The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas will meet on Wednesday, to discuss implementing the PLO Central Committee’s decision earlier this month to end security cooperation with Israel.

The Wednesday meeting was scheduled before the results of the Knesset elections – in which Likud soundly defeated Labor by 30 seats to 24 – were known.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has stated that he will aim to form a coalition within two to three weeks, and observers anticipate that the PLO will not take any highly dramatic steps until the final formulation of the coalition is determined.

A senior Palestinian Arab source told Walla! that “Netanyahu’s clear victory will ease to a great extent the activities of the Palestinian Authority with the international community given Netanyahu’s very clear positions and his statements that a Palestinian state will not be established.”

The reference is to Netanyahu’s promises in a number of last minute interviews in which he vowed not to allow a Palestinian state to be founded in Israel during his watch, as opposed to Labor head Yitzhak Herzog, who previously revealed he intended to divide Jerusalem in establishing such a state.

Netanyahu told Arutz Sheva that he had changed his position from the 2009 Bar Ilan speech, in which he declared support for establishing a Palestinian state. Netanyahu cited a change in the realities of the Middle East as being behind his shift.

However, just days earlier, his office denied a report in which MK Tzipi Hotovely said Netanyahu had renounced the Bar Ilan speech as being “void,” saying that this was Hotovely’s position, not Netanyahu’s.

As for the PLO threat to end security cooperation, Abbas has threatened the move several times over the past few months.

Rather than being a response to elections, the move appears to come as a response to Israel’s decision to withhold tax revenues collected for the PA in retaliation for its unilateral moves to join the International Criminal Court (ICC) and sue Israel for “war crimes.” It was, however, most likely put on hold until after Israel’s elections, so as not anger Israelis and thus lessen the chances that a leftist government would be elected. 

The PA even conducted arrests of Hamas terrorists in the lead-up to the election, and Israeli security sources said that this was intended to prevent terror attacks that could sway the vote rightward.

The PA has threatened to step up its efforts at the ICC following the elections, despite the fact that such unilateral efforts breach the 1993 Oslo Accords which formed the PA, and which removed the status as an internationally recognized terrorist organization from the PLO and Abbas’s Fatah faction.