Why the Palestinian Authority’s Abbas is under pressure to pick a successor

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), under pressure to appoint a second-in-command to its ageing leader, Mahmoud Abbas, created a vice president position after meeting with senior officials on April 24.

Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), promised during an emergency Arab summit in early March that the position would be created. Yet it remains unclear who will eventually fill the post.

The aim is to prevent a power struggle after Abbas vacates his post – a scenario that Israel could exploit to cause the collapse of the PA, fully annexe the occupied West Bank and ethnically cleanse Gaza, experts told Al Jazeera.

Yet Dianna Buttu, a former legal adviser to the PLO, believes creating a vice president post in the PA will not avert a power struggle once Abbas is gone – rather, it could exacerbate conflict.

“The more fragmented the PA becomes, the more it will create a power vacuum … and that vacuum will be filled by external actors and mainly by the Americans and Israelis,” she warned.

Legitimacy crisis

Abbas, 89, assumed control of the PLO and PA after Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in November 2004 and has ruled without a popular mandate since dissolving parliament in 2007.

His Fatah party dominates the PA and PLO. The long-defunct parliament has faded away, and critics have slammed Abbas for seeming to undermine attempts to hold elections that could revive it.

In the absence of parliament, the PLO controls the succession, a task Abbas has postponed, including by decreeing last year that Rawhi Fattouh, head of the Palestinian National Council, would become interim president if the position became vacant suddenly until elections are held.

“Abbas has put this off out of fear that if he brought anyone forward, then they would be a rival,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

The PA was created by the Oslo Peace Accords, signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 and 1995.

Tasked with governing the West Bank and Gaza until a Palestinian state was created alongside Israel, the PA lost credibility among Palestinians as Israel’s occupation became more violent and oppressive, and land grabs for Israeli settlements continued.

Since Oslo, the population of settlements, illegal under international law, built on Palestinian land has risen from about 200,000 to more than 750,000.

In 2007, a violent split with Hamas in Gaza constrained the PA’s authority to the parts of the occupied West Bank that it had some limited control over.

A Palestinian man inspects the damage in his house in Huwara, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, after a reported attack by Israeli settlers on December 4, 2024 [Zain Jaafar/AFP]

The PA did manage to become the de facto Palestinian representative on the international stage, replacing the PLO.

But at home, Abbas’s popularity slipped as people’s suffering increased and the PA continued its security coordination with Israel, which was outlined in the Oslo Accords.

The PA is also seen to have failed to protect Palestinians from Israeli troops and settlers while using its authority to crack down on civil activists and opponents.

This has resulted in a situation in which whoever he appoints, “Abbas’s handpicked successor probably won’t win people over”, Elgindy told Al Jazeera.

The name suggested most often is Abbas’s close confidant and secretary-general of the PLO Executive Committee, Hussein al-Sheikh.

Al-Sheikh also heads the PA’s General Authority for Civil Affairs, which issues the Israeli-approved permits that enable a few Palestinians to navigate the movement restrictions 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 Israel’s movement restrictions against Palestinians as apartheid.

Sheikh’s long-standing relationship with the Israeli authorities has led critics to accuse him of acting as a liaison for the occupation.

“Nobody likes him [among Palestinians],” said Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council for Global Affairs. “[Al-Sheikh] is tainted by his relationship to Israel and perceptions [that he is embroiled in] massive corruption.”

External pressure

The pressure on Abbas regarding succession has ebbed and flowed over the years, intensifying over recent months as Arab states push him to appoint a successor to prevent the PA from dissolving into chaos, analysts told Al Jazeera.

Egypt is particularly eager to ensure succession, according to Rahman.

In March, Egypt called and hosted an Arab League summit, during which it unveiled its reconstruction plan for Gaza to counter United States President Donald Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into a “Middle East Riviera”.

Egypt was mentioned as one of the countries where Palestinians could be “moved to”, an idea it firmly rejected and countered with its reconstruction plan.

The proposal included creating a Palestinian technocratic administration, supervised by the PA, to oversee the reconstruction of the devastated enclave without displacing anyone.

Secretary-General of the PLO Executive Committee Hussein al-Sheikh meets with foreign ministers in Amman, Jordan, in November 2023 [Jonathan Ernst/Pool photo via AP]

The path to PA administration of Gaza is not at all clear, however, as both Hamas and Israel object to it – Hamas because it administers Gaza currently, while Israel has panned the PA as ineffective.

Abbas appears to have gone on the offensive, delivering angry broadsides against Hamas during the meetings and blaming the group for allowing the continuation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza by not handing over captives and disarming.

However, many Arab states blame Abbas for failing to reconcile his Fatah faction with Hamas, making them eager to see a change of guard in the PA, according to Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Palestinian internal politics with the International Crisis Group

Since 2007, Fatah and Hamas have signed several agreements to heal their divisions after the fighting that split the Palestinian national movement.

“I think there has been a lot of frustration [among Arab states] that [Abbas] has been more of a spoiler and obstacle to trying to get a united Palestinian front, which has given Israel a pretext to continue doing what it has been doing in Gaza,” Mustafa told Al Jazeera.

Can a vice president revive the PA?

Instead of creating a new political post, Buttu believes Abbas should hold elections for Fatah, the PLO and the PA.

The last time voting was held was just before the conflict between Hamas and Fatah in 2006. Hamas won a huge majority in those legislative elections.

The choice to create a new vice president post, she fears, won’t solve the legitimacy crisis or power vacuum once Abbas is gone, given what she described as Abbas’s lack of political will to revive Palestinian institutions.

“In typical fashion, Abbas is doing the bare minimum to get [Arab states] off his back,” she told Al Jazeera.

Elections, she acknowledged, could prove technically difficult due to Israel’s devastating war and genocide in Gaza as well as its violence and movement restrictions in the West Bank.

However, she said Palestinians could still find ways to vote, perhaps through an online portal or process.

“Inside Fatah itself, there is a lot of pushback on this appointment of a vice president. They are all saying there should be elections instead,” Buttu told Al Jazeera.

“[Abbas] is putting a Band-Aid on a wound so open that it requires surgery,” she said.