Anchal Vohra
As the United States tries to prepare for the day after Hamas is uprooted as the governing force in the Gaza Strip, it is once again courting a familiar Palestinian to assume responsibility for the enclave. The problem is that the would-be savior is also vastly unpopular.
On a visit to Ramallah last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Palestinian Authority (PA) must play a pivotal role in the future of Gaza and looked to its president, Mahmoud Abbas, to provide any future plan with legitimacy.
Abbas, 87 years old, said that the PA was ready to step in, but only “within the framework of a comprehensive political solution”—a solution that he argues would necessitate creating an independent Palestinian state that includes all of the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem in its entirety.
The West knows Abbas and believes that it can bank on him as a man of peace. His credentials were burnished in the midst of the Second Intifada, when he had the courage to warn his firebrand boss, Yasser Arafat, against instigating violence. (Although at the time, Abbas was known to cite pragmatic considerations rather than moral conviction, saying, “We are losing control over the street”) Over nearly three decades as PA president, he has consistently opposed an armed rebellion as a means to pressure Israel and the West into obtaining statehood—but he has also failed in securing lasting peace, including in the territories he oversees.
On Thursday, Nov. 9, I called a leader from Abbas’s party who was in Jenin, a restive locality in the occupied West Bank, only to discover he was in the midst of a raid by Israeli security forces. He said he was surrounded by guns and that he couldn’t speak. “The situation is very bad; the soldiers are everywhere,” he managed to say before getting off the phone.
Such raids are common in parts of the West Bank, particularly in Jenin, which is home to some militants—including members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the groups that carried out the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel.
While Palestinians see such raids as a sign of Abbas’s collusion with Israel, the Israeli security apparatus sees them as a necessary compensation for his inability to contain radicalism in areas in which he is in charge. And yet, Israel is still hoping that it can count on Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to assuage the concerns of the wider Arab and Islamic world that Gaza will remain a Palestinian territory. Hamas and Israel’s far right, which leads its government, may have thus cooperated in handing Abbas a date with destiny and a final chance to push for a two-state solution.
Hassan Jabareen, the founder of a legal aid nongovernmental organization for Arab Israelis called Adalah, said that from Abbas’s viewpoint, he may be the last man standing. “He thinks: ‘I am now becoming the real card in negotiations, the politician the international community can speak with.’ He thinks that he didn’t have Hamas’s army, but because he is a peaceful person who chose a clear way of peace, he is the only person who remains. This is how he sees it,” Jabareen said. “Both [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s Likud and Hamas weakened him, but the weak person became relevant now.”
Palestinians may not agree. At a garment shop in the Muslim quarters of East Jerusalem down the stairs from Damascus Gate, which leads to the Old City, 73-year-old Yassir was furious at Abu Mazen, a nickname for Abbas.
“I want him gone—he shouldn’t be Palestinian president,” said Yassir, who only gave his first name out of security concerns. “Thousands have been killed in Gaza, and what has he done? He coordinates with Israel,” Yassir added, referencing the PA’s security coordination with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in parts of the West Bank.
Yassir was 17 in 1967 and vividly remembers how Israeli forces rounded up Palestinian men and boys, including him. Since that day, he has waited for Israelis to leave or at least for the creation of an independent Palestinian state where he can live with his seven children and 17 grandchildren without frequent frisking by security forces. He feels let down by Abbas, as do many others who say that Israeli settlements have expanded under his nose and that the right to movement and family reunification remains limited, while the peace talks—sold by Abbas as the panacea to all their problems—have yielded nothing.
A few meters away, 54-year-old Riyad Deis stood in his spice shop, surrounded by jute bags packed to the brim with cinnamon, cardamom, and star anise, expressing his positive feelings about Hamas’s attack. He said he felt immense pride at the audacity of the attack even though he didn’t support the killing of “any civilians,” although he refused to respond when asked if he mourned the death of Israelis.
“We don’t like PA or Abbas because we see ourselves as freedom fighters, and Abbas wants to negotiate,” Deis said. (Nearly half of Palestinians believe that they can achieve their political goals through the barrel of the gun and not negotiations.) In a reflection of the internal conflict among Palestinians, Deis then contradicted himself. “In a way he is wise—he wants a compromise. At the end of the day, even people from Gaza tell me that they want to live, love their children, and sleep next to their wives. The trouble is that his peace—it is an unjust peace.”
Palestinians such as Deis fear that Abbas may concede more than they are ready for. In a televised interview in 2012, Abbas seemed to have relinquished the right to return of Palestinian refugees scattered all over the world when he said he will not ask for a right to return to his ancestral home in Safed in the Galilee, which he was forced to leave along with his family back in 1948. He is also criticized for clinging to power (he was elected in 2005 for a term meant to end in 2009) and not letting a second rung of Palestinian leaders gain experience and legitimacy while he is still alive.
Abbas’s many failings have made him an immensely unpopular Palestinian president, with as many as 80 percent wanting him to resign, according to a recent poll conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. The PA was founded as an interim body in 1994 under the Oslo Accords to govern Gaza and parts of the West Bank until an independent state was formed, but it has continued in the absence of a settlement, which irks Palestinians who find it redundant for not achieving its goal.
And Israelis lack faith in him, too. Eran Lerman, Israel’s deputy national security advisor between 2006 and 2015, rebuffed Blinken’s comment that an “effective and revitalized” PA should ultimately run the strip. He said in an interview with Foreign Policy that “if Blinken wants an effective PA, he may have to invent it.”
“The way the PA is currently constituted is simply not fit for the mission. They cannot survive a week in control. They are unable to manage security even in Area A [of the West Bank] without constant operations by the IDF against Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists,” he said, referencing radicalism in the part of the West Bank that falls under full civilian and security control of the PA under the Oslo agreement. “Their capabilities are not up to the challenge even in the West Bank—Gaza is simply beyond their capacity.” Lerman added.
Blinken has perhaps factored that in, hence his recommendation that international institutions step in to provide basic services and security in the Palestinian enclaves.
But Israelis are not so keen on handing over security to peacekeepers from the United Nations. Netanyahu has said that Israel will be in charge of security in Gaza “for an indefinite period.” Many other Israelis doubt the usefulness of U.N. peacekeepers. “They are in Lebanon, but they couldn’t stop Hezbollah from firing into Israel,” Lerman said. He added that one idea is to instead recruit a different multinational law enforcement force to maintain security, along the lines of the group operating in Egypt’s Sinai region to ensure the implementation of its 1979 treaty with Israel.
But Palestinian experts and politicians dismiss all of that planning as wishful thinking. Ali Jarbawi, a former minister of the PA and a professor of political science, sardonically responded to the prospect of international security forces by saying “Ahlan wa Sahlan,” which means welcome in Arabic.
Jabareen, the founder of Adalah, instead envisaged a reconciliation between Hamas and the PA in the end, in the name of nationalist camaraderie. “I think the decision will be that the PA will be in Gaza and in the West Bank, one authority for one people, and Hamas will make way for the PA [to] give it legitimacy in exchange for survival.”
Despite many of his failings, Abbas dismantled the military wing of his Fatah party, kept the West Bank relatively quiet, successfully avoided another uprising, and warned about Hamas repeatedly. In 2009, he quoted Hamas’s own leaders in arguing they didn’t care if “Gaza was erased.” The current state of affairs in Gaza may have proved him right.
Some, particularly in the West, argue that as the main architect of the Oslo Accords, Abbas is still the best bet to peacefully resolve the conflict instead of getting mired in another round of insurgency and even more bloodshed in the Gaza Strip. Others, including many Israelis and Palestinians, say they are happy to wait him out and deal with a new leadership whenever it emerges.
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