The New Palestinian Government Might Not Survive The West Bank Kidnapping Crisis
Israel - and to a less explicit degree, the U.S. State Department - blame the kidnappings on Hamas, a U.S.- and EU-designated terrorist group that is now part of Palestine's new unity government.
In the days after the abductions, Israel quickly arrested much of Hamas' leadership in the West Bank. Just as significantly, the Palestinian Authority's leaders began voicing their displeasure about Hamas possibly letting some of its members pull off such a provocative act right after the designated terrorist group was brought back into the political fold.
Anonymous Palestinian sources have claimed that the unity government could come to an end if Hamas is responsible for the kidnappings. A "senior PA source" told the right-wing Israel Hayom that Hamas "betrayed the trust it was given and that the organization exploited the reconciliation agreement to throw sand in our eyes."
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, a member of the secular nationalist Fatah party, hasn't been quite so explicit in his condemnation. But in a speech in Saudi Arabia, he discussed the kidnapping crisis in terms of Palestinian unity. "Whoever did this wanted to destroy us," Abbas said in a televised address earlier this week, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And the kidnappers might just succeed. The unity government was always a gamble for Abbas. Disputes with its Iranian patron over its support for the Assad regime and the fall of a Hamas-friendly Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo have weakened the Palestinian Islamist group, whose leadership is spread out over Gaza, the West Bank, Qatar, and Turkey. In the West Bank, Hamas had been completely marginalized, thanks to the PA's long-standing security cooperation with Israel. Hamas and Fatah have been feuding with one another for years, often violently.
The unity deal gave Hamas new respectability and more formalized power a time when it was arguably at its weakest.
The kidnappings present a crisis that the PA might not be able to handle. As a practical matter, an aging Abbas - who hasn't named a successor yet - might not want to tie his clique's fortunes to a reckless and uncontrollable terrorist group whose actions could jeopardize U.S. funding and drag the Israeli military into parts of the West Bank that are firmly under PA control.
The kidnappings also give Israel cover for dismantling Hamas' West Bank infrastructure and making a unity government unworkable. Nimrod Goren, chairman of the Jerusalem-based Mitvim Institute, explained to Business Insider on Wednesday that Israel now has an opening for weakening a Palestinian government that it never wanted in the first place.
"The government opposed Palestinian reconciliation from its onset, and sees it as a threat rather than as an opportunity to create a unified Palestinian leadership," Goren explained. "Israel is carrying out a large operation in the West Bank. It aims at finding the kidnapped, but is also weakening dramatically the Hamas apparatus in the West Bank."
The kidnappings haven't resulted in the kind of all-out confrontation that followed the abduction of Israeli soldiers along the Gazan and Lebanese borders in 2006. But they've already triggered "the most substantial" Israeli operation in the West Bank in over a decade. Ultimately, the kidnappings could bring down the first Palestinian unity government in seven years.
Even if the teens are found soon, the crisis the kidnappings have set off could only be in its opening phase.