Reform the PA to be strong, not to be a democracy

It is time to finish the deal — and stop losing time barking up the wrong tree on it.

The West has in fact been barking up the wrong tree on how the Palestinian Authority must be reformed. What we need from the PA is to be stable and strong enough to govern. Not for it to be a good democracy, or any freer of corruption that the other regimes in the Arab world.

Democracy is not the precondition for peace and stability. Just the opposite in the Arab space around Israel: peace with Israel is the precondition for democracy to work even half-well there.

Without peace first, democracy in the neighboring countries would only further empower their anti-Israel militants. Democracy first would just be a further obstacle to the PA moderating its ideology more consistently. Without peace, the PA is caught between two stools – between the peacemaking stool Abbas sometimes sits on, on the one side, and the rejectionist stool of the militants, nationalist and Islamist alike, that he often goes over to and sits with on the other side. The stool that wins in an open vote is the extremist one.

The way to create conditions for changing that is: to further weaken the regional strength of rejectionism. There has been a lot of progress in that in dealing with the neighboring Arab regimes. The crux of it today is the need to end the Islamist regime in Iran. Fortunately, Iran is the one Islamic country in the region where something half-way to Western-style democracy might actually work. The Palestinian area is not such an area.

If Netanyahu wants to demand some reforms in the PA as a condition for peace, they should be reforms that will make the PA stronger and more effective in governing, not reforms aimed at satisfying American ideological rhetoric. He could add reforms that move it along more seriously in practice toward eliminating the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel ideology from its texts and speeches.

If Netanyahu wants to propose a further quid pro quo to Trump for ending the war in Gaza and moving toward a two-state solution, it should not be a quid in Gaza or the West Bank, but to stop preventing Israel from destroying the Islamist regime in Iran and seeing to a decent replacement for it.

But he should not demand any deal-breakers. The deal he has been offered is on balance a good one. He needs to see it through, here and now.