RAMALLAH, West Bank — Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’ age and health concerns have forced his supporters to now more seriously grapple with discomforting questions about the country’s leadership succession.
Abbas, 82, has been in power since 2005 but is reportedly battling stomach cancer. On April 30, he was supposed to chair a rare Palestinian parliament session where, among other topics, it would have a vote to replace members of the Executive Committee and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Central Council. The election will reflect the government’s reinvigorated attention to the potential power transfer, a senior PLO official said.
Instead, on Tuesday, the Palestinian Authority government announced it will delay the elections until May 13 in the West Bank and, having failed to convince the Gaza Strip to participate despite extended diplomatic efforts, it will proceed without the territory.
“[Abbas] is in and out of hospitals, but it’s kept secret to not create any situation,” said Mayaan Leshem, an Israeli tour guide and local geopolitical expert. “That’s a really difficult situation for the Palestinian people. … What we’re going to see next will be dramatic.”
The Palestinian parliament’s internal election will help set the progression precedent. Hamas, the Sunni-Muslim militant group controlling Gaza, and Fatah, Abbas’ secular party which controls the West Bank, haven’t been able to unify and provide national elections since Hamas won the 2006 elections and the two factions violently split. The break prevented the legislative council from convening again and paralyzed the government.
Hamas is more popular than Fatah with Palestinians, said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, partly because Hamas works against Fatah. The public views Abbas’ party as collaborators with Israel, who have little to show for their negotiations, while Hamas, even though it uses violence, stirs national pride by resisting the occupation.
Hamas, which the United States and Israel consider a terrorist organization, has no incentive to call an election because it is not recognized internationally. Neither Fatah nor Israel has an incentive either, because voting would strengthen their enemy.
Therefore, Palestinian citizens said, they have no hope for elections.
Recently over tea in a southern Ramallah café, Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian political analyst, said in this case, the PLO would likely appoint its chairman as the new president. This situation scares him, because of a potential power struggle between politicians, but he worries less about the political capital possessed by an appointed Fatah president in a pro-Hamas society than a complete power vacuum, which he sees as the most dangerous.
The Israel Defense Forces “very closely” monitor the “lots of infighting” it has seen in jockeying for the presidential post, a senior IDF official said. Multiple Palestinian political officials declined to speculate about who will succeed Abbas.
“Many of the top leaders in the PLO see themselves as perfect candidates,” Khatib said.
Khatib and a small group of politicians believe the West Bank should proceed with elections without Gaza until the Hamas conflict is solved because, at least in the interim, the new leader would have some sort of a mandate from voters, instead of internally appointing an official without one at all. Opponents of the idea said Palestine would be deepening the divide between their two territories, doing to themselves what their enemies want anyway.
Khatib conceded his view is a minority one “that isn’t going to materialize,” but it still leaves Palestine without solidified logistics to smooth a transition. The leadership still finds itself in a delicate situation. Last year, Khatib published an article that suggested Abbas might be the last leader of the Palestinian Authority because he saw succession as a threat to the structure itself. No coup would be required, he said, and no one would have to dismantle the PA. It might just fall apart all on its own.
“The PA has legitimacy problems and financial problems, but it’s brokered together by [Abbas],” Khatib said. “He’s the only remaining legitimate thing left in this Authority because he’s elected, though a long time ago. But, relatively speaking, he’s sort of legitimate, at least in the perception of the public. If this factor of unity will go, then we have the risk of disintegration or collapse.”
The IDF has prepared “several contingency plans,” the organization’s spokesman said, and he stressed Israel wants a centralized government in Palestine with which to cooperate on security measures. Just in case, though, said Michal Biran of the Labor Party, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hedged by communicating with Hamas.
Netanyahu has “no sincere intention of actually wanting to have a solution” with Hamas, Biran said, and the aim is to win better terms in the next cease-fire. But Netanyahu’s correspondence provides a window into a greater succession issue: Whenever it comes, Palestine will have a new leader trying to negotiate peace with Israel for the first time in more than a decade.
In Palestine, support for the two-state solution has fallen from about 70 percent a decade ago to now about 50 percent, said Shikaki, the Palestinian researcher. The defectors are headed for the one-state solution, he added. This public attitude has changed since the last election and won’t be accurately represented in the government until the next one.
It seems, though, to be a bygone issue for the leaders of both parties. Netanyahu sometimes still discusses the two-state solution, but Biran doubts his sincerity in wishing to broker it.
“He sometimes says that in English,” she said, “but he almost never says that in Hebrew.”
For some Fatah supporters, succession is a symbol of missed opportunity. Failing to make more progress on a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while Abbas, a moderate, is in power unsettles Nadav Tamir, an Israeli diplomat and expert on the state’s foreign relations. He worries whomever the next Palestinian leader is will be more polarized and see this era as he does: a “very bad message” to the international community “that diplomacy is not the way to deal with Israel.”
“Because of our victimhood, we — instead of strengthening the moderates — we’re actually weakening them,” he said. “It was a huge mistake not to move forward. It’s true that many people have hesitations and say [former prime ministers] Ehud Barak gave this thing and didn’t get anything, and [Ehud] Olmert didn’t, but…” He trailed off.
“With Abbas,” he said, “we could’ve moved forward.”
When asked what structure might replace the government Palestine has now, if the current system was to collapse, Khatib, the political analyst, frowned and put down his tea. He looked off into the distance and shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said, slowly. “Chaos is one possibility. Or Israel might have in mind an answer to that question that they are keeping to themselves. Or something else.
“We don’t know.”