The rockets fired by the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas and Israeli airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip only went silent, however, after claiming 12 Israeli and around Palestinian lives. For the first time in a long time, Palestinians felt they actively displayed their resentment against Israeli excesses instead of yet again swallowing their pride and merely hoping for the world to take notice.
Palestinians saw the barrage of rockets fired at Israel as a befitting reply on behalf of a disaffected people, not a provocation. As the battle came to an end without either side conceding, thousands of Palestinians celebrated. Those inside occupied territories as well as those living as Israeli citizens inside Israel, experts said, are pondering the merits of again organizing an extended campaign of armed resistance to intensify their struggle for an independent Palestinian state and against alleged apartheid by Israel.
They said they would support an armed uprising if only to remind Israel that they were not giving up on their right to self-determination and will never accept the status quo that Israel wished to impose on them as fait accompli. The recent crisis has furthered his decline, to the detriment of Israel, while Hamas is expected to rise in popularity.
It is hard to say if either will materialize, but at the end of the recent crisis, Israel has achieved little. It succeeded in causing more casualties, but there is no reason to believe that it deterred Hamas from firing rockets again on Israeli cities. Abbas, seen as a moderate, was preferred both by Israel and the United States to replace Yasser Arafat, a controversial figure in the West but a leader who enjoyed undisputed legitimacy in the Palestinian community.
Ever since, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad based out of Gaza have sporadically fought mini-wars with Israel, the broader approach of the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority—which is considered the representative of the Palestinian people by the international community—has been to engage in talks with Israel and the West to resolve matters peacefully.
The talks have led nowhere, and if there was any hope the Palestinians were clinging to, it was quashed by former U. President Donald Trump, who relocated the U. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the disputed holy city, in Hamas fired rockets in response, and many Palestinians felt empowered, as if someone, when no one was speaking for them, was doing something. They said that endlessly negotiating or pleading for negotiations was not only pointless but also humiliating. Palestinian experts expect that Hamas will rise in the estimation of Palestinians in the wake of the recent conflict and Abbas will lose whatever little credibility he was left with.
Ali Jarbawi, a former minister in the government of the Palestinian Authority and a political analyst, said the hopelessness with the defunct peace process among people was palpable and is expected to increase support for Hamas. In the meantime, the Hamas terror group has seen its popularity skyrocket since its May battle with Israel. A recent survey by veteran Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found that nearly 80 percent of the Palestinian public wanted Abbas to resign.
In a testament to an increasingly censorious media climate, however, the poll did not reach the headlines of several major West Bank news sites.
But in late April, a month before Palestinians were set to head to the ballot box, Abbas indefinitely delayed the elections. The PA premier blamed Israel, saying they had not received Israeli consent to hold the vote in Jerusalem. Most observers said that Abbas likely delayed the vote to avoid an embarrassing defeat by his rivals in Hamas and within Fatah.
In his address to the UN General Assembly, Abbas stressed that the elections had only been postponed, not canceled. Fourteen PA officers were later charged for beating him to death. The demonstrations rarely saw more than several hundred people take to the streets of Ramallah. But they were brutally suppressed by PA officers, who arrested peaceful demonstrators and smashed the cameras of journalists seeking to document the scenes, drawing international criticism.
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