The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), under pressure to appoint a second commander to his aging chief, Mahmoud Abbas, created a post of vice-president after meeting senior officials on April 24.
Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), promised at an emergency Arab summit in early March that the post would be created. However, we do not know who will end up filling out the position.
The objective is to prevent a power struggle after Abbas left his post – a scenario that Israel could exploit to cause the AP collapse, fully annex the occupied West Bank and the ethnically cleaning of Gaza, experts told Tel Aviv Tribune.
However, Dianna Buttu, a former legal advisor to the PLO, believes that the creation of a post of vice -president in PA will not avoid a power struggle once Abbas has disappeared – he could rather exacerbate conflicts.
“The more the AP becomes fragmented, the more it creates a power of power … and this void will be filled by external actors and mainly by the Americans and the Israelis,” she warned.
Legitimacy crisis
Abbas, 89, took control of the PLO and the AP after the death of the Palestinian chief Yasser Arafat in November 2004 and ruled without a popular mandate since dissolving Parliament in 2007.
His Fatah party dominates AP and OLP. Parliament for a long time has faded, and criticism criticized Abbas for having seemed to mine attempted elections that could rekindle it.
In the absence of the Parliament, the OLP controls the succession, a task that Abbas has postponed, in particular by decree last year that Rawhi Fatttouh, head of the Palestinian National Council, would become acting president if the position became vacant suddenly until the elections were held.
“Abbas made it fear that for fear that if he had advanced someone, so they would be a rival,” said Khaled Elgindy, a guest researcher at the Center for Contemporary Studies from the University of Georgetown.
The PA was created by the Oslo peace agreements, signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 and 1995.
Responsible for governing the West Bank and Gaza until a Palestinian State was created alongside Israel, the AP lost the credibility of the Palestinians while the occupation of Israel has become more violent and oppressive, and the seizures of land for Israeli establishments continued.
Since Oslo, the population of colonies, illegal under international law, built on Palestinian land has increased from around 200,000 to more than 750,000.
In 2007, a violent split with Hamas in Gaza forced the AP authority to the parts of the occupied West Bank on which it had limited control.
AP managed to become the de facto Palestinian representative on the international scene, replacing the PLO.
But at home, the popularity of Abbas slipped as the suffering of people increased and the AP continued its security coordination with Israel, which was described in the Oslo agreements.
The AP is also considered as not having protected the Palestinians from Israeli troops and settlers while using its authority to suppress civilian activists and adversaries.
This resulted in a situation in which he names, “the Successor has sorted on the abbas aspect will probably not win people,” Elgindy told Tel Aviv Tribune.
The name suggested most often is the close confident of Abbas and secretary general of the OLP executive committee, Hussein Al-Sheikh.
Al-Sheikh also directs the general authority of the AP for civil affairs, which issues the permits approved by the Israel which allow some Palestinians to sail in the movement restrictions that Israel has implemented in the occupied West Bank.
Human rights groups and the International Court of Justice – the highest legal body in the world – see Israeli movement restrictions on Palestinians and apartheid.
Sheikh’s long -standing relationship with the Israeli authorities has led criticism to accuse him of acting as an affair for the occupation.
“No one loves him (among Palestinians),” said Omar Rahman, an expert in Israel-Palestine of the Middle East Council for World Affairs. “(Al-Sheikh) is tainted by his relationship with Israel and perceptions (which he is involved in) massive corruption.”
External pressure
The pressure on Abbas concerning the succession has reflected and has flowed over the years, intensifying in recent months when the Arab states push him to appoint a successor to prevent the AP from dissolving in chaos, analysts told Tel Aviv Tribune in Tel Aviv Tribune.
Egypt is particularly wishing to ensure the succession, according to Rahman.
In March, Egypt called and organized a summit of the Arab League, during which it unveiled its reconstruction plan for Gaza to counter the proposal of the American president Donald Trump to clean ethnically Gaza and to transform it into “Riviera du Middle East”.
Egypt was mentioned as one of the countries where the Palestinians could be “moved”, an idea that it rejected firmly and bypass with its reconstruction plan.
The proposal included the creation of a Palestinian technocratic administration, supervised by AP, to supervise the reconstruction of the devastated enclave without moving anyone.
The path to the administration of the AP of Gaza is not clear, however, because Hamas and Israel oppose it – Hamas because it administers Gaza currently, while Israel has passed the AP as ineffective.
Abbas seems to have taken the offensive, offering angry widths against Hamas during the meetings and blaming the group for allowing the continuation of the Israel genocide in Gaza by not putting the captives and disarming.
However, many Arab states blame Abbas not having reconciled his faction of Fatah with Hamas, which makes them impatient to see a change of guard in the AP, according to Tahani Mustafa, an expert in Palestinian internal policy with the International Crisis Group
Since 2007, Fatah and Hamas have signed several agreements to heal their divisions after the fighting that divided the Palestinian National Movement.
“I think there was a lot of frustration (among the Arab states) that (Abbas) was more a spoiler and an obstacle to try to obtain a united Palestinian front, which gave Israel a pretext to continue doing what he did in Gaza,” Mustafa told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Can a vice-president revive the AP?
Instead of creating a new political position, Buttu thinks that Abbas should hold elections for Fatah, OLP and AP.
The last time the vote was held was just before the conflict between Hamas and Fatah in 2006. Hamas won a huge majority in these legislative elections.
The choice to create a new position as vice-president, she fears, will not resolve the crisis of legitimacy or the void of power once Abbas has disappeared, given what she described as the lack of political will of Abbas to relaunch the Palestinian institutions.
“Typically, Abbas is the strict minimum to withdraw (the Arab states) from his back,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
The elections, she recognized, could prove technically difficult because of the war and the devastating genocide of Israel in Gaza as well as its restrictions of violence and movement in the West Bank.
However, she said that Palestinians could still find ways to vote, perhaps through a gate or online process.
“In the Fatah himself, there is a lot of perspective on this appointment of a vice-president. They all say that there should be elections instead,” Buttu told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“(Abbas) puts a dressing on a injury so open that it requires surgery,” she said.