Years of Poor Palestinian Leadership Have Left Palestinians Adrift at the Worst Possible Time
World Politics Review quotes USCPR Executive Director Yousef Munayyer in a piece on the implications of Trump’s Jerusalem announcement for Palestinian politics.
The predicament is two-fold. First, the Palestinians no longer have a functioning political entity capable of achieving a consensus among all Palestinians on how to move forward with their political struggle. The traditional vehicle for such a task, the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, was gradually marginalized over the last quarter century and subsumed by the Palestinian Authority, an entity limited in scope to the daily administrative duties of the occupied territories under the terms of the Oslo Accords. Second, any change in the status quo risks the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and all that would entail, including the loss of the single biggest employer in the territories and basic services like police, education and health care. The West Bank and Gaza could deteriorate quickly into violence and anarchy.
“Palestinians are in a position of having to choose between chaos in their daily lives in the form of the collapse of their limited institutions of governance, or having a political path forward. So it is very debilitating,” says Yousef Munayyer, an analyst of Palestinian affairs and the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Read the article here.