People, institutions, and factions are not the same thing
OZJF’s quarrel is with Palestinian political institutions, not with Palestinians. That distinction matters because it is routinely collapsed in both directions — by activists who treat Hamas’s crimes as the voice of a whole people, and by critics who treat Palestinian civilian suffering as sufficient grounds to legitimize whoever happens to rule over them. Neither move survives serious scrutiny. A governance analysis has to look at what governments actually do: how they come to power, how they hold it, how they raise revenue, what they fund, and what they say about the people they are supposed to serve.
By that standard, the governance record in Gaza and the West Bank is genuinely poor, and that record is one of the main reasons international recognition of a Palestinian state under current leadership is not warranted.
Two territories, two factions
Since 2007, the Palestinian territories have been governed by two rival regimes. The Palestinian Authority, dominated by Fatah and nominally under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization, administers parts of the West Bank. Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in a violent 2007 takeover after winning the 2006 legislative elections, and has ruled it since. The Congressional Research Service’s report on the Palestinians (RL34074) and R47828 describe the bifurcated political reality in detail, including the repeated failure of reconciliation talks.
Hamas has been designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States since October 1997, as reflected on the State Department’s current FTO list. Its charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and its conduct on October 7, 2023 — the murder of roughly 1,200 people and the seizure of more than 240 hostages, documented by CRS R47828 — was not an aberration but a realization of the organization’s stated program. A governing entity that defines itself by war with its neighbor is not, under any reasonable standard, a state-building partner.
What the polling shows
It is tempting to treat Hamas as a fringe imposition on an unwilling population. The polling does not support that assumption. Quarterly surveys by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), led by Khalil Shikaki, are the most methodologically serious Palestinian polling operation and are cited across the U.S. and Israeli policy community. PCPSR’s polling has repeatedly shown, in the year-plus since October 7, that Hamas retains substantial — at times majority — support in the West Bank and significant support in Gaza, and that support for armed struggle exceeds support for negotiations. Support for President Mahmoud Abbas’s PA polls in the single digits to low teens.
This is not a brief against Palestinian civilians, the overwhelming majority of whom want safety, employment, functioning hospitals, and the chance to raise their children. It is a brief against the governing factions that have captured Palestinian national politics and have delivered none of those things.
The martyrs fund and the Taylor Force Act
The Palestinian Authority operates what it calls a Prisoners and Martyrs Fund — commonly known as “pay-for-slay” — which provides monthly stipends to Palestinians imprisoned in Israel for security offenses and to the families of those killed while committing such offenses. Payment levels scale with the length of sentence, meaning the most serious attacks produce the largest payments. The U.S. Congress responded with the Taylor Force Act, enacted as part of Pub.L. 115-141 (2018), which conditions certain forms of U.S. assistance to the PA on the cessation of those payments. The PA has not complied. Successive administrations have applied the statute accordingly.
A governing authority that incentivizes terrorism through its budget is not a credible partner for statehood. That is not an ideological conclusion; it is the considered judgment of a bipartisan U.S. Congress.
The missing elections
The PLO, through the Palestinian Authority, has not held national legislative elections since January 2006 — the elections that produced the Hamas victory and led to the split. Presidential elections have not occurred since 2005. President Mahmoud Abbas is, at the time of writing, nearly two decades into a four-year term. Scheduled elections in 2021 were canceled. CRS reporting and UN Secretary-General reports on the Middle East consistently describe the legitimacy deficit as a central obstacle to Palestinian state-building. An authority without electoral mandate cannot credibly claim to speak for its people, and it cannot credibly negotiate binding commitments on their behalf.
The Rhodesia analogy
It is worth being blunt about why international recognition alone does not confer legitimacy. Rhodesia declared independence in 1965 under a white-minority regime. A number of actors treated that declaration as a fait accompli. Most of the international community, correctly, did not. Recognition was withheld not out of hostility to the people living in Rhodesia, or to the idea that the territory should eventually be self-governing, but because the regime in question failed basic tests of legitimacy — consent of the governed, equal citizenship, the repudiation of political violence.
OZJF makes the same argument about premature recognition of Palestinian statehood under the current governance arrangement. A state led by a non-elected PLO in partnership, implicit or explicit, with a U.S.-designated terrorist organization in Gaza, and funded in part by a martyrs scheme that rewards the murder of civilians, cannot be the answer to the Palestinian national question. Recognition granted on those terms would entrench the current leadership, reward the worst actors, and make genuine Palestinian self-government harder, not easier.
What reform would look like
OZJF supports Palestinian self-government as part of an eventual two-state outcome. The preconditions are not mysterious. A reformed Palestinian governing authority would: hold credible national elections with independent monitoring; end all payments under the martyrs fund and replace them with a needs-based welfare system; disarm and dismantle terrorist organizations within its territory; recognize Israel and renounce violence unambiguously in its foundational documents; and accept international monitoring of education and finance. These are the same conditions articulated in successive U.S. administrations, in multiple CRS reports, and in the communiqués of the Arab states most engaged in mediation.
None of those conditions currently obtain. That is a problem Palestinian leadership must solve. Until it does, the argument for statehood remains incomplete — not because Palestinians do not deserve self-government, but because the institutions currently claiming to represent them do not yet have the legitimacy, the accountability, or the peaceful intent that statehood requires.