Sidelined over Gaza war, Mahmoud Abbas faces growing calls to quit

Last month the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, flew to the Qatari capital, Doha, for talks on securing a ceasefire in the war in Gaza. That in itself was unusual; the West Bank-based Abbas, who is also chair of the Fatah party and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), has been all but sidelined by local and international actors since the conflict between Israel and Hamas broke out.

According to three sources with knowledge of the meetings, which involved Palestinian and Qatari officials as well as diplomats from around the region, it was suggested that Abbas, 88, should consider shifting to a ceremonial presidential role. Such a move would pave a path for new Palestinian elections and help heal the long-running rift between Fatah and Hamas. It would also allow US-led hopes for a “revitalised”, “single structure” Palestinian Authority (PA) that could take charge in Gaza to move forward, with the eventual aim of restarting peace talks aimed at a two-state solution.

Abbas, whose four-year term expired in 2009, declined to consider the proposal, two Palestinian and one western diplomatic source said, in effect shutting the door on desperately needed reform within the corrupt and undemocratic PA. Abbas’s office and the Qatari foreign ministry did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

“We can’t move forward with Abu Mazen calling the shots,” said Nour Oudeh, a Palestinian political analyst, using Abbas’s well-known kunya. “There needs to be buy-in across the Palestinian public and political spectrum. The [PA] is weak and has made itself irrelevant. We can’t just put some makeup on it and make it look pretty … We are too far gone in Gaza for that now.”

In the five months since Hamas attacked Israel, sparking the worst war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much has been made of how Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, appears to be slow-walking ceasefire talks.

Facing multiple corruption trials, Netanyahu seems to believe he stands a better chance of beating the charges if he remains in office, and elections are unlikely while Israel is at war. Until 7 October, his efforts to sideline the peace process with the Palestinians were largely successful.

But Abbas, too, stands in the way of meaningful progress towards a two-state solution. A year after he entered office in 2005, his secular Fatah party lost parliamentary elections to the Islamist Hamas, leading to a brief civil war in which the PA lost control of Gaza.

There have been no elections in the occupied Palestinian territories since. In 2021, after polling showed he would lose, Abbas cancelled scheduled elections, a decision that helped to spark that year’s war in Gaza.

Today, most Palestinians regard the PA as little more than a subcontractor for Israeli security, working hand in hand with the occupation to oppress its own people. In an opinion poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in December, 90% of respondents said Abbas should resign and 60% called for the PA to be totally dismantled.

Mustafa Barghouti, the general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative party, which bills itself as a “third way” between Fatah and Hamas, said: “I have worked on unity initiatives with Hamas for years and I am certain that if we had had elections in 2021, 7 October and this war could have been avoided.”

Recently there have been some indications of openness to change from the West Bank’s political establishment, although critics note it means little as long as Abbas remains in office. Last week his cabinet and the prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, resigned. In a televised statement, Shtayyeh said the “next phase” required “a new government and political arrangements that take into account the new reality in the Gaza Strip, national unity and the urgent need for achieving inter-Palestinian consensus”.

Over the weekend, delegations from Hamas and Fatah held talks in Moscow aimed at forming a new technocratic government to serve until elections can be held, and bringing Hamas under the umbrella of the PLO. While unity talks are held about once a year, there has never been so much at stake. Any new administration in Gaza must have the tacit approval of Hamas to function.

Many stumbling blocks remain. Israel and the west regard Hamas as an untouchable political operator, but Palestinian analysts say attempts at reunifying the West Bank and Gaza will have to involve the Islamist movement.

The PLO recognised the state of Israel in 1993, a development that led to the creation of the PA, which was supposed to be an interim government before the creation of a fully independent Palestinian state. An acknowledgement from Hamas that it respects the PLO’s position on Israel would go a long way towards making the Islamist group more palatable for outside actors.

“It is counterproductive to think that Hamas will not survive, or not continue to be an important player after the war,” Oudeh said. “I am not saying it can be turned into something it is not, or that it should be part of any government, but that voice has to be part of the conversation going forward. Hamas’s political wing is more pragmatic than it is given credit for … They begged the outside world to engage with it for years.”

A former member of a western secret service who was stationed in the region echoed Oudeh’s point. “We always assessed that Hamas would need to be brought in from the cold at some point,” they said. “Since 7 October, that has become a difficult sell.”

Even if the new war had not erupted, time to rejuvenate the PA was already running out. Abbas is in ill health and has never appointed an official successor. Instead, it is widely expected that the president’s ally Hussein al-Sheikh, appointed secretary general of the PA’s executive committee in 2022, or economic adviser Mohammed Mustafa, would take over.

Abbas’s bitter rival Marwan Barghouti, serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison, enjoys the most public support by far, and Mohammed Dahlan, another enemy living in self-imposed exile in Abu Dhabi, is believed to have maintained links to armed groups in the West Bank and Gaza.

Power struggles within Fatah could escalate the violence already engulfing the Palestinian territories; in the event of a major power vacuum, Hamas would be all but certain to step into the void.

Palestinian political reform is not in some Israelis’ interests. Over the last 20 or so years, Netanyahu has preferred to keep the Palestinian leadership weak and divided between the two geographically separate areas. He has repeatedly said since the war broke out that Israel would not accept the return of the PA to rule in both Gaza and the West Bank, despite Washington’s wishes.

“The west keeps talking about ‘revitalising’ the PA so that it has legitimacy. There’s no such thing. We need to start again completely … because we are back to 1948,” said Barghouti, referring to the creation of the state of Israel. “This isn’t about revitalising the system. It’s about rebirth.”