By Robert Inlakesh
PA forces shot the children of Palestinian Samer Samara, wanted by Israeli occupation forces. (Photos: via Wikimedia, social media. Design:; Palestine Chronicle)
As the Israeli government officially advances its policy to register territory in the occupied West Bank as ‘State Land’, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) is busy executing children while pursuing those wanted by Israel. Far from resisting annexation, the PA’s role as a security subcontractor for the occupying army is aiding it.
On Sunday, the Israeli cabinet ordered the implementation of what is known as the land registration process, applying it to the occupied West Bank. This process, known historically as “settlement of land title,” was used to officially register Palestinian lands as belonging to the Israeli State or private settler ownership, prior to 1967.
This means a total annexation of the territory targeted and a declaration that it constitutes part of the Israeli State, which will first be implemented in what is known as Area C of the occupied West Bank. The target here is to ethnically cleanse some 350,000 Palestinians living in this area — Area C constitutes 60% of the West Bank — while legitimizing up to 450,000 Israeli illegal settlers and their settlements.
Under this process, the Israelis claim Palestinians will have the right to prove that they are the landowners. However, only 30% of the West Bank was registered prior to 1967, when the territory was ruled by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Not only that, most of the land registered was not in Area C, and the majority of the population will not be capable of meeting Israel’s impossible threshold for legal proof of ownership.
We also have a recent precedent for assessing the disaster that will befall hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, because in 2018, the Israeli authorities implemented a land registration drive in occupied East Jerusalem, where only 1% of the land was registered to Palestinians.
Israel will simply use this process — aided by settler lawfare organizations, many of them receiving donations from charities in the West that constantly throw case after case at Palestinians — in order to see them ethnically cleansed from their lands. What is worse is that the Israeli government’s legislative initiative has been preceded by years of escalating settler violence.
Not only are the illegal settler militias, backed by the Israeli army, driving out Palestinians from their lands, but Israel has even established special units that are either dominated by settler extremists or are entirely run by them, like the infamous ‘Desert Frontier’ unit.
According to Israel’s top rights group, B’Tselem, “since October 2023, military attacks and violence by settlers and the military in the West Bank have led to the displacement of Palestinians on a scale not seen since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967.” So far, the settlers and army have succeeded in fully or partially ethnically cleansing around 60 Palestinian communities and villages.
The Palestinian Authority as Security Subcontractor
On the same day that Israel approved its land registration push, the Palestinian Authority’s security forces launched an armed ambush on a car in the town of Tammun, located in the northern West Bank’s Tubas governorate.
The PA’s armed men, who were described as having covered their faces during the assault, were pursuing 44-year-old Samer Samara, who was previously arrested by the Israeli occupation forces and is accused of being a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) resistance fighter. The PA, for its part, claimed that Samara was wanted by the “authorities” after he escaped Israeli capture and has since evaded them.
Instead of approaching the issue rationally, the PA’s masked militants ambushed Samara’s vehicle, which caused him to try to flee. The PA security forces then opened fire indiscriminately on the vehicle, killing his 16-year-old son, Ali, immediately, before shooting his 4-year-old daughter, Rozana, in the head.
Rozana was rushed to the hospital, but later declared dead due to her head wound. At a hospital in Tubas, another of Samara’s children was also injured.
The main culprit, accused by the family, is the director of the Palestinian Authority Preventative Security Forces (PSF) in Tubas, a man named Maher Abu Al-Halawa. He was also PSF’s director of operations in the city of al-Khalil, overseeing the brutal murder of PA critic and rights activist Nizar Banat back in 2021.
Banat, who was critical of the PA’s undemocratic mandate and its doctrine of “security coordination” with Israel, was brutally dragged from his home, beaten in front of his family, and tortured to death.
The Palestinian Authority not only lacks any democratic legitimacy, but its support base also consists almost entirely of those on its direct payroll. In the past, the PA did at least threaten to end security coordination when Israel would carry out its heinous crimes and seize more territory illegally, but since October 7, 2023, it has stopped even playing that game.
It was a game, because even when the severing of security coordination was announced, it was never once fully implemented and remained symbolic. Instead of taking an adversarial stance against Israel’s unprecedented crimes against humanity, the PA’s leadership, under the supervision of its President Mahmoud Abbas, has blamed Hamas for the suffering of the Palestinians, even deploying his forces to violently put down protests against the genocide, which has resulted in the murder of civilians.
The sole purpose of the PA is for there to be a Palestinian militant force that takes the burden of the Israeli occupiers; it breaks the backs of its people who choose to resist, while facilitating a corrupt system that depends entirely on Israel handing over its own tax revenue to it. Without Israel permitting it to access its own finances, the whole deck of cards collapses.
A nepotistic system has been set up by the corrupt Palestinian bourgeoisie that guards a hierarchy not too dissimilar from other pro-Western Arab dictatorships. In order to keep the population under control and away from any form of meaningful collective action, the PA has worked hand in hand with Israel to effectively pacify them.
The only exceptions are the refugee camps and small pockets of the West Bank, where they are made outcasts of this corrupt system. In the rest of the territory, the Israelis implement a policy of territorial divide, ensuring that all the Palestinian enclaves are isolated from one another.
The System of Control and Social Engineering
Then come the Western nations and their soft power NGOs, which serve a number of purposes. One is the reshaping of Palestinian culture through promoting Western materialism and values. The other is to work inside Palestinian communities and divide the people between separate leading figures.
This model works differently depending on where the NGOs work. For example, if they are operating in a more conservative village or area, separate NGOs will work with different community leaders and organizations, creating competition between the two. This causes immediate friction and a battle for the favor of the Western NGOs. In order to keep up, these individuals are urged to preach pro-Western talking points, take grants, and be invited on trips abroad for doing so.
In the cities, they will inject liberal non-violent doctrines, a Western-oriented ideology that patronizes Palestinians and seeks to reward them for dissociating from Palestinian resistance groups and the Global South anti-imperialism. In other words, these people are disconnected from the masses; they speak in a language no one believes in and are seeking status.
There is then the system of debt, which is rarely focused on. In the West Bank, you can easily qualify for endless loans and credit cards, which you can stack to the roof with debt. Under this debt-driven system, a culture has developed in major cities like Ramallah, mirroring Amman, where designer clothes, flashy watches, and luxury cars are what fill the minds of the people.
Alternatively, people accumulate this debt, which they will never be able to pay back, in order to support their families. In addition to this, the PA is always fishing for new recruits, especially amongst villagers for its security forces, granting them a salary and enabling them to get married and own property, but not without a catch.
The West Bank was once a united territory, where general strikes, volunteer schools, and education were taken seriously, where revolutionary ideas were spread amongst its populace. But the Palestinian Authority’s system has been used to break the backs of the population.
If you comply, you can keep your lifestyle. Although you live under occupation and the conditions continue to deteriorate, at least you still have a house if you live in a place like Ramallah. But if you stand up, you want to form an independent protest movement, take up arms to protect yourselves or your neighbors, not only are you going to suffer, but your entire family will too.
Perhaps the PA will capture and torture you, or the Israelis will shoot you, arrest your children, or detonate your family home. No more loans, no more jobs, no more family. So, what do these people do? They put their heads down and try to simply exist, not focusing on the horrors that await them.
Nobody wants to talk about the system, which has been outlined above, because to do so is to admit that the Israelis have succeeded through their PA subcontractors. This is perhaps one of the most complex psychological social engineering projects on earth. The reason why is that if the people of the West Bank were to break free from it, the Israeli State would come under an existential threat, and Israel knows this.
Therefore, the Israelis, along with their Western and PA partners, have conspired to ensure that as long as they boil the West Bankers slowly, they will get away with doing exactly what they have done to the Gaza Strip. The West Bank is even more important a territory to Israel than Gaza, which to them is more of a nuisance and not the “biblical heartlands of Israel”.
Meanwhile, the system of control imposed on the West Bank has managed to allow for a situation where the PA can execute children in Tubas, and nobody will even protest about it beyond that governorate alone. A system whereby Jenin refugee camp and Nour al-Shams refugee camp are destroyed, as their valiant youth fight their occupiers to the death, yet in the cities of Jenin and Tulkarem, life continues as normal.
Nobody wants to say it, but the Palestinian Authority is currently worse than the “Peace Bands” created by the British to put down the Arab Revolt in 1936; it is worse than the South Lebanon Army. In fact, it has inflicted more harm than the five ISIS-linked gangs created by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
Why? Because, as Gaza suffered through a genocide, the representative for the State of Palestine at the UN was an Israeli-controlled security subcontractor that has managed to prevent an uprising in the West Bank. Such an uprising could have helped to save Gaza, but instead, the Abbas clique was too busy pandering to their masters and swimming in the cash pools they forged through their corruption. History will not be kind to them. Eventually, the West Bank’s population will say enough is enough. That day is when the whole deck of blood-soaked cards tumbles.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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