A senior European Union official today discussed the possibility of the EU causing the collapse of the Palestinian Authority if the current round of peace talks fail, with an eye toward pressing Israel to make some serious moves toward Palestinian statehood.
The official, who was not named, noted that the funding was supposed to be to prepare the PA for the establishment of statehood, and said there was no point to keeping the spigot flowing if the Palestinians weren’t going to get a state anyhow.
The end of EU bankrolling of the PA would virtually assure its collapse, and would force Israel to take offer practical responsibility for the occupied West Bank, instead of just letting the EU subsidized PA muddle through.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas raised a similar prospect in 2010, suggesting that the PA be dissolved if there was no progress toward statehood. The idea then is that without the PA, Israel has no one to hold phony negotiations with, and no pretense that they’re going to allow statehood at some far-flung future date, meaning they’d struggle to defend their treatment of the Palestinains as “non-citizens” going forward.
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