After meeting with senior officials on April 24, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) met with senior officials to discuss appointing a second-in-command for its aging leader, Mahmoud Abbas.
During an Arab summit in early March, Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) president, promised to establish the position. However, it is still unclear who will ultimately fill the position.
According to experts, the goal is to prevent a power conflict after Abbas leaves his post, which Israel might then use to annex the West Bank, ethnically cleanse Gaza, and prevent the PA from dissolving.
However, Dianna Buttu, a former legal advisor to the PLO, believes that replacing Abbas with a vice president position in the PA will not prevent power struggles; rather, it could only aggravate the situation.
She warned that “the more splintered the PA becomes, the more there will be a power vacuum,” which external actors, primarily Americans and Israelis, will fill.
Legitimacy crisis
After Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat passed away in November 2004, Abbas, 89, has ruled without a popular mandate since the government’s dissolution in 2007, has taken control of the PLO and PA.
The PA and PLO are ruled by his Fatah party. The long-defunct parliament has vanished, and Abbas has been criticized for appearing to support unsuccessful elections efforts.
The PLO is in charge of succession when there is no parliament, which Abbas has delayed by enacting. For instance, last year, it was decreed that Rawhi Fattouh, the Palestinian National Council’s head, would take office as interim president if the position suddenly became vacant until elections are held.
Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, said Abbas had put this off because he feared that if he introduced someone forward, they would be competing.
The Oslo Peace Accords, signed by Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin as prime ministers in 1993 and 1995, established the PA.
As Israel’s occupation grew more violent and oppressive, and Israeli settlement land grabs continued, the PA lost credibility with Palestinians.
Since Oslo, there have been more than 750 000 people living in Palestinian-owned settlements, which are prohibited by international law.
The PA’s authority was restricted to the West Bank areas that it had some control over as a result of a violent conflict with Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
In contrast to the PLO, the PA did succeed in becoming the de facto Palestinian representative on the global stage.
However, as people’s suffering increased and the PA continued to coordinate security with Israel as it was stated in the Oslo Accords, Abbas’ popularity decreased.
Palestinians are also suspected of being ineffectively protecting them from Israeli forces and settlers while using its authority to impose sanctions on opponents and civil activists.
Regardless of who he appoints, “Abbas’s handpicked successor probably won’t win people over,” Elgindy said.
Hussein al-Sheikh, Abbas’s close friend and PLO Executive Committee secretary-general, is often the name that comes to mind.
Al-Sheikh also serves as the head of the Palestinian Authority’s General Authority for Civil Affairs, which issues the permits that Israel has approved to let a few Palestinians circumvent the restrictions that Israel has put in place in the occupied West Bank.
The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest legal body, views Israel’s restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement as apartheid.
Critics accuse Sheikh of acting as a liaison for the occupation because of his long-standing relationship with the Israeli authorities.
Omar Rahman, a Middle East Council for Global Affairs expert on Israel-Palestine, said, “Nobody likes him [among Palestinians].” Al-Sheikh’s relationship with Israel and his perceptions that he is a victim of massive corruption are tainted by his behavior.
External pressure
According to analysts, the pressure on Abbas to appoint a successor has increased over the years and is expected to increase as he has become more dependent on Arab states, according to Al Jazeera.
Rahman claims that Egypt is particularly interested in ensuring succession.
Egypt convened and hosted an Arab League summit in March to discuss its reconstruction plan for Gaza in response to President Donald Trump’s call to “Middle Eastern Riviera” and ethnic cleansing of the region.
Egypt’s mention of being one of the nations where Palestinians could be “moved to” was vehemently rejected and refuted by its reconstruction plan.
The PA-led creation of a Palestinian technocratic administration, which would allow the PA to carry out the reconstruction of the devastated enclave without causing any displacement, was a part of the proposal.
However, Hamas and Israel object to it because they currently govern Gaza and Israel has criticized the PA as ineffective.
Abbas appears to have launched an offensive, blaming Hamas for not hand over captives and disarming them during the meetings and delivering angry broadsides against the organization for allowing the continuation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
According to Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Palestinian internal politics with the International Crisis Group, many Arab states are eager to see a change of guard in the PA because of Abbas’ failure to reconcile his Fatah faction with Hamas.
Fatah and Hamas have signed a number of agreements since 2007 to rescind the Palestinian national movement’s divisions following fighting.
According to Mustafa, “I think there has been a lot of frustration] among Arab states] regarding Abbas’ role as a spoiler and obstacle in efforts to form a united Palestinian front, which has given Israel a pretext to continue doing what it has been doing in Gaza,”
Can the PA be revived by a vice president?
Buttu believes Abbas should hold elections for Fatah, the PLO, and the PA rather than creating a new political post.
The last time voting was held was shortly before the Hamas and Fatah conflict in 2006. In those legislative elections, Hassan won a sizable majority.
Given what she describes as Abbas’s lack of political will to revive Palestinian institutions, she fears that the creation of a new vice president position won’t solve the legitimacy crisis or power vacuum once he leaves.
Abbas, she told Al Jazeera, “does the bare minimum to get the Arab states off his back.
She acknowledged that due to Israel’s devastating war and genocide in Gaza and its violence and movement restrictions in the West Bank, elections might prove to be challenging technically.
She added that Palestinians could still access voting options, perhaps through an online process or portal.
There is a lot of opposition to this appointment of a vice president, according to Fatah itself. They all agree that elections should be held instead, Buttu told Al Jazeera.
Source: Aljazeera
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