Distinguished Israeli journalist Amira Hass pointed out in a recent article in the Israeli English language newspaper Haaretz this week an essential fact that is often forgotten or glossed over both at home and abroad: the PNA is not a sovereign government by any definition of the word, although it is routinely considered and judged – by itself and everyone else – as one. Much has always been made, particularly in the last few weeks, of the PNA’s obvious faults: its chronic inability to stem the deteriorating security situation in the Territories; the cronyism with which it is plagued; its opaque reporting lines; its resistance to reform; its preference for rhetoric over achievement; and its open contempt for the presumed independence of the legislative and judiciary branches of government. In these and other respects, the PNA is compared, sometimes favorably, but more often not, to other governing institutions (the government of Israel, for example, or those of European liberal democracies, and those of neighboring Arab states).

But all such comparisons are wildly inaccurate, for the PNA is not the executive branch of a functioning democratic government but rather, as Ms. Hass wrote, “a bureaucratic-political system with limited administrative and governmental authority over a population of approximately three and a half million people. It has no authority or control over central elements that define a people’s sovereignty: land, water, minerals, borders, freedom of movement, freedom to make decisions such as change of address and the right of residence of non-citizens, the awarding of citizenship, and the entry of tourists. An IDF soldier at an out-of-the-way checkpoint has more say in these matters than the (PNA).”

The list, of course, could easily be made longer – the PNA has no right to basic self-defense, which is the primary duty of any government towards its citizens, and Palestinian security forces have no right to prevent frequent Israeli incursions into (and aerial bombardments of) the Palestinian territories. The PNA has no legal power to determine the status of Palestine’s citizens and to protect their rights (Palestinians are not officially citizens of any nation and carry no passports; they cannot appeal to any court in their “country” for wrongs committed by another country). The PNA has few fiscal and economic powers independent from Israeli influence; it can conduct no independent monetary or trade policy; it has not even a currency of its own to regulate. Indeed, it cannot ensure basic property rights for its citizens: it cannot prevent, for example, Israeli settlers from stealing land from Palestinian villages without offering any payment or compensation in return; it cannot decide whether the wall can divide villages and confiscate land and decimate Palestinian communities; it cannot decide whether or when key roads in the West Bank and Gaza can be closed to Palestinian traffic; it cannot decide when goods will, or will not, be allowed to travel from one area in the Territories to another; it cannot even decide whether one part of the would-be country of Palestine (Gaza) can be linked to the other part (the West Bank) by rail or road. It cannot, in short, perform any of the functions that are routinely performed by even the weakest and most corrupt and undemocratic of governments elsewhere in the world.

Nevertheless, it is easy to understand why the Israelis purport to treat President Abbas as the chief executive of a sovereign governing entity, for it allows them to heap blame on his head for any number of faults – which can, under normal circumstances, be reasonably considered the responsibility of the sovereign executive of a state – while all the while deflecting blame from themselves. Thus, President Abbas is resoundingly blamed by most Israelis (with a few notable exceptions, including the admirably independent-minded Ms. Hass) for failing to prevent the suicide bombing attack two weeks ago in Khdeira market (Hadera); for failing to prevent Islamist militants from launching Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel; for failing to prevent the internecine warfare between militants of Fatah and Hamas/Jihad factions; for, in short, failing to prevent the frequent eruptions of anger and hatred to which the seething, suffering, humiliated Palestinian population is prone.

Never, in all this fault-finding, does Israel acknowledge its role in creating and sustaining the violence: never does it admit, for example, that the assassination of Islamic Jihad and Hamas militants will inevitably provoke predictable reactions from those groups (which is precisely what happened at Khadeira); never will it consider that the crushing punitive measures it takes to destroy the lives and livelihoods, and, indeed, the sanity, of innocent Palestinian civilians may push them to join the ranks of militant groups in droves; nor will it admit that the PNA has no feasible means with which to stem the violence on its own, given that the Palestinian security forces are willfully neutered by the various imbalanced agreements the PNA has entered into with Israel since its creation through the Oslo process, and that, more importantly, the PNA’s administrative powers are carefully circumscribed to only a few areas in the Territories while Israel remains in full control of the rest. The PNA is blamed, in effect, for failing to keep its own house in order by the very people who can forcibly prevent it from even turning on the lights in that house when it pleases them.

It is harder to understand why the PNA itself perpetuates the myth that it is the executive arm of a functioning democratic government. Perhaps the answer lies in the long struggle for recognition and legitimacy the Palestinians have endured: given that for many decades there was not even an acknowledgment, by the Israelis, of the need for a Palestinian state, perhaps the creation of the PNA by the Oslo process constituted so great a victory for the officials in question that for them to admit the impuissance of the entity would be tantamount to admitting complete, life-long, failure. Or perhaps the answer is simpler, and rooted in human nature: the officials who comprise the PNA might need to pretend that they are indeed emissaries of a functioning government to justify – to themselves, and to the Palestinian people – their salaries, their relatively easy lives, and their empty trappings of power.

Whatever the reason for this self-sustained delusion, it is time Palestinians acknowledge the truth for their own sakes, even if no one else, save an intrepid Israeli journalist, will: the PNA is not a government by any means, and it should stop considering itself as one. It gains the right to call itself a government the day it gains the right to govern, but no sooner. Until then, it remains what it has always been: a government-in-yearning, a government-in-training, a government-in-waiting.