Abbas, Mahmoud

President of the Palestinian National Authority

B orn March 26, 1935, in Safed, British Mandate Palestine (now part of northern Israel); married Amina; children: three sons. Education: University of Damascus, Syria, B. A., 1950s; Moscow State University, Ph.D., 1980s.

Addresses: Office—c/o Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations, 115 E. 65th St., New York, NY 10021.

Career

C o-founded Fatah, 1954; elected to Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee and named head of PLO national and international relations department, 1980; negotiated Oslo Accords, 1993; prime minister of Palestinian National Authority, April 2003 (resigned, September 2003); elected president of the Palestinian National Authority, 2005.

Sidelights

M ahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, has worked for years to achieve an independent Palestinian Arab nation and a peace agreement with Israel. After rising through the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Abbas was the key Palestinian negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which brought eight years of peace with Israel as well as limited self-government for Palestinians. But quarrels with other Palestinian leaders have wounded Abbas’ attempts to negotiate a permanent treaty that satisfies his people’s grievances and ends Israel’s four-decade occupation of Palestinian lands. During a stormy few months as Palestinian prime minister in 2003, Abbas struggled over power with former ally Yasir Arafat. After Arafat’s death in 2004, Abbas succeeded him as president of the Palestinian National Authority. But conflicts with the radical Palestinian group Hamas have sapped Abbas’ power and greatly complicated his attempts to find common ground with Israel.

Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, was born on March 26, 1935, in Safed, a town that is now part of Israel. At the time, it was part of British Mandate Palestine, the territory that comprised present-day Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. He was 13 when Israel was founded and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 broke out. He and his family fled to Syria. “I remember everything,” he once told Stephen Erlanger of the New York Times. “It was 1948 when we [were] deported from Safed to the Golan Heights to Damascus, and I remember every specific point. There was a war. We had to leave the city. The Israelis invaded the city, the Haganah at the time. We left our country.”

Abbas earned a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Damascus in Syria in the early 1950s. In the late 1950s, while living in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, Abbas helped organize a group of Palestinian Arab leaders who eventually became key leaders in the PLO. He and Arafat co-founded Fatah in 1954, which became the most dominant political faction in the PLO, with the goal of creating an Arab nation in Palestine. After the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel occupied Palestinian Arab territories, the PLO became more prominent. It established itself as the main representative of Palestinian Arabs and advocated their desire for their own nation. The PLO carried out several guerrilla and terrorist attacks on Israel. During this time, Ab-bas, Arafat, and the PLO’s other leaders lived in exile in other Arab nations, such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia.

As Abbas rose in the PLO leadership, he got to know many Arab leaders and the heads of their intelligence services. He became a successful fund-raiser for the PLO and assumed a key security position with the group. Meanwhile, he began a dialogue in the 1970s with Jewish pacifist and left-wing movements. In 1980, he was elected to the PLO executive committee and named to lead the organization’s national and international relations department.

During the early 1980s, Abbas earned a doctorate in history in the then-Soviet Union. His doctorate and the book he adapted it into, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, attracted controversy as he rose to power. His comparison of Zionism, the ideology of Israeli Jewish nationalism, with Nazism was highly provocative simply because Nazis exterminated six million Jews in the 1940s. Also, some Jewish groups have argued that the book was an example of Holocaust denial. They said Abbas accused Jews of working with the Nazis and also minimized the number of victims of Nazi murders. Abbas denied the charges in 2003. “The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind,” he said, according to BBC News.

Abbas spent the 1980s as a close adviser to Arafat and became known as a moderate voice within the PLO. In 1993, Abbas negotiated secretly with Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres in Norway to reach a peace agreement. Their work resulted in the Oslo Accords, the 1993 agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that led to eight years of peace. The PLO renounced violence against Israel as part of the accords. Israel allowed for the creation of the Palestinian National Authority, which provided limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, two Palestinian Arab territories Israel had occupied since the 1967 war.

After the peace agreement, Abbas briefly visited his old hometown in Israel in 1995. “I did go back, but secretly,” he told Erlanger of the New York Times. “The Israeli ministry of interior helped me to go discreetly there. I was there for five or ten minutes only,” he said. “I was very, very sad. I was very sad. Every place, every quarter, every building I remember. I saw my house. But I didn’t go inside.” A refugee himself, Abbas passionately advocates for the right of Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 to return there or to be compensated for the loss of their homes—a major issue in all peace negotiations between the two sides.

Peace between Israel and the Palestinians broke down in the early 2000s after the failed talks between Arafat, the Palestinian National Authority’s president, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David, Maryland, in 2000. A new Palestinian uprising broke out in 2001. Abbas was opposed to the uprising, viewing it as extremely damaging to attempts to establish an independent Palestinian country.

Expectations were high in April of 2003 when Ab-bas became prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority, making him the second most powerful official in the government, below Arafat. In a speech to the Palestinian parliament just before it elected him, Abbas declared he was in favor of a “lasting peace” with Israel and renounced terrorism “by any party and in all its shapes,” according to James Bennet of the New York Times. He called on various Palestinian radical groups to join the political process and defer to the Palestinian National Authority’s decisions. “On this land and for this people, there is only one authority, one law, and one democratic and national decision that applies to us all.” In a conciliatory gesture to Israel, he said, “We do not ignore the sufferings of the Jews throughout history. And in exchange, we hope the Israelis will not turn their backs on the sufferings of the Palestinians.” He called for Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian lands. “The root of our suffering and the source of our pain is the occupation and its detestable oppressive policies,” he said.

Many observers hoped Abbas would move the Pal-estinians and Israelis closer to peace; however, Arafat refused to cede much power to Abbas. The two quarreled over who would control the Palestinian security forces. It was the first time that Arafat had let a prime minister form a cabinet instead of forming one himself, and he had done it only in response to international pressure. In September, after several stormy months of conflict with Arafat, Ab-bas resigned.

Arafat died in November of 2004, and the PLO namedAbbas its chairman. That made him the leading candidate to succeed Arafat as Palestinian president. He ran for the post as the candidate of the Fatah faction. In January of 2005, Palestinians elected him to a five-year term as president by a wide margin.

A month later, Abbas met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt. There, the two leaders agreed on a truce. Abbas soon declared that the war between Israel and the Palestin-ians was effectively over. “I believe we will start a new era,” he told Erlanger of the New York Times.

However, Abbas’ optimism was short-lived. By the time he took over Fatah, it had been in power for eleven years, and many Palestinians felt it had become ineffective and corrupt. In January of 2006, Fatah lost Palestinian elections to the more radical group Hamas. The Hamas victory left Abbas with much less power: He was in charge of the Palestinian National Authority’s security forces and foreign policy, but little else. Israel and Western nations considered Hamas a terrorist group, and Hamas would not renounce violence or recognize Israel’s right to exist, therefore Israel cut off the tax revenues that paid many salaries for Palestinian National Authority officials, and the United States and European Union cut off most aid to the Palestinians.

In March of 2007, Abbas and Hamas agreed to form a unity government, with both Hamas and Fatah in the cabinet. But it did not last long. Street fighting between Fatah and Hamas loyalists broke out in Gaza in June 2007, and ended with Hamas taking over Gaza. Abbas responded by dismissing Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah of Hamas, forming a new cabinet without Hamas, and solidifying his government’s control over the West Bank. In September, Abbas told Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post that he supported the United States’ attempt to isolate Hamas. “In the beginning, I believed that they were mistaken, but now we are in the same position. I am against Hamas,” he said. That November, after three Hamas policemen shot and killed seven civilians at a Fatah rally in Gaza, Abbas called for Hamas to be ousted from power there. “We must topple this gang that took control of the Gaza Strip by force and that is exploiting the suffering and tragedies of our people,” he said in a televised speech, according to Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner in the New York Times.

In November of 2007, Abbas met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Annapolis, Maryland, for a peace conference sponsored by the United States. There, Abbas and Olmert agreed to negotiate a peace treaty by the end of 2008 that would outline how Arab Palestine would become an independent country. At the summit, Abbas declared emotionally that it was time for the two sides to confront the toughest issues between them. “I am not making an overstatement, Mr. President, if I say that our region stands at a crossroad that separates two historical phases: pre-Annapolis phase and post-Annapolis phase,” Abbas said to Bush, according to Steven Lee Myers and Helene Cooper of the New York Times. “I say that this opportunity might not be repeated. And if it were to be repeated, it might not enjoy the same unanimity and impetus.”

However, the peace talks soon hit several snags. Abbas suspended them for two months in 2008 to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza (a response to Ha-mas attacks). Also, a political scandal that threatened Olmert’s job escalated. “Nothing has been achieved in the negotiations with Israel yet,” Abbas declared in late May at a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, according to Mark Lavie of the Washington Post. Abbas and Olmert continued to talk, with another meeting between the two leaders scheduled for early June of 2008.

Selected Writings

Non-fiction

The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, 1983.

Sources

Periodicals

Newsweek, December 6, 2004, p. 32.

New York Times, April 30, 2003; February 14, 2005; November 16, 2007; November 28, 2007; May 11, 2008; May 30, 2008. Washington Post, September 30, 2007, p. B4; May 25, 2008.

Online

“Mahmoud Abbas” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia, http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_70171215.tif2/abbas_mahmoud.html (May 11, 2008).

“Palestine Liberation Organization” Microsoft En-carta Online Encyclopedia, http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_76156684.tif4/Palestine_Liberation_Organization.html (May 30, 2008).

“Profile: Mahmoud Abbas” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1933453.stm (May 11, 2008).

“Times Topics: Mahmoud Abbas” NYTimes.com, http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/mahmoud_abbas/index.html?scp=1spot&sq=mahmoud20abbas&st=cse (May 11, 2008).

—Erick Trickey