Political legitimacy derives, inter alia, from governing authorities’ capacity to foster inclusive political participation, meaningful representation, transparency, accountability, justice, effective public service delivery, and policy agendas aligned with the needs and aspirations of the population. Yet, under the Oslo Accords framework that established the Palestinian Authority (PA) three decades ago, international legitimacy has persistently taken precedence over and suppressed locally-grounded legitimacy. As a result, core pillars of legitimate governance were subordinated to Israeli security imperatives, the preservation of the status quo, and the securitised and increasingly authoritarian functions assigned to the PA. This dynamic produced a structural paradox in the occupied West Bank: as the PA’s local legitimacy declined, its institutional endurance and entrenchment increased, sustained by external political backing, aid dependency, intra-Palestinian fragmentation, and entrenched structures of colonial domination. Consequently, as evolving ‘facts on the ground’, including Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank, continued settlement expansion, and the consolidation of a settler-colonial apartheid regime, undermined the PA’s institutional relevance, the sources of locally-rooted legitimacy remained largely unaddressed and underutilised, in part because their activation could empower Palestinian agency beyond externally defined constraints. Current developments in Gaza suggest the emergence of another governing structure shaped primarily by coercive colonial conditions, where local legitimacy is again being deprioritised. Moving beyond the Oslo paradigm, and beyond prevailing international frameworks for Gaza’s ‘day after’, requires a fundamental reassessment of the institutional utility of the PA and of any future Palestinian governing arrangements that fail to prioritize local legitimacy as their primary organizing principle.

Published by The Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) and the Rome MED – Mediterranean Dialogues, 12 February 2026 

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