Omar H. Rahman is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, where he is writing a book on Palestinian fragmentation in the post-Oslo era. Rahman is a writer, analyst, and multimedia journalist specializing in Middle East politics and American foreign policy. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Lawfare, PBS NewsHour, VICE, Quartz, The National, Al Jazeera English, and World Politics Review, among others.
The fighting in Gaza dominated the headlines and eclipsed a development in Palestinian geopolitics with far more serious implications for regional security. Eleven days before the outbreak of the latest Israel-Hamas war, Palestinian National Authority (PNA) President Mahmoud Abbas canceled legislative and presidential elections, dashing hopes that the 14-year-old Palestinian civil war would come to an end anytime soon.
The eruption of violence between Israel and the Palestinian Territories has disrupted a series of Arab-Israeli normalization deals, initiated with the 2020 Abraham Accords, and the Biden administration’s planned pivot away from the Middle East as the United States focuses on great power competition.
