Palestinian Authority’s Abbas has ‘cut down’ every potential successor

Ghaith al-Omari has long been a key player in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, acting as a Palestinian negotiator at the 2000 Camp David Summit convened by then-US president Bill Clinton and again at the 2001 Taba Summit in Egypt. He was an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas until 2006. With the peace process stalled since 2014, he now works as a senior fellow at the Washington Institute’s Irwin Levy Family Program on the US-Israel Strategic Relationship.

Al-Omari was in Paris last week to unveil the Whispered in Gaza project – a series of short animated films based on the testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza – at the French National Assembly. 

>> Click here for the first part of the interview

After discussing the despair of Palestinian youth in the first of this two-part interview series, al-Omari spoke about the political situation in the occupied West Bank under the 87-year-old Abbas, whose leadership has not been subject to democratic contestation since the last Palestinian presidential elections in 2005 and the last legislative elections in 2006.

What is your assessment of the situation in the West Bank as Abbas clings to power?

There’s a political and security vacuum in the West Bank that is prompting its people to abandon their government and institutions and turn to other actors. For example, the courts in the West Bank are so under-resourced it takes years for them to reach a verdict. And when one finally arrives, it takes years to enforce it. So people no longer look to the authorities to solve their problems – and that only adds to the government’s lack of legitimacy in the eyes of many in the West Bank.

In every town, every area in the West Bank, people are taking matters into their own hands because the authorities are unable to ensure their security. That explains – in part – the emergence of small armed groups in the West Bank. In the town of Jenin, it’s Islamic Jihad [an armed Islamist group] that dominates, alongside other small groups. In Hebron, further south, it’s tribes and clans which are maintaining the peace.

The Palestinian Authority’s loss of control and legitimacy both illustrates and feeds its weakness. When you have weakness, when you have weak government institutions, any shock can make the system collapse. And we are afraid that when Abbas leaves the scene – either because of old age or for political reasons – he’ll leave a power vacuum behind him, a power vacuum he’s had a hand in creating.

In such a situation, the possibility of the Palestinian Authority collapsing would become even more serious. 

Aren’t there any promising candidates who could replace Abbas?

Palestinian political life has never been democratic, but it was once vibrant and active. That doesn’t exist any longer; Mahmoud Abbas has systematically made sure that every time a new leader starts becoming popular, he cuts them down. When [Abbas’s long-serving predecessor Yasser] Arafat died – and throughout Arafat’s leadership – there were always two or three people who were potential candidates. […] Today, you cannot identify specific leaders because Abbas undermines them. Mohammed Dahlan [the former security chief in Gaza, now living in exile], for example, was pushed out. [Arafat’s nephew] Nasser al-Qidwa was also pushed out 10 years ago. So everyone Abbas disagrees with, he pushes away.

Today, I can name ten people who think they’re going to be the next president. None of them is strong enough. None of them has enough popularity; none of them has enough support. So we could very well [get] into a situation where, if Abbas leaves, we will have a contest about who will take over after him. This contest [could] become violent. We know today there are a lot of guns in the West Bank. We know today that many of the potential successors are buying guns, buying support. Because there is no clarity, there is no legal mechanism, and there are no strong candidates, the possibility of a long, violent process [of succession] has become credible […] It is no longer a far-fetched scenario.

You’re quite critical of the Abbas era in your writings, including the diplomatic strategy that led the Palestinian Authority to seek full sovereignty status at the UN.

Well, I’m not the only one to produce such a critical assessment. Recent polls by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research show that about 80 percent of Palestinians see the Palestinian Authority as corrupt and the same proportion think Abbas should leave power. Abbas is very much associated with the peace process, with the generation of Palestinian politicians who negotiated and signed the Oslo Accords [in 1993]. But the failure of the peace process means this is no longer a source of legitimacy.

When the peace process failed, the Palestinian Authority tried to make itself look relevant by going to the UN, trying to join the UN, et cetera. There [were] two problems with this approach, though: To join the UN, you have to have the Security Council vote for you. The US, which is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, was always very clear that it was not going to allow this to happen.

More than that, the Palestinian Authority was not willing to make a compromise position. In 2011, when the Palestinian Authority applied to become a member, France, which is a permanent member, and Jordan, which was the Arab member, tried to convince the Palestinian Authority to soften the resolution so it could succeed. They refused. So that’s the first problem. It failed.

The second problem is that – even when it succeeds: the Palestinian Authority succeeded in joining some UN agencies – yes, it creates excitement on the day when the noise comes, but it doesn’t change reality for Palestinians. If you’re a Palestinian, you can be happy when you see the TV footage but when your life doesn’t change the next day and the next week, you give up on this. So today most Palestinians believe that when you go to the UN, it doesn’t give you anything. The Palestinian Authority continues to do it because it has nothing else to do, but this does not resonate anymore. It does not capture the imagination of the public in Palestine.

You were once a close adviser to Abbas. Why did decide to leave your position in 2006?

Abbas is someone who many rallied around because we felt when he was prime minister [under Arafat], he was a leader who was committed to reform, to non-violence, to diplomacy.

When he became president, he remained committed to diplomacy and non-violence. To this day, he is. But we realised that he was not a reformist leader – that he allowed corruption [and] resisted reform.

I decided to leave when it was clear to me that President Abbas was trying to undermine a reformist prime minister we had at the time named Salam Fayyad. He had the potential to create a clean, effective, efficient Palestinian government; to start building a real economy. And Abbas and his [allies] undermined him. That’s when I felt I couldn’t work in that system anymore.

Could this chaotic situation in the West Bank benefit Hamas?

Absolutely. Hamas is doing everything it can to encourage an explosion in the West Bank and a collapse of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas’s view in general is that if the Palestinian Authority collapses, then they are the “last man standing” and they become the only [actor] for the international community and for the region to deal with. 

So Hamas is doing this in a number of ways. First of all, we know that it is trying to get its terrorist cells in the West Bank to conduct terror attacks. There are reports on a daily basis of these terrorist cells being dismantled. 

Second, Hamas is also trying to support some of these groups. Look at the group Lion’s Den in [the city of] Nablus. This [group was] not created by Hamas; most of the members are not Hamas. But Hamas is now trying to pay money to this group and other groups just to encourage them. In the past, Hamas would only pay money to its supporters. Today, they’re willing to pay money to anyone who is willing to shoot.

Three, Hamas doesn’t want a war in Gaza, because a war in Gaza ultimately damages Hamas. But Hamas might be willing to start a war in Gaza, especially [during] Ramadan – if they feel this will create ripple effects, spillover effects, in the West Bank. Two years ago, during Ramadan, Hamas initiated a war with Israel – I think primarily in order to destabilise the West Bank.  

So a combination of the three: using terror, encouraging these small groups, and maybe instigating a confrontation in Gaza. And of course this is all happening in the context where, every day, the messaging against the Palestinian Authority is calling them traitors; calling security co-operation treason. 

This article was adapted from the original in French.