Israel’s current collaborators in Gaza and West Bank can’t lead the Palestinians either

Leaders of the al-Ja’abari clan who in a statement issued in early July distanced themselves from the plan to secede from the Palestinian Authority in Hebron

Jack Khoury writes in Haaretz on 8 July 2025:

Recently, two stories have stood out in the news regarding power struggles in the Palestinian arena. Both reflect a lesson that Israel has yet to learn.

One story details a local initiative in Hebron aimed at breaking away from the Palestinian Authority, establishing an independent emirate, and joining the normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states. The other focuses on a man in Gaza calling himself the “head of the Abu Shabab militia,” who promises to fight Hamas and represent Palestinian interests in Gaza.

In Hebron, leaders of the al-Ja’abari clan – one of whose members claims to have initiated the move – were quick to distance themselves from the move. The initiative seems to have been buried before it ever got off the ground.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, anyone familiar with the ground reality knows that Yasser Abu Shabab’s militia operates solely in the Rafah region, which is under Israeli control. His militia’s survival depends entirely on the IDF and Shin Bet. It’s doubtful he has any popular support, and it’s likely he will vanish with any Israeli tactical shift or withdrawal from the area.

These two cases are a contemporary example of how Israel continues to try to replicate failed models from the past. It still believes that “alternative,” pro-Israeli leadership can govern a civilian population that Israel defines as hostile. But this is an illusion. Time and again, history shows that such collaborators – even if they seem to stabilize the area for a while – are a sure recipe for collapse and escalation.

Back in the 1980s, Israel tried to establish the “Palestinian Village Leagues” in the West Bank as an alternative to the Palestine Liberation Organization and other factions. Perceived as an arm of the occupation, these leagues quickly disintegrated. In Lebanon, the South Lebanon Army – a militia backed by Israel – collapsed after the IDF withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000.

Two decades earlier, Israel sought an alliance with the Christian Phalangists and their leader Bashir Gemayel to drive the PLO out of Lebanon. But his assassination and the subsequent Sabra and Shatila massacre led not to order or security, but to the rise of Hezbollah, which remained dominant in Lebanon until a few months ago.

This pattern is not unique to Israel. The U.S. tried similar tactics in Afghanistan, backing President Hamid Karzai and a corrupt military apparatus that collapsed overnight, returning power to the Taliban. In Iraq, the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein without installing a credible civilian replacement, creating a vacuum that was filled by Al-Qaeda, Shia militias and ISIS.

In Syria, too, the collapse of governance structures – and failed attempts to promote so-called “moderate forces” – helped pave the way for ISIS to grow under the Assad regime’s shadow. After his regime collapsed, Islamist factions moved in, whose ideas of democracy still remain deeply questionable.

Israel’s repeated attempts to engineer external, implanted and dependent leadership might create a short-term illusion of control, but in the long run, they only fuel chaos. Leadership without legitimacy collapses – and the chaos becomes fuel for the next enemy.

The results of the attempts to build collaborators do not end with their disintegration. They continue the bloodshed for years: as Israel opened the door to Hezbollah with the collapse of the South Lebanon Army, the U.S. opened the gates of the Middle East to Iran with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The failure does not stay local; it creates regional waves.

The push to promote Abu Shabab as a model for post-Hamas Gaza fits the same mold: a hasty and superficial attempt to solve a complex problem. Real solutions require a slow, deliberate process in which Palestinian society redefines its own leadership. That cannot be forced from the outside.

Israel, like other powers before it, should internalize a fundamental truth: legitimacy and leadership cannot be engineered or imposed. Especially not on the Palestinian people. Legitimate leaders emerge from within, through free will, or end up in the trash bin of history.

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