The following study looks at the triangular relationship between Israel, the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Gaza since the latter took over Gaza in 2007 to explore variation in state formation between the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government through the lens of three major approaches in international relations, offensive realism, neorealism and constructivist accounts. Offensive realism, with its focus on the balance of power, would predict greatest cooperation between the PA in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria as both balance against a far more powerful state that they rhetorically perceive as an occupying and expansionist state. Defensive realism with its focus on the balance of threat, would predict greater cooperation between Israel and the PA against Hamas, the force that expelled the PA from Gaza and whose grassroots presence in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria presents a grave threat to the PA. Constructivist accounts with its stress on identity politics would suggest that given the strong identity differences between the three sides– a Jewish Zionist Israel, a “secular” nationalist PA and an Islamist theocratic movement such as Hamas - that the relationship between each side and the other two would be totally inimical characterized by zero-sum games. All three would have varying impacts on state formation. Cooperation between the PA and Israel, as predicted by neorealism would translate into a truncated, semi-independent pattern of state formation for the PA and the emergence of a classical Weberian strong state for Hamas. A balance of power account would translate into maximal state formation for both the PA and Hamas and strong cooperation in other fields between them. Were the constructivist paradigm robust in explaining relationship between the triangle, we would expect robust state formation but without cooperation between the PA and Hamas governments. The paper argues that the neorealist account comes closest to describing the relationship between the three political actors. The fine-tuned and intensive security cooperation between Israel and the PA is clearly levelled against the Hamas threat. Not only did the PA refrain from coming to the Hamas’ government’s aid during its three rounds of major conflict against Israel, as anticipated by offensive realism, it actively repressed anti-Israel demonstrations and violence against Israel in the PA during the rounds of conflict between Israel and Hamas. The price of Israeli protection for the PA is a truncated pattern of state formation.
