A Foreign Affairs report said that Palestinian President and founding member of the Fatah movement, Mahmoud Abbas, is an “authoritarian leader who has compromised with Israel and the United States at the expense of the Palestinian cause, challenged them only for his own personal gain, and failed to unite Palestinian factions,” which has contributed to the current war on Gaza.
Khaled Al-Jundi, a prominent writer and researcher on Palestinian and Arab affairs, said that Abbas has become a “volatile, authoritarian and suspicious” leader who sees enemies where there are none, especially after his political failures.
The writer explained that some of Abbas’s failures are due to factors outside his control, such as Israeli and American interventions and international pressures, but he bears responsibility for many of the failures that affect the fate of the Palestinians.
Including his failure to unify the Palestinian factions and share power with them, and his failure to exploit Palestine’s status as a non-member observer in the United Nations to achieve tangible changes in the reality of the Palestinians and on the international level.
The writer demonstrated this by Abbas’s disregard for the meeting held by the Palestinian factions in late July 2024 in Beijing, which resulted in the Beijing Declaration aimed at forming a government to run both Gaza and the West Bank, reforming and expanding the Palestine Liberation Organization, and holding national elections.
Abbas ignored the Beijing Declaration “arrogantly” and did not pay attention to it, but rather sent someone to represent him despite the presence of leaders from the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and other factions, according to the writer, who saw this behavior as unjustified, especially in light of the current war on Gaza and the worsening humanitarian crisis.
The writer said that Abbas’s handling of the Beijing Declaration reflects two ongoing approaches in his leadership that lasted for nearly 20 years: distancing himself from the demands of his people, and his insistence on refusing to follow strategies that lead to the liberation of Palestine.
A series of failures
The writer pointed out that Abbas faced a series of setbacks during his term, including his failure to deter Israel’s wars on Gaza, including the 2008 and 2014 wars, despite his repeated bargaining with the American and Israeli leaderships, and his “suppression” of any opposition forces trying to provide solutions to these crises.
In his timeline of Abbas’s failures, the author points to the 2006 national elections, when Hamas’s victory dealt a major blow to Fatah’s four-decade dominance. Abbas had hoped to “tame Hamas politically” and make it more “moderate,” but the United States and Israel refused to deal with it, branding it a terrorist organization, the author said.
Abbas failed to manage the situation and abandoned the Gaza issue in the face of Israeli and American pressure. Israel withheld tax revenues from the Palestinian Authority, while the United States imposed an international blockade on the Hamas government. This led to the deterioration of the Palestinian economy and pushed the Palestinian Authority to the brink of collapse.
Abbas’s most influential decision was to cancel the 2021 Palestinian elections—the first in 15 years—despite popular enthusiasm for reviving Palestinian politics. The elections could have ended Hamas’s isolation and made it part of official politics, which might have prevented the October 7 attack, the author says.