pretending that it’s anything else prolongs the suffering, Palestinian and Israeli alike.
Until the P.A. is judged not by the lies it tells at donor conferences but by what it does on the ground, the conflict will persist exactly as designed. Not because peace is impossible, but because the P.A. doesn’t want it.
It never has and likely never will.
