Close security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) is one of the wonders of the complex relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians. On July 24, it was reported that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had summoned the PA’s leadership for an urgent meeting in Ramallah the following day to discuss various dramatic steps they might take with regard to their relationship with Israel. Although it was not specifically stated what will be on the agenda, two recent intimations suggest that security coordination with Israel will continue even as the two parties convey the sense that their relationship has reached a crisis point.

One sign was the July 23 arrest by Israeli security forces of Alaa Bashir, a Quranic teacher from the West Bank village of Jinsafut, near Qalqilya. Bashir was suspected of planning a suicide attack in Israel. She had previously been arrested by Palestinian security forces two months earlier, apparently on the basis of information provided by Israel that she was planning a suicide attack on behalf of the Islamic State. Instructional materials were found in her home, and during her interrogation by the PA forces, she did not deny that she was planning an attack.

Bashir's first arrest by the PA sparked a huge campaign on social media, lambasting the PA and claiming that it had arrested women at Israel’s command and carried out a policy of arrests and assassinations on behalf of the “Zionist enemy.” A video castigating the PA made the rounds. Bashir was eventually released, but after that the PA arrested her twice more out of fear that she might conduct the attack out of sheer stubbornness. Each time, however, public pressure led Palestinian Preventative Security to release her. The Israel Defense Forces put an end to all that when its soldiers entered her village and arrested her themselves.

If the PA leadership thought that might put an end to the criticism of it, Hamas spokespeople disavowed them of that, publicly declaring what Palestinians on the West Bank were thinking but were too afraid to say out loud: “Israel’s arrest of Alaa Bashir after her release by the Palestinian security forces reveals the scope of the Palestinian Authority’s crime in continuing its security coordination with Israel.”