On Monday 11 November, Abdel-Salam Haniyeh, the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel earlier this year, posted a photo on Facebook paying tribute to the memory of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Despite differences between Hamas and Fatah, Arafat’s faction, he alluded to Arafat’s respect for the Palestinian resistance and the resistance’s respect for Arafat.

While apparently apolitical, Haniyeh’s post can only be read in the light of Arafat’s status in the hearts and minds of Palestinians who looked up to him as a father-figure both of the Palestinian population and of their destitution from the 1948 Nakba onwards.

It was on 11 November 2004, at a military hospital in a Parisian suburb, that Arafat was announced dead after an unspecified illness that affected him while he was held hostage by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon at Al-Muqataa, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Arafat was taken aboard a French jet from Ramallah to France on 29 October.

On 12 November, Egypt hosted a high-profile funeral for Arafat in Cairo, where he was born in 1929, before his body was taken to Ramallah to be buried amid wide shows of grief for the charismatic leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as of 1969, five years after it was established in October 1964, the first chair of the Palestinian Authority, and above all the face of the Palestinian cause.

Taking over from Arafat, almost automatically, was Mahmoud Abbas, historically one of Arafat’s closest aides who was long perceived by Israel as his diplomatic arm. Abbas did not carry the same revolutionary legacy as Arafat, whose life was about militant resistance and political manoeuvering according to Israeli commentators and Arab diplomats alike. However, he was perceived as the most natural successor, especially since most older PLO revolutionaries had  already been assassinated by Israel and in view of the fact that in 2004, despite aggressive Israeli military operations, including the massacre committed at Jenin Refugee Camp in 2003, the path of negotiations was perceived as the “sole path” towards Palestinian statehood.

Arafat died two years after the Saudis, under the leadership of the then crown prince Abdullah, offered the landmark peace initiative of Palestinian statehood in return for full Arab-Israeli normalisaiton. The initiative was endorsed by the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002 while Sharon had Arafat held hostage in Al-Muqataa.

It was no surprise that the death of Arafat was good news to Sharon and many other Israeli political and military who had spoken of Arafat’s hidden preference for military resistance despite his announced commitment to peace with Israel in the wake of signing the Oslo Accords with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres with support from the White House in September 1993, in the presence of US president Bill Clinton. In 2000, prior to the end of his second term in office, Clinton had tried to have Arafat and Ehud Barak, during marathon talks at Camp David, to sign a final deal. However, Clinton failed, essentially as Arafat declined to agree to  language that he thought too compromising on the status of east Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in 1967 and proclaimed by the Palestinians the future capital of the independent Palestinian state after the Oslo Accords.

According to the testimonies of Arab, including Egyptian, diplomats at the time, Arafat told Clinton that he could not go back to his people if he was to sign the deal offered. In the words of one of the top diplomats at the time: “The Clinton parameters for a final peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis were essentially good but Clinton did not put enough pressure on the Israelis, especially in relation to East Jerusalem.” He added that, while in Camp David, Arafat told Clinton he could only accept the offer if Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak supported and lobbied Arab support for it, “knowing that Mubarak would not do this.”

When Arafat died, several in Israel and in the US expected that Abbas would show more flexibility until a deal could be sealed. This did not happen. According to the narratives shared at the time by Arab diplomatic sources, things were different for many reasons. First, the “Clinton Parameters” were off the table once Clinton exited the White House, in January 2001. Secondly, the 9/11 attacks re-routed the interest of Washington from the Palestinian struggle to the War on Terror – with Arabs and Muslims being labelled as terrorists. Thirdly, Abbas took over from Arafat during the Second Palestinian Intifada, which started in September 2000, only two months after the failure of the Camp David talks in July of the same year.

“Abbas could not have done it; he could not have signed up to anything that Arafat had declined – not just because he could not come across as choosing to agree on things that Arafat, with all the clout he carried, declined but also because neither the Americans nor the Israelis were there for peace talks,” according to the remarks of the same top diplomat at the time.

However, according to remarks shared by Hamas members and leaders in the early years of the Abbas leadership, while Abbas would not sign to something Arafat declined, he made concessions Arafat would never have agreed to. This related to the level of commitment that Abbas had shown to enforcing security coordination with Israel and the exaggerated faith he had in the chances of negotiations to deliver as little as a disarmed Palestinian state on only a fraction of the land of historic Palestine.

The last serious round of peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis were held in Annapolis in 2007, while George W Bush was in his second term in office and Ehud Olmert was prime minister of Israel. According to Arab diplomatic sources, what was offered in Annapolis was even less than what Arafat had declined in 2000 at Camp David.

However, Abbas maintained a strong commitment to the path of the Oslo Accords that was proving to be of limited benefit to Palestinians, especially as Israel was done with the construction of the separation wall that runs through the West Bank, away from the Green Line, supposedly Israel’s borders. Abbas was growing old and his feud with Hamas, which had won the legislative elections, was deepening especially after Hamas took control of Gaza Strip in 2007 in a move that was proclaimed a preemptive act against “a coup that the PA was plotting against us to push us out of power despite the vote of the Palestinian people,” according to one of Hamas leaders at the time. “Abbas was acting like a [Third World] dictator when he did not have a state and he could not promise one to his people,” he added.

Abbas resisted in the hope of a better day when George W Bush would be out of the White House. His dreams, and those of many in the region, soared with the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Inaugurated in January 2009, shortly after the end of one of Israel’s most aggressive attacks on Gaza, Obama promised a commitment to bring peace to the Middle East. However, the hopes of Abbas were crushed as the attention of the White House again shifted to the rise of the democratic protests in several Arab countries and the Palestinian Cause was put on the back burner. The deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, which had been under an Israeli imposed siege since 2007, was overshadowed by the developments of the Arab Spring.

When Trump came to the White House after the end of Obama’s second term in office, Abbas was rather more worried than hopeful. According to a Washington-based Arab political researcher, Abbas knew that Trump was firmly pro-Israeli but he did not think that Trump would go so far as to endorse the US Embassy to Israel being moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As of that moment, Abbas was just desperate and frustrated.

With the marginalisation of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, Abbas whose real claim to fame is his commitment to the path of negotiations, was simply not part of the Palestinian story unfolding on the ground, with a call for resistance, either peaceful, as in the Great March of Return of 2018, or militant as the Al-Aqsa Flood, was carried out by Hamas on 7 October 2023 in what started the current genocidal war.

During this 13-month period, Abbas did not do much beyond issuing statements of condemnation and calling on Arab and European leaders to find a way out of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. “There was not much that Abbas could have done; he was not a player because he has no power over Hamas and because [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu was not interested in engaging him or anyone else for that matter, he just wanted to keep the war going,” said an informed Egyptian source.

According to a regional diplomatic source, Abbas had actually left the West Bank to Jordan for the first few days of the Israeli war and only went back after the situation started deteriorating fast. However, the same source said, Abbas did not do what the Palestinians in Gaza, particularly, would have expected of him: “to announce the suspension of all security cooperation with Israel and to walk out on the Oslo Accords. He did not and he would not, he is just going to hang on there – old, frail and hors-jeu as he has come to be”.

According to the aforementioned Egyptian source, the question today is not about Abbas because Abbas, who was born in 1935, is unlikely to be part of the future of the Palestinian cause. “It is time for a new leadership that can gather the pieces and take the Palestinian cause forward,” he said. “It is very easy to argue with the choices of Abbas but the issue is one of the future not of the past, especially in view of the rule of the current extremist Israeli government.”

It is only an open secret in the diplomatic quarters that many around Arafat are battling to be groomed for succession. It is also an open secret that Abbas is grooming Hussein Al-Sheikh, secretary-general of the Executive Committee of the PLO who is known to have good in-roads with the Israelis. “Al-Sheikh does not stand a chance today,” said the regional diplomatic source. He explained that the choices of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which had also come under repeated Israeli military incursions during the past year, are totally “in a different direction”.

According to several diplomatic sources, the only leader that could be accepted today by all Palestinians, across the political and territorial divide, is Marwan Barghouti, the prominent Fatah revolutionary leader whose name was firmly associated with the leadership of the first and second Palestinian intifadas. Barghouti was arrested and jailed by Israel in 2002.

It is an established fact that Hamas has profound respect for Barghouti and that his name appeared on the list of Palestinian prisoners requested for any swap deal. His name appeared during the recent lists that Hamas handed over to mediators trying to secure a deal between Hamas and Israel to return Israeli captives held by Hamas and others in Gaza since 7 October 2023. However, successive Israeli political and security bodies have determined that Barghouti is not going to be included in any deal. Some sources have suggested that this position is encouraged by several Arab capitals and by Abbas himself, who fears the release of the figure, over 20 years younger, could end the path he had favoured since 2004: appeal for peace and decline in militant resistance.

According to Hesham Youssef, former chief of the cabinet of the Arab League secretary-general, who has worked on inter-Palestinian relations and the Palestinian Israeli conflict for long, the issue is not one of names but of legitimacy. “In 2021, when Abbas signed the decree for the legislative elections [which did not take place], 93 per cent of all Palestinians eligible to vote registered to take part in the elections,” he said. This, he added, is a clear indication of the fact that the Palestinians want to take the future of their leadership in their own hands.

Obviously, Youssef said, in view of the current situation it is hard to think that any elections, either legislative or presidential, could be held anytime soon but it has to be included in any post-war plan. The question of the profile of the next Palestinian leader, he argued, is going to be decided in view of the developments on the ground and in all cases it has to be the choice of the Palestinians in a fair and transparent elections.

“Arafat was a master politician who knew exactly how to keep the delicate balance that did allow for political negotiations to happen without abandoning resistance,” Youssef said. “Abbas made a decision to stick to diplomacy and to oppose the call for armed resistance,” he added.

Clearly, Youssef argued, diplomacy had failed to deliver the hopes of the Palestinian people. Equally, he said, armed resistance was not able to deliver. “It is not easy to think what the Palestinian people would choose when they get to decide on their next leaders,” he said.

“Whoever is going to be the next [elected] leader, he would need to follow the path of the people because this is the source of legitimacy; the question now is one of legitimacy much more than anything else,” Youssef said. “Arafat was surely a leader in his own right in his own time, but so much has happened since Arafat died 20 years ago and I don’t think comparisons with the past are a good indication as to what will happen in the future.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly