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The Last Palestinian

The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas

Prometheus Books

THE RISE OF MAHMOUD ABBAS

On the morning of September 28, 2016, Mahmoud Abbas awoke to upsetting news. Overnight, Shimon Peres, Israel's former president and a man with whom Abbas had a long history of trying to negotiate a peace agreement, had died at the age of ninety-three. His death marked the end of an era in Israel, as Peres was the last member of the Jewish state's founding generation. For Abbas — a member of the same generation but on the Palestinian side — this was more than the passing of a neighboring leader. Abbas had long seen Peres as his natural negotiating partner.

Abbas and Peres met two decades earlier in Washington, DC, when they signed a historic agreement of mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on the White House lawn. They had remained in close contact ever since that day, even when the conflict between their two peoples descended into its darkest hours. In 2005, Abbas became the president of the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous body that was born as a result of the agreement he had signed with Peres. Two years later, the Israeli negotiator became the president of his own country, a mostly symbolic post that he nevertheless used to tirelessly advocate for peace with Israel's neighbors. Just months before his death, Peres was insisting that Abbas was, in his opinion, "an outstanding man who really does want to commit to peace."

As more and more world leaders announced they would attend Peres's funeral in Jerusalem, Abbas consulted with his advisors: should he also take part in the ceremony? While he had been close to Peres, the Israeli leader was still a vastly unpopular figure on the Palestinian street. If Abbas attended the funeral, he would be exposing himself to an onslaught of criticism. This dilemma grew more difficult with each passing moment. On the one hand, the arrival of leading figures like Barack Obama and Charles, Prince of Wales, meant that the funeral could be a chance for Abbas to show his support for the peace process on a global stage. On the other hand, it was becoming clear that no Arab country was going to be represented by its leader at the event — which would make Abbas even more vulnerable to criticism from the Palestinian street if he attended.

"Why do you need this now?" a number of his advisers asked him. Abbas was already unpopular at home — a recent poll showed nearly two-thirds of his people wanted him to resign — and it wasn't as if there were peace talks on the horizon. Why couldn't he just send one of his deputies? Abbas saw the logic of this approach. In his view, there was nothing bad about playing it safe. But the next morning, he surprised his staff by telling them that he was going.

One factor in his decision was a phone call he received from Peres's daughter, who told him that her father would have appreciated him coming to the funeral. Abbas was touched by her plea. Furthermore, some among his staff thought that in showing up he could "disprove Israeli claims that Palestinians only believe in violence." So, twenty-four hours before the funeral began, his office called the Israeli military to inform them that the Palestinian president would pay his last respects to his counterpart in Jerusalem.

On Friday the 29th, just before noon, Abbas's bulletproof motorcade arrived at the Mount Herzl cemetery on Jerusalem's western side. Soon after arriving, he bumped into Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his wife, Sara. The two leaders, who had met only once in the five years prior to the funeral, briefly shook hands and exchanged some polite niceties. Mrs. Netanyahu told Abbas that she and her husband would be happy to welcome him to their official residence in Jerusalem. Abbas smiled and simply mumbled, "long time, long time," a reference to the years that had passed since he had last visited the place.

The antipathy between the two leaders was evident when Netanyahu, during his eulogy of Peres, mentioned many of the dignitaries who had gathered at the cemetery but said nothing of Abbas. In the weeks and months prior to Peres's death, the Israeli premier had publicly accused Abbas of inciting violence and failing to condemn terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens. Netanyahu's frustration with Abbas, whom he saw as partly responsible for the deaths of innocent Israelis, wasn't going to go away simply because he had made a gesture toward the Peres family.

By the time the dust had settled, Abbas was back in a familiar position. His symbolic gesture had garnered him a chorus of condemnation from all walks of Palestinian life and did little in easing the tensions with Israel. His only comfort was the sentence in Obama's eulogy that praised him for making the trip from Ramallah. As ever, Abbas was more popular in Washington than in Ramallah, Gaza, or Jerusalem.

* * *

Mahmoud Abbas was born in 1935 to a modest family in the northern Galilee town of Safed, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Together with his parents and siblings, he fled Safed during the 1948 war and settled in Damascus, Syria. He taught elementary school during the day, while finishing his studies at night, before moving to the oil-rich Qatar to work for the government. There he married his wife, Amina, raised their children, and got involved in the burgeoning arena of Palestinian politics. Before long he had made a name for himself and had joined up with other young Palestinian refugees, including a young man from Gaza named Yasser Arafat, who was the leader of a new Palestinian political organization: Fatah.

Abbas would spend the rest of his life among Fatah's leadership. His military prowess low — he admits in his own memoirs that he was flushed out of a Syrian military academy as a teenager — he viewed the "armed resistance" not as an end but a means. While Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian leadership was fighting Israel out of Beirut, Abbas was with his family in Damascus. He positioned himself as the Palestinian fundraiser and ambassador in residence: he fostered ties with the broader region and world, working especially closely with Soviet Russia (where he completed a controversial doctoral thesis in 1982, which disputed the number of Jewish victims in the Holocaust). By the 1970s and 1980s, he was openly advocating dialogue with Israelis, and a decade later he began to openly support the concept of a "two-state solution," in which a Palestinian state would be established next to Israel in the territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

Abbas's wish became the Palestinian platform with the advent of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Through back channels in London and then Norway, Palestinian negotiators reporting to Abbas, and Israeli negotiators close to then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin's government reached a historic declaration of principles that laid out a path toward a comprehensive peace agreement. The Oslo Accords were a high point of optimism in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After their signing, a new entity — the Palestinian Authority — was established, with Arafat as its leader. Abbas, the architect of this historic achievement, found himself back in the margins afterward. Arafat, Peres, and Rabin all received Nobel Peace Prizes. Abbas got nothing.

The next six years were a frustrating period for Abbas. He led one back-channel attempt to reach a comprehensive peace agreement with Israeli representatives, but the agreement became irrelevant following the tragic assassination of Rabin in 1995. And while the peace process was stuck, Abbas failed to navigate the treacherous waters of Palestinian politics, where his rivals portrayed him as a weak and untrustworthy negotiator who was "too soft" with Israel. In July 2000, when the Clinton administration made one final attempt to reach a peace agreement at the famous Camp David summit, Abbas was so busy protecting his own image that he contributed almost nothing to the negotiations, and in the words of one senior American official present, "was a non-entity."

After the Camp David negotiations collapsed, violence erupted on the streets, leading to thousands of deaths in what came to be known as the Second Intifada, or uprising. During this dark hour, while Arafat was actively supporting terrorism, Abbas emerged as a rare voice of reason and moderation within the Palestinian leadership. He warned Arafat early on about the dangers of unleashing violence against Israel and regularly admonished local leaders for supporting terror attacks. What was happening, Abbas told Gazan leaders in 2002, was the "total destruction of all we have built." Arafat refused to listen, however, and Abbas was again on the outside looking in.

All of that changed in 2003, when Arafat — under considerable pressure from the Bush administration — agreed to create the position of prime minister within the Palestinian Authority and name Abbas for the post. For a few months, Abbas tried to reform the Palestinian institutions, strengthen the government and put an end to the intifada. Yet despite the support he received from Washington, Abbas's tenure as prime minister ended in failure. Arafat refused to budge or cede any power to his deputy, and Abbas eventually gave up. He resigned just months into the job, with nothing but uncertainty about the future.

He had stood up to the "Old Man" however, and when Arafat died in 2004 Abbas became the immediate favorite to replace him. He was named Arafat's successor in November of that year, before winning a presidential election in January 2005. He now had a mandate to strengthen the PA's institutions and engage in peace negotiations with Israel. Yet within a year of his election he suffered a catastrophic setback when his Fatah party was crushed in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections by Hamas, an Islamist party officially designated as a terror organization by the United States.

To make things even worse, in July 2007, a civil war broke out between Abbas's Fatah-dominated PA and Hamas in Gaza. Abbas would lose, his forces would be expelled or killed, and the trajectory of the Palestinian national project would forever change. From this moment on, Abbas would be a president with half a mandate. He could negotiate with Israel, but he could never deliver an agreement to all of his people. Staying in power and preventing a similar takeover in the West Bank would become the primary goal of the rest of his tenure.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was eager to reach a peace agreement with Abbas despite all of that, and in the fall of 2008 he presented to the Palestinian president a far-reaching offer that included an Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and a return of thousands of Palestinian refugees into Israel. Abbas, however, never gave Olmert an answer. Olmert was himself in a weak position at the time, as a number of corruption investigations were about to bring down his government. Palestinian officials insist it wasn't a serious offer, and Americans saw it as a feeble attempt, but, regardless, it was a unique overture from an Israeli premier, one that Abbas ignored.

In 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu replaced Olmert in Israel, while Barack Obama became president of the United States. Abbas was hopeful about the Obama administration, especially after it turned out that he was among the first leaders in the world to receive a phone call from the new president. Yet with time, Abbas's excitement was replaced with disappointment as he saw the American administration devote less and less attention to the peace process. At one point, Palestinian officials even confessed that they were somewhat longing for the previous administration of George W. Bush. Faced with an uninterested White House and an Israeli prime minister whom he didn't trust, Abbas turned toward international legitimacy, launching an auspicious plan to make the world recognize Palestine as the 194th member state in the United Nations.

The "Palestine 194" campaign was Abbas's attempt at subverting the traditional peace process while placating his people. When, in November 2012, Abbas went to the UN General Assembly and upgraded the Palestinian standing, thousands celebrated in the West Bank. That's why when, in 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry offered to sponsor another round of peace negotiations with Netanyahu, Abbas was hesitant. He did not believe anything would come out of these negotiations. Many within his camp preferred making more moves at the UN rather than entering another round of unpopular talks. Yet eventually he entered the talks, only to walk away from a historic peace plan proposed by the Obama administration in March 2014, at his last-ever visit to Barack Obama's White House.

Since the civil war in 2007, Abbas — once a champion of democracy and reform — has gradually turned into an authoritarian. He's fired rivals, persecuted his antagonists, and put allies in key positions within the party. He's attacked union heads, detained journalists, and even sent his PA forces after everyday citizens for their social media posts. There was a point in his life when he viewed negotiations as the way forward for the Palestinian national project, but after coming to power he has appeared less and less interested in that. The primary focus of his reign is on consolidating as much power as he can.

Mahmoud Abbas started his presidency as a man of peace and institutions. More than a decade into his four-year term, he will end it as just another regional autocrat.

* * *

The picture on the cover of this book is of Mahmoud Abbas's first campaign stop. Two months after Yasser Arafat died, Abbas arrived in the northern West Bank town of Jenin to speak to nearly ten thousand Palestinians. It was one of the largest crowds he had ever addressed. He arrived to a mob and was carried through town on people's shoulders. In the picture, he's holding hands and waving while a poster of the Old Man, his mentor, rival, and predecessor Arafat, looks on. Weeks later, he would win the presidency by a comfortable majority. His victory would mark the golden age of Abbas's rule: a one-year period before he lost his parliament, and then Gaza, to his rivals in Hamas. This period would be the height of his political legitimacy in Palestinian politics. He would never approach it again.

Taken together, the arc of Mahmoud Abbas's career bends toward that of a missed opportunity. If Israeli officials were to describe their ideal negotiating partner, they would describe someone almost identical to Abbas, with his aversion to terror and stated willingness to compromise. But the tragedy of Abbas, and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, is in what he doesn't bring to the table. He is not a charismatic leader and thus could not convince his people to modify their version of the national narrative. Peace requires leaders who have both the courage to sign an agreement and the ability to implement it. Abbas appeared at times in his life to have the former. He was never close to having the latter.

Blame is easy to come by in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Surely, Abbas is not the sole reason the Palestinian people do not have their own state. But he has failed to prepare his people for the concessions necessary to live peacefully side by side with Israel. He lost half his territory in 2007 to the Islamist terror group Hamas and then also lost touch with many ordinary Palestinians, who see him and his royal court as detached from the hardships and realities of their life.

And yet, Abbas still occupies a place in the Palestinian political hierarchy few others can claim. When he speaks, he can claim to do so in the name of an entire people. He was born into the British Mandate of Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel, grew up as a refugee outside his homeland, and spent decades working next to the father of the Palestinian national movement, Yasser Arafat. Abbas has personally lived the history of his own people. He is very likely the last Palestinian leader with that kind of pedigree.

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Excerpted from The Last Palestinian by Grant Rumley, Amir Tibon. Copyright © 2017 Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
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