Since 7 October 2023, “reforming the Palestinian Authority” has become the international community’s favourite incantation.
Every major diplomatic statement — from Washington, Brussels, and Arab capitals — now insists that a “revitalised,” “restructured,” or “reformed” PA is the indispensable answer to Gaza’s “Day After.”
The premise is simple and comforting: Hamas must go, Israel will not rule Gaza, and therefore a reformed PA must step in.
But this consensus rests on a political fiction.
The reform agenda being imposed on the Palestinian Authority is not designed to solve the crisis of Palestinian governance. It is designed to help the international community avoid confronting the real sources of Palestinian political collapse — the Israeli occupation, fragmentation, and the systematic hollowing out of Palestinian self-determination.
Europe, in particular, has become a central architect and enforcer of this illusion.
The irony is striking. Long before diplomats rediscovered the language of reform, Palestinians themselves had been demanding deep political change.
For years, Palestinian civil society, intellectuals, and public opinion surveys have converged on the same diagnosis: the PA is unaccountable, authoritarian, and disconnected from its people.
Yet these domestic demands were largely ignored by international actors — until Gaza made inaction untenable.
The reform banner was raised not because Palestinian aspirations suddenly mattered, but because the international community needed a non-Hamas alternative it could sell as legitimate.
Having invested billions of dollars in the PA over three decades, Western governments — especially European ones — are unwilling to admit that their state-building project has failed.
At the same time, they remain unwilling to confront an Israeli government openly committed to preventing the PA’s return to Gaza and thwarting the creation of a Palestinian state.
A “reformed PA” thus emerged as a convenient diplomatic placeholder: vague enough to promise change, flexible enough to avoid real political costs.
Having invested billions of dollars in the PA over three decades, Western governments — especially European ones — are unwilling to admit that their state-building project has failed
The United States has led with a security-first approach, defining reform largely as the PA’s willingness to act as a more effective counter-terrorism partner and subcontractor for the Israeli occupation.
Europe has followed with a softer vocabulary but a similar logic. Brussels emphasises governance, technocracy, and transparency — yet these demands are embedded in a framework that prioritises stability over legitimacy and control over representation.
European leaders praise curriculum revisions, fiscal compliance, and the dismantling of payment system to families of prisoners and martyrs, while treating elections, national unity, and political inclusion as secondary or even dangerous.
This is where Europe’s role becomes especially troubling.
Unlike Washington, Europe claims normative leadership — championing democracy, human rights, and international law. Yet in practice, the European reform agenda has reduced democracy to an administrative exercise and sovereignty to conditional compliance.
When European officials applaud reforms undertaken without elections, without parliamentary oversight, and without public consent, they are not strengthening Palestinian institutions; they are entrenching their emptiness.
When French president Emmanuel Macron and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas announce a joint committee to draft a future Palestinian constitution, they are not just engaged in theatrical gestures, they are also demonstrating the extent to which a weakened PA has become willing to go to ensure its own survival.
European governments insist that the PA must become more legitimate, while endorsing measures that further detach it from its people. They call for democratic renewal, while quietly supporting the exclusion of major political factions from future elections. They demand accountability, while empowering a presidency that has dismantled every mechanism capable of enforcing it.
Reform, in this framework, is not about restoring Palestinian political agency — it is about managing Palestinian behaviour.
Palestinian voices have been remarkably clear about this disconnect. Across ideological and institutional lines, there is near-consensus on what genuine reform requires: reunification of the Palestinian political system, restoration of the rule of law, independence of the judiciary, and — above all — free and inclusive elections.
Elections are not a technical detail; they are the foundation upon which all other reforms depend. Without them, anti-corruption measures are cosmetic, technocratic cabinets are unaccountable, and constitutional committees are performative.
The result is a reform agenda that asks Palestinians to change everything except the conditions that deny their political rights. Reform has been detached from sovereignty, democracy from representation, and governance from national liberation.
This is why the entire project feels fictional.
The PA being asked to reform has been financially strangled by Israel’s seizure of its tax revenues and territorially squeezed by expanding settlements. The Palestinian Legislative Council has been defunct for nearly 20 years. The judiciary has been subordinated to executive decree. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) exists largely as a symbolic shell.
Demanding reform from such an entity is like demanding renovation from a building whose foundations have been deliberately removed.
7 October and its aftermath have only deepened this vacuum. Hamas’s actions destroyed its own governing capacity, while the PA’s paralysis exposed its irrelevance. Into this void stepped international and regional actors eager to design Palestine’s political future from the outside.
Europe has played a key role — not by imposing colonial rule, but by reviving a familiar logic: that Palestinians must first be reshaped into acceptable political subjects before they can be granted political rights.
Ultimately, the fixation on PA reform serves as a diversion. It allows policymakers to speak the language of progress while avoiding the central obstacle to peace: Israeli policies aimed at entrenching control, fragmenting Palestinian territory, and foreclosing statehood.
Linking Gaza’s future — or any political horizon — to the reform of a hollow authority is not realism. It is denial.
A PA without legitimacy cannot govern Gaza, no matter how many reforms it signs onto paper. Real reform begins not with international checklists, but with Palestinian consent.
Until Europe and its partners are willing to prioritise democracy over manageability and peace over their deference to Israel, the reform agenda will remain what it is today: a carefully maintained fiction, shielding international actors from the consequences of their own political choices.
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Khalil Shikaki is director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, Palestine.
Khalil Shikaki is director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, Palestine.