The Palestinian National Council’s planned November elections are little more than political games and an attempt to project an image of legitimacy to the United States and the West, Prof. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at INSS and a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Monday that the PNC will hold elections on November 1, though Michael said he believed the PA would find a reason to cancel them, as it has on countless other occasions.
Calling for the elections, Michael said, was part of showing the US and the West “they are going in the path of reforms, and they are going to democratize themselves, and they are going to have free elections, and so and so forth.”
Repackaging pay-for-slay
A similar strategy was employed by the PA when they repackaged the pay-for-slay ‘Martyr’s Fund,’ which paid Palestinian terrorists and their families, as a needs-based welfare framework administered by the Palestinian National Economic Empowerment Institution.
The PA has an opportunity to build legitimacy as an alternative to Hamas, especially given the terror group’s absence from the Palestinian Liberation Organization, as part of US President Donald Trump’s plan for the future administration of the Gaza Strip, he explained.
Abbas “wants to demonstrate that he is still relevant. But the PLO is, [while] officially still the soul representative of the entire Palestinian people, is much less important than the Palestinian Authority that actually controls the daily life of the Palestinians in the West Bank,” he explained. “So this is also a sort of way to escape, to run away, from all the problems that the Palestinian Authority faces. This is something that struck the attention of the people…These are internal political games of the Palestinian leadership.”
Noting Abbas’s advanced age at 90, Michael theorized that “if he is alive in November or close to November, and if he will be sure enough that Fatah can gain the election, then he will enable the election, but if he will have some good indications that he's going to lose the election, then he will find very good excuses why they have to postpone the election.”
Abbas opened the elections to the Palestinian diaspora, which Michael commented would likely be of little interest, and Fatah’s popularity is not high among those living in the Palestinian territory. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reported that Fatah’s voter base in the West Bank nearly halved, from 23% to 14%, based on a survey conducted in October 2025.
“The Palestinian Authority and the leaders of Fatah and the leaders of the PLO have no legitimacy among their own constituency, at least in the Palestinian territories…” Michael accused. “And the Palestinian system now is very fragile, mainly when we are talking about the system in the West Bank, mainly when we are talking about Abbas and his, I would say, successor, Hussein al-Sheikh, is even less legitimate than Abbas.”
Upcoming election
The upcoming election, which will be the first in which PNC council members are elected rather than appointed if it goes ahead, is about little more than political survival, Michael commented.
“These people are very experienced, and they are very cynical and very brutal, and they have to assure their political survival, because their political survival is their physical and economic survival,” he continued. “And therefore I believe that if they will assess that they are under some sort of risk, even as a minor or small risk, they will find the right excuse to postpone the election.”
Asked his predictions if the election goes ahead, Michael said it very much depended on whether Hamas was running. If Hamas runs, Hamas will win, he predicted, but if not, then Fatah will maintain its power.
Abbas also issued a decision setting the date for the 8th General Conference of Fatah in Ramallah for May 14, 2026, and the cabinet had earlier announced the date for local elections in the West Bank for April 25, 2026. Abbas signed a decree banning Hamas from the municipal elections.