Mahmoud Abbas: The rise and fall of the Palestinian leader - opinion

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will be celebrating his 88th birthday this year – although a certain amount of online confusion exists as to the precise date, either March 26 or November 15. There is however no dispute about the year (1935), city (Safed) and country (British Mandatory Palestine) of his birth.

Despite his advanced age, Abbas continues to hold three crucial positions: He is president of the Palestinian Authority, chair of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and head of the Fatah political movement.

Abbas assumed these roles following the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004. Arafat had established Fatah in 1959, took control of the PLO in 1969, and became the PA’s founding president in 1994.

For more than a generation, Arafat’s defiant persona, with his trademark black and white checkered keffiyeh, habitual unshaven stubble, and ubiquitous green battle fatigues, was synonymous with the Palestinian cause.

Compared to Arafat’s larger-than-life presence, Abbas is a dry suit-and-tie technocrat. But upon inheriting the leadership, Abbas’ more restrained manner was widely perceived as an advantage, given what his predecessor’s maximalist revolutionary agenda did to hopes for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Mahmoud Abbas, the failed nation-builder

The initial enthusiasm for Abbas’ governance seemed to be vindicated in his January 2005 campaign slogan for the PA presidency: “One authority, one law, one gun.” For many, this indicated that instead of persevering with Arafat’s terrorist war against Israel, the new Palestinian chief would be focusing on positive nation-building.

Such a view was seemingly affirmed with Abbas’ June 2007 appointment of Nablus-born Salam Fayyad as PA prime minister. Fayyad holds a PhD in economics from the University of Texas and had previously been the International Monetary Fund’s representative to the Palestinian territories. He served as Ramallah’s finance minister under both Arafat and Abbas, and was respected as a reformer committed to strengthening the PA’s institutions and economy.

But Fayyad’s plans for modernization, while very popular with international donors, threatened the way Fatah does business and challenged its system of political and economic control. Tellingly, Abbas sided with his Fatah cronies and Fayyad was forced to resign the premiership in April 2013.

Mahmoud Abbas, the failed peace partner

Just as Abbas’ record as a nation-builder became tarnished, so too did his reputation as a peace partner. Initially, Abbas was the refreshing non-Arafat, and consecutive Israeli prime ministers – Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu – negotiated with him with varying degrees of intensity.

The most sustained effort to engage with Abbas occurred during Olmert’s premiership – the two leaders holding some 36 meetings between 2006 and 2008. The Palestinian president was repeatedly hosted by the Israeli prime minister for talks at the official Balfour residence. There they would usually first have discussions with senior advisers present, then relocate to a separate room for a long one-on-one conversation.

As the prime minister’s international spokesperson, at the end of these talks I would be called into the room, where they would give me my talking points for the media.

In those brief interactions with the Palestinian president, he was gracious and grandfatherly. Abbas once even presumed that I spoke Arabic, maybe having seen my dubbed inserts broadcast on the Qatari pan-Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera.

But personal interactions aside, Abbas proved to be an intransigent political interlocutor.

Mahmoud Abbas, the political interlocutor

IN THE lead up to the November 2007 Annapolis Middle East peace conference, foreign minister Tzipi Livni failed to get Abbas to agree to a conceptual framework of mutual recognition, whereby Israel acknowledges the existence of a Palestinian peoplehood with a legitimate right to a nation-state of its own, and in parallel, the Palestinians recognize that the Jewish people has a corresponding right to national self-determination in its homeland. Until today, Abbas stubbornly refuses to accept any such symmetry.

Even more striking was his response, or lack thereof, to Olmert’s September 2008 peace initiative. Olmert proposed the establishment of a Palestinian state on 100% of Gaza and some 94% of the West Bank.

The plan had the smaller settlements being evacuated, while the larger blocs, 6% of the West Bank, would be incorporated into sovereign Israel. In return, lands from pre-1967 Israel would be transferred to the Palestinians as compensation.

Moreover, according to Olmert’s proposal, Jerusalem would become the capital of two states, the Jewish neighborhoods going to Israel, the Arab ones to the Palestinians. Nobody would receive sovereignty over the “holy basin” where the Old City’s major Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious sites are situated.

Rather, the area would be collectively administered by a five-nation condominium of Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

Olmert implored Abbas to embrace the role of historic peacemaker: “It will be 50 years before there will be another Israeli prime minister that will offer you what I am offering you now. Don’t miss this opportunity.”

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice described Olmert’s offer as “amazing” and observed that “Yitzhak Rabin had been killed for far less.” She had a testy relationship with Olmert, but nonetheless readily appreciated the groundbreaking character of his proposal.

Promising to help advance the initiative, Rice traveled to Ramallah for a meeting with Abbas, but to her surprise the Palestinian leader showed no special interest, let alone a willingness to seize the moment.

Later, president George W. Bush was to raise Olmert’s plan with Abbas during a White House meeting, but in Rice’s words: “The Palestinian stood firm, and the idea died.”

Olmert was to write: “To this day, I cannot understand why the Palestinian leadership did not accept the far-reaching and unprecedented proposal I offered them… It would be worth exploring the reasons that the Palestinians rejected my offer and preferred, instead, to drag their feet, avoiding real decisions.”

A decade and a half later, feet dragging has perhaps become Abbas’ most profound legacy. As the twentieth year of his four-year presidential term approaches, he has fathered the “Brezhnevization” of the organized Palestinian body politic. Like in the final years of the Soviet Union, the ongoing rule of an aged autocrat has brought stagnation and paralysis to the PA.

As with other authoritarian regimes, those following Palestinian developments tend to focus on Abbas’ health and longevity, the conventional wisdom being that he will only end his term in office through natural causes.

Under such circumstances, Israel has little choice but to pursue a minimalist strategy of conflict management. Unfortunately, adopting a more ambitious peace agenda will first require a massive dose of wishful thinking.

The writer, formerly an adviser to the prime minister, is chair of the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy at Reichman University. Connect with him on LinkedIn, @Ambassador Mark Regev.