On July 12, 2023, Abu Mazen visited Jenin – 11 years after his last visit in 2012. Prior to his arrival, Palestinian security apparatus vanguard forces arrived in the city and the refugee camp to prepare the theater for a successful event. On the day of the visit itself, hundreds of members of the security apparatuses were present throughout the city. The visit passed peacefully and some minor attempts by young men from the Jenin Brigade to disrupt it and protest against the Palestinian Authority and Abu Mazen were overcome by the shouts of the cheering crowd. For his part, Abu Mazen can count the visit as successful, even if its success will be short-lived – if the Palestinian Authority does not succeed in leveraging it for the purpose of renewing its governance in the area and consolidating it elsewhere within the PA as well.
The determination of the PA and its security apparatuses was likely the sense of a real and growing threat to the PA leadership of a Hamas takeover in the Jenin area, followed by other districts. The visit was required to demonstrate the capability of the PA leadership to the Palestinian public, and to display defiance and send a message to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which seek to undermine the PA’s stability, status, and legitimacy. Yet no less, the visit was also a message to the Israeli public and political and security leadership and to the international community, including the Arab world. The message, proof of capability, is intended, inter alia, to convince the countries contributing to the reconstruction of the refugee camp to do so through and with the PA, which will allow the PA to control the reconstruction resources and process and to present it to the residents of Jenin and the Palestinian public as its own enterprise, which will help restore its position and strengthen its legitimacy.
The residents of the city of Jenin are concerned about security and the enforcement of law and order, and the effective governance of the Palestinian Authority is of great importance to them. Abu Mazen's visit was presumably seen as a significant event heralding the PA's return to the area, and therefore it is likely that the crowd’s cheers were for the most part authentic.
Israel can and should help the PA expand and consolidate its control over the Jenin region by deepening the security coordination and allowing the Palestinian security mechanisms to operate in the area. This can occur within the framework of agreements about wanted individuals (i.e., terror suspects) such as were previously implemented, and then extend to other regions, alongside a series of supportive economic moves and significant restraints of Israeli violence against Palestinians. At the same time, the disturbing question remains, namely, why Abu Mazen avoided such a move two years ago, before the bedlam. Whether he did not understand the magnitude of the threat to the PA itself or whether he thought he could ride the tiger (as was Arafat's practice at the beginning of the second intifada, and in general), whereby the violence and terror directed against Israel would not be attributed to him but would prompt Israel to change its policy, the implications are highly troubling.