Mahmoud Abbas is in his final act as betrayer of the Palestinian cause
Sami Al-Arian, MEE, 17 December 2024
Desperate to stay relevant, the faithful US-Israeli ‘handpicked leader’ has intensified his crackdown on Palestinians in the West Bank and pledged to work with Trump
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks during the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York City on 26 September 2024 (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP)
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to stay relevant as events in Gaza, the West Bank and across the region have been moving at a much faster pace than the octogenarian politician is able to cope with.
This week, amid an Israeli genocide that has been unceasingly raging in Gaza for 14 months, Abbas’s security forces brazenly killed several prominent resistance fighters in Jenin in an attempt to appease the Israelis and their American benefactors.
When then-US President Donald Trump announced in January 2020 the so-called “deal of the century“, a proposal that was wholly aligned with Israel on all issues of contention, Abbas said: “I want to say to the duo – Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu – that Jerusalem is not for sale, and all of our rights are not for sale or bargaining. Your deal, the conspiracy, will not happen…we say a thousand times no, no, no to the deal of the century.”
Yet, when Trump was re-elected on 5 November, Abbas called to congratulate him and vowed to work with him on a political settlement that he himself rejected out of hand five years earlier.
This was followed by a deal the Egyptians struck two weeks ago between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinian faction headed by Abbas. The agreement was to appoint an independent committee of prominent and professional Palestinians in Gaza to run its affairs and reconstruction after the war.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
It was a demand by the Zionist regime and the Biden administration in order to dislodge Hamas from any future role in ruling Gaza.
However, Abbas’s Fatah quickly retracted its approval as the Israelis rejected any role for or input from Hamas in the future of Gaza. It seems that such a deal would not play well in Netanyahu’s vow for a “total victory” over Hamas and the resistance.
So what’s Abbas’s end game, and where is he headed in his twilight years?
Hand-picked ‘leader’
In his 20th year of a four-year term, Abbas announced in late November, a few days after he turned 89, his succession plan.
He issued a decree that called for the appointment of the unambitious, uncharismatic and feeble Fatah leader, Rawhi Fattouh, as an interim president after Abbas.
Condoleezza Rice recounted how a handful of people in 2003 hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people
The 75-year-old Fattouh is currently serving as the chairman of the Palestine National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) parliament in exile.
In 28 years, the PNC met only once in 2018.
Interestingly enough, Fattouh is also the same person who served as
an interim president after the death of former PA President Yasser
Arafat in November 2004 until Abbas was elected to replace him in
January 2005.
For over a year, Abbas has been under American pressure to appoint a successor who will be as compliant and amenable to Israel and the US as he has been during his long tenure.
As recalled in her 2011 memoir, No Higher Honor,
Condoleezza Rice, who served as US President George W Bush’s national
security advisor, recounted how a handful of people in 2003, including
her, Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli
prime minister at the time, hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of
the Palestinian people.
For much of 2002, Sharon refused to deal with Arafat but was eventually able to convince Bush to sideline the PLO leader in favour of Abbas as the more submissive and yielding Fatah leader.
Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war
Before he was appointed as a prime minister in 2003 as a result of American and European pressures, Abbas was publicly ridiculed
by Arafat, who called him the “Karzai of Palestine”, a reference to
Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, who was widely considered in
the Arab world as a US puppet.
Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, had risen to the leadership of Fatah and the PLO almost by default.
Even though he was considered among the first generation of Fatah founders as he joined the movement in the early 1960s, he was not distinguished or appointed to senior positions until decades later.
‘Strategic asset’
It was not until most of the early founders and senior leaders of Fatah and the PLO, such as Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Sa’ad Sayel, Abu Yusuf al-Najjar, and many others, had been assassinated by Israel between the 1970s and early 1990s that Abu Mazen started to hold more significant positions within Fatah and the PLO.
When the PLO adopted its 10-point plan in 1974, paving the way towards a political settlement based on recognising Israel in exchange for a truncated Palestinian state, Abbas was known to favour abandoning any form of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Why the Palestinian Authority’s biggest claim is a lie
Regarding this political ideology, Abu Iyad, who was considered to be
next in line in the Palestinian movement after Arafat before his
assassination in 1991 by the Zionist regime, quipped: “The thing that I fear the most is that treason would one day just become (normalised as) an opinion.”
When
Israel failed to crush the First Intifada (1987-1991), it adopted a
political track that would preserve its expansionist and settlement
policies. This path culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Abbas
was not only one of the few Palestinian interlocutors in this process
but also the person who actually signed the accords on the White House
lawn on behalf of the Palestinians.
Needless to say, the Oslo process was nothing short of a disaster that was doomed to fail from the start.
The Palestinian negotiators led by Arafat and Abbas surrendered their main card and strongest leverage at the outset, which was the recognition of the Zionist regime on 78 percent of the historical land of Palestine.
In exchange, Israel only pledged to engage in a vain political process that should have ended with an independent Palestinian state by 1999, or so thought the PLO leaders.
Yet, more than three decades after Oslo, the Zionist regime has not only killed the so-called two-state solution but consolidated its plans for a “Greater Israel”, including a more than six-fold increase of illegal settlers in the West Bank from about 115,000 in 1993 to over 750,000 today.
According to a 2015 International Crisis Group report, most Israeli officials consider Abbas their most important “strategic asset”.
The reason is quite clear.
It has been mainly through a political philosophy championed by Abbas that rejected decades of Palestinian resistance, prompting one expert to remark: “Abbas not once in his life did he adopt armed resistance, nor did he support it.”
He often mocked any notion of armed resistance by any group, including his own, even when Israel had killed scores of Palestinians unprovoked.
Brutal security force
His leadership style turned a relatively vibrant Palestinian national movement into a subsidiary of the Israeli occupation, often referred to as a “five-star occupation” since it had relieved the Zionist regime from appearing as the occupying power, while carrying out aggressive and domineering settler-colonial policies worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime.
During his tenure, he embraced the American dictate to change the security doctrine of the Palestinian security forces from policing and protecting Palestinian population centres into a brutal security force acting as the first line of defence of Israeli settlements and the occupation army against any form of resistance, including passive popular forms.
Why western plans for another Palestinian client regime will fail
Since his rise to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2005, he adopted the American plan under Lieutenant General Keith Dayton to train PA security forces, which engaged in suppression and silencing of dissent, as well as illegal arrests and torture, many times leading to death as in the case of Nizar Banat in 2021.
In
coordination with the US and the Zionist regime, Abbas created a
bloated security force whose primary mission was security coordination
with the Israeli army to thwart any resistance or operations against the
occupation.
He called this mission sacred and for decades refused to stop it even though Palestinian public opinion overwhelmingly condemns it.
Scores of Palestinian political bodies and factions have called on him to halt such disgraceful practices.
A detailed 2017 report
found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all
civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget, and
receives around 30 percent of total international aid given to the
Palestinians, including most of the funds coming from the US.
The
study further found that the Palestinian security sector spent more of
the PA’s budget than the education, health, and agriculture sectors
combined. It included more than 80,000 individuals, where the ratio of
security personnel to the population is as high as 1 to 48 – one of the
highest in the world.
In Abbas’s first encounter with Donald Trump in 2017, the US president bragged about the PA’s continued security coordination with Israel, as he praised its effectiveness in protecting the Israeli occupation, in which he said: “They get along unbelievably well. I was actually very impressed and somewhat surprised at how well they got along. They work together beautifully.”
‘Small-time dictator’
When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, Abbas coordinated with the Americans and Israelis, as laid out in detail in Rice’s account in her book, to obstruct the Hamas-led government from being able to serve as the democratically elected party.
In fact, it was Abbas’s security forces, again in coordination with the Americans, that tried in 2007 to topple Hamas’s government in Gaza, only to be outmanoeuvred by Hamas, which took over Gaza, effectively resulting in two separate Palestinian governments.
Palestinian resistance can always survive without outside support. Can Israel?
David Wurmser, a Bush administration official at the time, commented in a Vanity Fair article in 2008 that the Bush administration was engaged “in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory”.
He added that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand.
Wurmser
further observed: “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a
coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before
it could happen.”
Ever since this internal strife, Gaza has been living under a crippling Israeli siege with little interference from Abbas.
With
the support of the Americans, Israelis and regional actors, Abbas took
total control of the Palestinian political life. He started to
unilaterally issue decrees like any small-time dictator of a banana
republic.
His unconstitutional and unlawful decrees would dismiss governments, install prime ministers, cancel elections, spend billions, cover corruption by his cronies, family members and sons, and appoint a constitutional court in order to dismiss the Hamas-led legislative council.
But perhaps the behaviour that shocked most Palestinians was Abbas’s deafening silence during the early days of Israel’s genocidal war.
As the Israeli war of extermination and ethnic cleansing campaign intensified, Abbas would voice his strong but empty opposition to the Israeli brutality on the one hand, while continuing to have security coordination with the same vigour as if no genocide in Gaza, daily settler attacks across the West Bank, or routine Al-Aqsa compound incursions had been taking place for over a year.
With the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza entering its 15th month with no end in sight, and while Israel prepares its long-term occupation of Gaza, as well as aggressively pushing its policy of effective annexation of Area C in the West Bank, it appears that the current fascist Israeli government is on the verge of dumping Abbas in favour of a new security arrangement that would favour local Palestinian collaborators to govern the Palestinian populations.
A 2017 study found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget
It’s clear that the current Zionist regime, with its grand design to impose the Greater Israel project, wants to resolve its demographic Palestinian problem and decisively end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its favour once and for all.
Hence, part of Israel’s grand strategy to realise this objective is not merely to be content with banning Unrwa, killing the two-state solution, or establishing Israeli hegemony in the region.
But in essence, it’s moving aggressively to redesign all the Palestinian institutions and sources of power that have defined the Palestinian struggle over decades.
Regardless of Abbas’s decree or what happens to him in the near term
as he enters the twilight of his life, Israel will make sure that he is
the last Palestinian leader who combines all the titles that define the
Palestinian institutions – the PA president, the PLO chairman, the Fatah
leader, and the president of the “State of Palestine”.
From an Israeli perspective, he has served his purpose, and it is now time for the final solution.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. Originally from Palestine, he lived in the US for four decades (1975-2015) where he was a tenured academic, prominent speaker and human rights activist before relocating to Turkey. He is the author of several studies and books. He can be contacted at: nolandsman1948@gmail.com.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found her.
