Palestinian Authority would avoid a military confrontation with Israel in 2012

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Israel’s intelligence community has determined that the Palestinian Authority would avoid a military confrontation with Israel in 2012.

Israeli sources have told U.S. officials and analysts that the PA was not interested in what they termed a “third intifada” or uprising, in the West Bank. They said PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the ruling Fatah movement would threaten and encourage civilian unrest, but avoid the suicide bombings and other lethal attacks that took place a decade ago under his predecessor, the late Yasser Arafat.

“The assessment by Israel is that that any new intifada would play into the hands of Hamas,” a U.S. official said.

On March 27, Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, reported a similar Israeli assessment. Satloff, who met with the Israeli leadership, said the government was convinced that Abbas would not support another uprising against Israel.

“The general consensus is that the calm that currently exists will stay for the forseeable future,” Satloff said.

Satloff told the institute that Israel assessed that the PA was maintaining economic and security cooperation with the PA.

“And for all the posturing by Abu Mazen [Abbas] and his coterie, they are doing nothing to change either the economic or the security cooperation,” Satloff said. “I have my own doubts about this.”

The Israeli assessment was conveyed amid warnings by PA and Fatah leaders of an imminent conflict with Israel. In late March, former Fatah secretary-general Marwan Barghouti, regarded as a potential heir to Abbas, called for another uprising.

“The launch of large-scale popular resistance at this stage serves the cause of our people,” Barghouti said in a statement from an Israeli prison cell.