Who would rule a Palestinian state?

If, or when, a Palestinian state comes into existence, who would rule it? And how would that decision get made?

Presumably, some existing body would get recognized as the interim government of this Palestinian state.  The Palestinian people, citizens of the new state, would ideally then choose the successors.  How would that happen? Western advocates of a Palestinian state often assume that would happen through elections, but that seems unlikely.  The assumption may depend on cultural myopia.  We do not have many examples of consequential elections in this part of the world.  Few rulers take the risk of actually losing based on honest popular voting.

This part of the world does have mechanisms for settling disputes who among competing factions should actually rule.  Those mechanisms have a certain logic to them.  The definition of a state, as Hobbes articulated, requires that the state maintain a monopoly on legitimate use of violence.  Where the apparent state government does not have a monopoly on use of violence, Lebanon for example, the populace suffers the consequences.  Traditionally, in this neighborhood, disputes among rival factions get decided by contests for who can demonstrate control of power, by importing weapons and by conscripting fighters most efficiently.  Members of other factions then promise enduring loyalty to the most powerful faction, loyalty that endures until or unless the other factions can import weapons and recruit fighters.

Who could win a series of contests to become leader of the Palestinian state?

An Islamic party, one of the competing heirs to the Muslim Brotherhood, could conceivably come out  winner.  Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other less-well-known Sunni groups fit this description. Not all of these act so radically; Ra’am (United Arab List), a successor of the Muslim Brotherhood, actually served in the previous Israeli government.  The Palestinian Authority, made up of partially secularized Sunni parties, heirs to Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, might have a chance.  The thoroughly secular Marxist groups, successors to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (so secular that it even once boasted a Christian leader, George Habash) seems not so relevant anymore.  Hezbollah might contest for leadership, but it suffers from its identity as a Shia faction in the largely Sunni Palestinian population.

At the conclusion of the contests for leadership – if indeed the contests have a foreseeable conclusion and do not just continue – one of the competing factions would, thanks to the ferocity of its fighters and its ability to import weapons from external sponsor states – rule the new Palestinian state.  Survivors from other factions would have to fall in line, at least temporarily.

This arrangement would, in theory, grant Sunni Muslim Palestinian Arabs loyal to the dominant faction civil rights which they do not fully enjoy under Israeli occupation.   They would enjoy those civil rights which the dominant faction acknowledges.  This might represent an improvement for them.

Other groups, even Palestinian Arabs, who do not fit into the dominant faction, might not benefit from this new state nearly as much.

Would the founding of such a state enhance the prospects for human rights, peace. and prosperity, as so many outside observers glibly assume?