Palestinians weigh calls for successor to Abbas

Ramallah: As US-sponsored peace talks with Israel proceed, Palestinians are broaching the sensitive topic of who will succeed Mahmoud Abbas, their ageing president, who has been embarrassed by a string of leaks from the negotiations.

The Palestinian National Authority’s ruling Fatah movement has held discussions on creating an office of vice-president, to establish a clear successor for Abbas, who turns 79 in less than a month.

This would shore up the leadership’s position for any outcome from the talks, whether they end in a peace agreement, or fail and result in the Palestinians resuming their unilateral push for international recognition.

“We can’t leave it for accident — we need to know who will be the successor,” said Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of Fatah’s central committee and the main advocate in the ruling movement for the creation of the office of vice-president.

“All of the world’s leaders have deputy presidents, vice-presidents; we can’t be the only country in the world that doesn’t have a number two.”

The push to create a clear line of succession for Abbas comes as the ageing leader faces intense scrutiny — and growing criticism — for his role in talks, with many Palestinians remaining deeply sceptical over the outcome.

Palestinian and Israeli media have over the past month carried reports about the concessions the US and Israeli are seeking from Abbas, leading to criticism that the president is giving too much away or failing to abandon the negotiations.

“The difficulty for Abbas is explaining to the Palestinians why they are in the peace process, because they aren’t seeing any benefit from it,” one western diplomat said this week.

“You have a population, 70 per cent of whom are under age 30, and then you have a gerontocracy at the top who are thinking of making, what, a half-generation shift [in leadership].”

The idea of creating a Palestinian vice-presidency was first broached during the term of Yasser Arafat, the founding leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, who was succeeded by Abbas in 2005. Mr Abbas’s term expired in 2010, but the Palestinians have not held elections since Fatah’s 2007 split with Hamas, the militant Islamist group that rules in Gaza.

Palestinian and Arab media have recently floated reports that Mohammad Dahlan, a former Fatah official who headed security in the Gaza Strip at the time of Hamas’s takeover of the territory in 2007, was being lined up as the next Palestinian leader, possibly with tacit or overt support from the US, Israel, or Gulf states.

However, while he remains popular with many in Gaza, he is a controversial figure inside Fatah because of persistent allegations of foreign patronage and because of his perceived role in provoking the split between Fatah and Hamas.

Political analysts say that Fatah wants to shore up its own position in preparation for the outcome of the peace talks which, if successful, would require new elections.

“There will be a need for elections if there is an agreement because the agreement will need legitimacy,” said Khalil Shaheen, director of research and policies at Masarat, a Ramallah-based research group.

For most Palestinians, mired in quotidian issues such as the West Bank’s slowing economy, the debate over succession inside Fatah has barely registered. However, many say the time is approaching when Abbas and other ageing Palestinian leaders should step down.

“We want a way for young people to be in charge,” said Hussam Suweti, a 22-year-old employee of a call centre in Ramallah. “There should be at least one young man in charge, in order to understand us; this man does not understand what we need.”