Mahmoud Abbas
Mahmoud Abbas has been president of the Palestinian Authority since 2005, elected to a four-year term. He was a founder of Fatah with Arafat, negotiated the Oslo accords, and signed them on the White House lawn in 1993. He was the first Palestinian leader to argue publicly that the armed struggle of the second intifada was a disaster for the Palestinian cause, which cost him support and is the position he has held since. He won the presidency after Arafat's death and then lost the parliamentary election of 2006 to Hamas. The result was rejected by Israel and the Western donors, a unity government failed, and in 2007 Hamas took Gaza by force while the Authority kept the West Bank. There has been no national election since, and his term has run for two decades on that basis. What his administration does in the West Bank is largely administrative and depends on Israeli permission for movement, revenue transfers and security coordination - which he has continued through every crisis, and which many Palestinians regard as subcontracting the occupation. The ground moved faster than the diplomacy. The settler population of the West Bank roughly trebled over his term, past seven hundred thousand including East Jerusalem, and the territory his authority administers fully is about eighteen per cent of it. Negotiations have been suspended since 2014. He has pursued recognition through international institutions instead: non-member observer state status at the United Nations in 2012, accession to the International Criminal Court, and recognition by well over a hundred states. When the Gaza war began in 2023 his authority had no role in it, no presence in Gaza, and little standing to speak for the people being bombed.
- Lived: 1935 CE – ?
- Nationality: Palestinian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
