The Fall and Fall of Mahmoud Abbas

For nearly two decades, Palestinian leadership has been fractured. Along with a basic division between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, numerous other groups have competed for influence. In late July, leaders of all 14 Palestinian political factions, including Fatah and Hamas, met in Beijing to issue a call for national unity. The agreement they signed, known as the Beijing Declaration, promised to create a consensus government presiding over both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, to reform and expand the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and to hold national elections.

Such proposals are not new and largely reiterate the principles set out in previous reconciliation accords. But they have taken on much greater urgency in light of Israel’s unprecedented war on Gaza. As of mid-August, the Israeli assault launched in response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel had killed more than 40,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—forcibly displaced two million people, and reduced most of the territory to rubble. It has become the deadliest moment in Palestinian history and the most destructive episode in the century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Amid this crisis, the Beijing Declaration provides a road map to a different Palestinian future, one with credible leadership and functioning political institutions that will be essential for the day after the war.

Yet despite the gravity of the situation, Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah in the West Bank, has—through a spokesman—disparaged the Beijing Declaration as unhelpful and insignificant. (Abbas sent a Fatah representative to the talks in his place.) It is puzzling that a political leader, especially one as deeply unpopular as Abbas, in a moment of national trauma and existential despair, should show such open contempt for a display of national unity. Perhaps he sensed that Hamas’s back was against the wall and thus felt no sense of urgency to share power with the group. Or maybe he did not want to defy U.S. and Israeli officials, who, in the wake of October 7, are dead set against any political accommodation with Hamas. Either way, Abbas’s arrogant dismissal of the plan highlighted two hallmarks of his nearly 20 years in power—a profound disconnect with his people and an unwillingness to promote a coherent strategy for Palestinian liberation. If the Palestinians’ painful history has taught them anything, it is that bad things happen to them when they don’t have credible leaders. Such is the case with Abbas today.

Once seen as a promising peacemaker and political reformer, Abbas has steadily devolved into an erratic and small-minded authoritarian with a virtually unbroken record of failure. Although some of these setbacks were the result of forces beyond his control, particularly during the first few years of his rule, most have been self-inflicted. A short list of these own goals would include letting a debilitating internal political schism fester, creating an environment of growing corruption and authoritarianism, and, what is most crucial, failing to put forth a coherent strategy for national liberation. Nowhere have Abbas’s shortcomings been more evident—and consequential—than in Gaza, home to roughly 40 percent of all Palestinians under Israeli occupation and from which his own Palestinian Authority was expelled by Hamas in 2007. Abbas has consistently avoided dealing with Gaza’s problems, allowing the territory to paralyze internal Palestinian politics and repeatedly foil peace negotiations.

Now, amid a terrible and unending war, Abbas has an opportunity to mitigate some of the damage done to Palestinians and to his own legacy by pursuing Palestinian unity. And yet even at this most decisive moment in Palestinian history, Abbas remains a helpless bystander, with little say in either war or peace. Of course, he was not solely to blame for the neglect of the Palestinian question, which led to the October 7 attack—Hamas, Israel, the United States and even the peace process itself all undoubtedly played a role. But Abbas’s deficient leadership contributed to the conditions that precipitated the war, and his lacking vision for the future is helping to sustain it now.

SETBACK AFTER SETBACK

The problems with Abbas’s leadership of the PA have a long history. His tenure got off to an auspicious start in January 2005, following the death of Yasir Arafat, the PLO chairman and founding president of the PA who had towered over Palestinian politics for decades. But Abbas was quickly confronted by one setback after another. Two key developments in particular—the failure of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in late 2005 and the collapse of the national unity government and ensuing civil war in Gaza in 2007—effectively doomed his leadership. Abbas had come to office focused on the twin goals of unifying the fractious Palestinian factions under his rule and securing a peace deal that would end decades of Israeli occupation and lead to an independent Palestinian state. Unlike Arafat, who often sought to leverage political violence, Abbas was firmly committed to diplomacy. Indeed, the soft-spoken, grandfatherly Abbas, who will turn 89 in November, was everything his larger-than-life predecessor was not. Abbas was decidedly uncharismatic and notoriously averse to crowds. His disposition was more that of a school headmaster than the leader of a liberation movement.

Within a month of taking office, Abbas was able to unite the various Palestinian factions to back a cease-fire agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, quietly ending more than four years of bloodshed during the second intifada. Abbas hoped to use the calm to lay the groundwork for diplomacy, but Sharon had no interest in a peace process. Instead, he put forward a radical plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip, a move that was aimed not at advancing a two-state solution but rather, as Sharon’s chief of staff Dov Weissglas described it, at putting Palestinian statehood in “formaldehyde.” Israel effectively closed Gaza’s borders, sending its economy into a tailspin. The failure of Israel’s unilateral disengagement, although not Abbas’s fault, set off a chain of events from which he would never recover.

To begin with, Hamas’s surprise electoral victory in national elections in January 2006 effectively ended four decades of Fatah dominance over Palestinian politics. This was a major blow not only to Abbas but also to the U.S.-led peace process. Although Abbas hoped to encourage Hamas’s political moderation, the United States and Israel adopted a zero-sum approach to the group, which they designated as a terrorist organization: they categorically refused any dealings with Hamas until it laid down its arms and recognized Israel. As Israel withheld tax revenues that made up the bulk of the PA’s budget, the United States imposed an international boycott of the new Hamas-led government, devastating the Palestinian economy and briefly pushing the PA to the brink of collapse.

Abbas has steadily devolved into an erratic and small-minded authoritarian.

Hoping to diffuse the crisis, Abbas struck a unity deal with Hamas in February 2007, known as the Mecca accord, in which Hamas agreed to relinquish control over most PA ministries to Fatah. Although the deal was backed by Saudi Arabia and Washington’s other Arab allies, the United States and Israel continued to reject any arrangement that allowed Hamas to remain in government. Instead, the Bush administration pressed Abbas to dissolve the government and call for new elections, an extraordinary and unconstitutional move. Abbas was faced with an impossible choice—either overturn the results of a democratic election and trigger a civil war or risk indefinite international isolation and the eventual collapse of the PA. As U.S. and Israeli pressure mounted, fighting broke out between Hamas and the PA in June 2007, ending with Hamas’s forcible takeover of Gaza and the expulsion of the PA from the territory. A humiliated Abbas dissolved the putative unity government and accused Hamas of staging a coup in Gaza. Israel rewarded Abbas by lifting its siege of the West Bank and punished Gaza with a full blockade.

The collapse of the Mecca accord and the ensuing civil war of 2007 solidified the emerging divisions in Palestinian politics and ensured continued instability in Gaza. It is unclear whether the United States and Israel were prepared to bring down the PA and the entire edifice of the Oslo accords in order to keep Hamas out of Palestinian politics. But by prioritizing the demands of a U.S.-led peace process over national unity, Abbas guaranteed that he would have neither.

The split with Hamas left Abbas’s leadership permanently hobbled—too weak to be a credible peace partner and too dependent on the United States and Israel to pursue meaningful national unity. This became evident almost immediately, with the relaunch of peace negotiations in Annapolis in late 2007. The talks lasted a year, until war broke out between Israel and Hamas in December 2008. At the time, this was the deadliest conflict that had ever taken place in Gaza and the first of several bloody wars in the years that followed. The Israeli offensive, which left some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead, seriously eroded Abbas’s support. Many Palestinians now regarded him not only as powerless to stop the assault but also, given his feud with Hamas, as complicit in it.

Months later, Abbas was forced to relive the nightmare following the release of the Goldstone report, a UN-commissioned investigation into the Gaza war of 2008–9, which accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes. When the Goldstone report came up for a vote in the UN in late 2009, Abbas came under intense U.S. and Israeli pressure to ask his allies to delay the vote, which he did, setting off a firestorm. For many Palestinians, Abbas’s willingness to abandon the Gazans who were killed in the war as well as relinquish a crucial piece of leverage against their Israeli occupiers was tantamount to treason. Despite Abbas’s attempts at damage control, including a halfhearted offer to resign, the Goldstone debacle marked a new low point in his presidency. Now politically paralyzed, Abbas spent the next year avoiding U.S. entreaties to resume direct negotiations with Israel, agreeing only to participate in indirect “proximity talks,” in which U.S. officials communicated separately with Palestinian and Israeli negotiators. Even after Washington managed to convince Abbas to relaunch direct negotiations in September 2010, they collapsed within only a few weeks.

DEATH BY TRIANGULATION

The Arab Spring uprisings, which began in late 2010 and continued to spread across the Middle East through much of 2011, caused more headaches for Abbas. In early 2011, a popular revolt led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s longtime strongman and Abbas’s most important ally in the Arab world. After Mubarak’s ouster, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—an ally to Hamas—briefly gained power, emboldening Abbas’s rivals. Moreover, Abbas’s legitimacy weakened as the PA continued to be divided, corrupt, and repressive. The protests spread to the West Bank and Gaza. With demonstrators calling for an end to divisions between Fatah and Hamas, Abbas was forced to back away from the U.S.-led peace process and to pursue national unity. In May 2011, he signed a reconciliation deal with Hamas, which called for the formation of a national consensus government made up of technocrats unaffiliated with any faction, as well as new presidential and legislative elections. At the same time, he pursued UN membership.

Although hugely popular at home, both measures elicited a punitive response from the United States and Israel. As a result, Abbas was forced to tread lightly, dragging his feet on the implementation of the reconciliation pact with Hamas while slowly teasing out his UN bid. He got a much-needed domestic boost when, in November 2012, the UN General Assembly finally voted to recognize Palestine as a nonmember state. The new status allowed Palestinians to join other international bodies, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Despite fleeting moments of defiance, however, Abbas was too reliant on the United States to pull away completely. His adherence to the U.S.-led peace process became a domestic liability because most Palestinians saw it as highly lopsided and ineffective. Abbas tried to balance these conflicting interests by pursuing three pathways simultaneously: internal reconciliation, the internationalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the UN and other multilateral forums, and U.S.-sponsored negotiations with Israel. But instead of weaving all three tracks into a single, coherent plan for national liberation, Abbas vacillated among each of these priorities while fully committing to none. When one track was used up or became too costly, Abbas simply pivoted to the next. Thus when negotiations under U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry collapsed (rather predictably) in March 2014 after just nine months, Abbas switched tacks by entering 15 international agreements and organizations and signing yet another reconciliation agreement with Hamas.

The split with Hamas left Abbas’s leadership permanently hobbled.

But Abbas remained powerless to influence events in Gaza. The outbreak of yet another devastating war in the territory in 2014, which left some 2,200 Palestinians and 70 Israelis dead, once again undercut Abbas’s domestic standing. Many Palestinians were outraged at the PA, perceiving that it had sided with Israel and the United States against Hamas. To quell the anger, Abbas joined the International Criminal Court in early 2015—a step that many Israelis regarded as a nuclear option and that Abbas had, until then, studiously avoided. The decision triggered fresh sanctions against the PA by Israel and the United States. Abbas was now trapped in a downward cycle largely of his own making: the weaker he became, the more he felt compelled to distance himself from Israel and the peace process, but the more he defied U.S. and Israeli officials, the more sanctions he faced and the weaker he became.

By 2015, the walls had begun to close in on Abbas. Abbas won a momentary spike in popularity by joining the ICC. But the step also signaled that he had taken the internationalization track as far as it could go. Meanwhile, the reelection of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who headed an even more right-wing coalition than before, ended any chance of resuming peace negotiations. The diplomatic stasis and the urgent need to reconstruct Gaza presented an opportune moment to finally put the Palestinians’ own house in order, but Abbas once again stalled. Both the United States and Israel softened their stance toward Palestinian reconciliation, hinting that they could work with (or at least live with) the consensus government. But the consensus government, which was still not operating in Gaza, was dissolved by Abbas barely a year after its formation, delaying reconstruction efforts in the war-shattered enclave. Although Hamas had, by agreeing to power sharing, indicated a willingness to give up its governance role in the territory, Abbas was reluctant to inherit Gaza’s myriad social, economic, and security problems, for which he had few solutions. Moreover, he was even less keen on sharing power with Hamas in an expanded and reformed PLO. During this time, Abbas’s popularity slumped to an all-time low, with nearly two-thirds of Palestinians saying they preferred him to resign—a proportion that would only climb over the years. Public speculation over who might succeed the aging leader became a national preoccupation.

ABBAS, THE TYRANT

As his strategy of bouncing between tracks began to wear thin, and with his domestic legitimacy hemorrhaging, Abbas grew more autocratic and paranoid. He began lashing out at would-be rivals and challengers, both real and imagined. His list of internal enemies grew and included the former Gazan security chief Muhammad Dahlan, former premier Salam Fayyad, and senior PLO figure Yasir Abed Rabbo. Abbas had effectively ruled by decree since 2007, without parliamentary or institutional oversight of any kind. To mask the arbitrariness of his rule, he created a new Supreme Constitutional Court in 2016, which he stacked with loyalists to rubber stamp his decisions. Two years later, Abbas resurrected the Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s long-dormant parliament in exile, for the first time in 22 years, in order to elect a new executive committee; it dutifully reappointed him as its chair and conveniently renewed his mandate as PA president, dispensing with the need for elections. Though such measures were condemned by civil society and opposition groups, Abbas persisted. By the close of 2018, Abbas used his newfound powers to formally dissolve the PA’s (largely idle) legislative council.

Having tethered himself so completely to the sinking ship of a U.S.-led peace process, Abbas left himself exposed to the pendulum swings of both U.S. and Israeli politics over the next several years. Abbas initially tried to ingratiate himself to U.S. President Donald Trump but was forced to change course in late 2017 when Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, overturning 70 years of U.S. policy. Abbas then took the uncomfortable—and for the PA, unprecedented—step of declaring that the United States could no longer be part of the peace process.

But Trump was only getting started. Over the next few years, his administration threw all it could at Abbas, severing all aid to Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories, reversing U.S. policies on settlements by declaring them legal, doing away with the land-for-peace formula, and even dispensing with the idea that Palestinians lived under Israeli occupation. (Trump called the territories “disputed” or simply “Judea and Samaria.”) Ironically, Trump’s anti-Palestinian onslaught inadvertently helped Abbas’s flagging leadership. In response to Trump’s so-called deal of the century, a purported peace settlement that granted Israel nearly all of its key demands, and growing talk among Israelis of formal annexation in the West Bank, Abbas carried through on his long-standing threat to cut security ties with Israel, giving the beleaguered leader a fleeting popularity bump. Moreover, the Abraham Accords­—the normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signed in September 2020—forced Palestinians to come together to defend their liberation struggle, which had effectively been sidelined. The accords marked a departure in foreign policy for many Arab countries, which previously held that they would only forge formal diplomatic ties with Israel in exchange for concessions to the Palestinians. Within days of the Abraham Accords being inked, Fatah and Hamas signed their most far-reaching reconciliation deal to date, which for the first time ever included a schedule for presidential and legislative elections.

Abbas left himself exposed to the pendulum swings of both U.S. and Israeli politics.

If there was ever a chance for Abbas to rewrite his legacy, the national elections slated for the spring and summer of 2021 should have been it. Even though Fatah and Hamas tried to pre-cook the outcome, there was genuine popular enthusiasm at the prospect of reviving Palestinian politics after years of stagnation, with 36 electoral lists and more than 1,300 candidates set to participate in the first national elections in 15 years. In January 2021, however, President Joe Biden had taken office, and once again, Abbas subordinated the needs of his people in an effort to curry favor with the new administration in Washington.

First, Abbas swiftly resumed security coordination with Israel and made other gestures to get back in Washington’s good graces. The sentiment was not mutual. Biden restored aid to the Palestinians but was not prepared to invest major political capital in either the Palestinians or a two-state solution. Nevertheless, with the thaw in relations with the United States, Abbas again felt comfortable freezing domestic politics. As the Palestinian elections drew near, Abbas grew nervous about the prospects of his Fatah party, which remained deeply divided. With just over three weeks before the vote, Abbas canceled the elections, triggering widespread outrage among Palestinians. The decision was met with silence from Washington.

Abbas’s decision to scrap the elections proved to be among the most consequential moves of his political career. Holding the vote would have ended the debilitating schism with Hamas by folding the group into formal politics and might even have prevented the October 7 attack, since Hamas would have largely lost its ability to act as a free agent. Instead, by canceling the vote, Abbas sealed his disastrous legacy and accelerated his political demise. A few weeks after he abandoned the elections, PA security forces murdered Nizar Banat, a popular activist and critic of Abbas, sparking weeks of protests and underscoring the moral rot of Abbas’s administration.

As Israel’s current war in Gaza has unfolded, Abbas has remained impotent and irrelevant, and even his fiefdom in the West Bank has begun to crumble. With a cash-strapped PA struggling to pay salaries, Israel’s violent crackdown on armed insurgents across the northern West Bank has upended life for ordinary Palestinians and forced PA security forces out of parts of the northern West Bank.

THANK YOU, NEXT

Of course, any Palestinian leader faces significant constraints on power. Because of the Palestinians’ statelessness and the PA’s subordination to Israel, no Palestinian leader can influence outcomes in the same ways that an Israeli or U.S. counterpart can. Despite the limitations Abbas has faced, there have been times when he showed he was capable of significant accomplishments, often at great risk. He managed to resist U.S. and Israeli sanctions to obtain nonmember UN status for Palestine in 2012 and to join the ICC in 2015. In fact, it was Abbas’s campaign to build international support for the Palestinians through multilateral bodies that paved the way for the International Court of Justice’s investigation of Israel for the crime of genocide this year and for the ICC prosecutor to request arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders. But Abbas has been willing to challenge the United States and Israel only when it served him personally, such as by improving his domestic standing. He has not been willing to take the same risks in the service of his people, for instance by ending the rift with Hamas, which would have required some form of power sharing.

Abbas’s central dilemma has always been how to balance the need for a peace deal with Israel with the imperative for national unity. What Abbas, and Israeli and U.S. leaders, have failed to understand, however, is that without national reconciliation there is virtually no hope for a durable peace with Israel. By sacrificing Palestinian political cohesiveness and his own domestic legitimacy on the altar of a U.S.-led peace process, Abbas has done immeasurable damage to the Palestinian struggle. Israel reinforced the Palestinian rift through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has proved to be equally shortsighted and detrimental, as the October 7 attack has demonstrated.

But Abbas will not be around forever, and it is crucial that the Palestinians look forward to a successor who can finally overcome the tensions that have paralyzed Abbas’s leadership from the outset. Abbas’s successor will have to resolve this dilemma by unifying the fractured Palestinian polity, including incorporating Hamas into formal political structures, such as the PLO. This will be very hard for Israeli and U.S. officials to swallow, but the group is not going to go away, and allowing it to continue acting as a free agent would be even worse. With or without the support of the United States, the next Palestinian leader must articulate a clear vision for national unity and liberation—one that is no longer beholden to a dysfunctional and obsolete peace process.