There’s an ironic challenge facing those working to prepare the Palestinian Authority for the future: After the war, Gaza’s municipal and security framework can be rebuilt practically from scratch. But the PA that exists when the war ends will be the PA that inherits sole custody—eventually—of Palestinian governance.

Neither the Biden administration nor, for obvious reasons, PA President Mahmoud Abbas has shown any of the urgency necessary to reform the governing structure that would represent the Palestinians in their drive for self-determination.

And that word, represent, is key. Here’s the Washington Post on why a reformed and improved Palestinian security force may not matter at all: Its members are “viewed by many in their communities as Israel’s repressive subcontractors.” Not to mention, “they are not welcome in some Palestinian towns and cities, where militant groups have become the de facto authorities.” As inertia has settled in, “many Palestinians came to view the force as an arm of the Israeli occupation, or a private militia that answered to their increasingly authoritarian leaders in Ramallah.”

One reason for this is the tricky circumstance that any population seeking self-determination would be in. “It was reformed,” Stockholm-based researcher Alaa Tartir told the Post, “in order to deliver stability, security coordination and Israeli security first.”

Well, sure. Isn’t that the point of a domestic security apparatus? Americans have plenty of complaints about the FBI, but one of them isn’t that the Bureau ought to be serving no-knock warrants in Alberta instead of Chicago. Was the expectation that a Palestinian security force would be a national army that would liberate the West Bank from the IDF? Because if so, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here of what a state is.

At the same time, one can see how quickly the legitimacy of such a force would disintegrate when the overarching government is led by a man who is barreling into the 20th year of his four-year term as president.

Which is really the crux of this problem. Democracy promotion gets a bad rap but some democratic reforms over the years would’ve eliminated most of the PA’s legitimacy deficit. If Mahmoud Abbas is going to operate like a warlord, then he’s going to be opposed by warlords. Hence we have the gangland version of federalism: different areas of the West Bank have become not municipalities but turf. Abbas has been taking Western money all these years and using it to push Palestinian territory backward through time.

Of course, there is the elephant in the room. Elections are, in a way, responsible for the territorial split between the PA and Hamas and the subsequent emergence of Gaza as an impacted wisdom tooth in the peace process. Palestinian elections in 2006 led to a surprise Hamas victory, which was followed in 2007 by Hamas’s armed takeover of the Strip.

But there haven’t been elections since. Instead, Abbas has only become more authoritarian and consolidated more governmental power even in territory he controls. Late last month, Abbas accepted the resignation of his entire cabinet in a move intended to show Western backers that change was coming. But that was interpreted as, if anything, moving the PA in the opposite direction of reform. As the Times of Israel explained: “The PA’s move to announce a new government was ostensibly designed to neuter calls by Abbas’s critics for him to empower an independent government, with a mission and a timetable for carrying it out.”

Abbas “preempted everyone.” It was a stalling tactic, sowing chaos among those jockeying for a chance to replace the outgoing cabinet in order to keep Abbas’s position as “the indispensable man” firmly intact.

No one expects Abbas (or anyone in his orbit) to suddenly morph into Thomas Jefferson or make the West Bank a libertarian island in the sun. But the problem of the security forces highlights how much Abbas’s increasingly paranoid authoritarianism undermines his chances to one day be president of an actual Palestinian state. The PA’s forces lost the 2007 battle with Hamas for Gaza and there’s no reason that it wouldn’t lose again next time to whatever Iran-backed militia plants Tehran’s flag in the ground.

You can’t have politics without security. And there’s no security without the legitimacy that comes with some kind of representation and accountability. Mahmoud Abbas is still standing in the way.