The Palestinian movement is at a crossroads. Fatah and its foremost rival for power, Hamas, are both weakened, the former by internal divisions and unpopularity and the latter by the Israeli military. Palestinian politics are entering a transitional phase, and Palestinian political institutions are dead or decaying. The aftershocks will be felt in the Middle East and beyond.

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Mahmoud Abbas turns 90 this year. Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, the United States-backed entity that rules over the majority of Palestinians living in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). The PA was birthed by the 1990s Oslo peace process, which created a lot of process but, in the end, very little peace. Indeed, as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis has documented, terrorist attacks have increased in the post-Oslo period.

The PA was established in 1994 as a result of the Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization Declaration of Principles. In exchange for Western backing and support, the Authority, then headed by PLO head Yasser Arafat, promised to renounce terrorism and to resolve outstanding problems with Israel in bilateral negotiations. Palestinians got the opportunity to have limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. But three-plus decades after its creation, the verdict is in: The PA is a failure.

The Authority never kept its promises to renounce terrorism and accept Israel. From its inception, the PA has paid tax-deductible salaries to those who murder and maim Jews, or people it believes are Jewish, such as Taylor Force, an American and U.S. Military Academy graduate who was killed in 2016 by a Palestinian terrorist. The PA’s media and educational arms praise terrorist attacks and celebrate murderers, even planting trees and bestowing awards in their honor.

Since the PA’s creation, Palestinian leaders have rejected numerous proposals for something that has never existed: a sovereign Palestinian Arab state. Arafat refused U.S. and Israeli proposals in 2000 at Camp David and in 2001 at Taba. In 2008, Abbas rejected an offer that would have given the Palestinians 93.7% of the West Bank, with Israeli territory to make up 5.8% and a corridor to Gaza for the other .5%. Abbas not only rejected the plan, but he also refused to make a counteroffer. Similarly, in 2014 and 2016, the Obama administration sought to present plans for restarting negotiations, with the 2008 offer as a starting point. Yet again, the PA refused to sit down and negotiate — a feat it would repeat when the first Trump administration sought to engage in talks. 

The reasons for the refusals are simple: No Palestinian leader has ever accepted Israel’s right to exist. Going back more than eight decades, all have, without exception, rejected offers for statehood if it meant living in peace next to a Jewish state. The PA’s maps depict all of Israel as “Palestine.” Even Arafat’s pretensions during Oslo were a lie. 

The PLO never amended its charter calling for Israel’s destruction. And in a May 10, 1994, speech in South Africa and in another one on Aug. 21, 1995, at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Arafat compared his decision to participate in the Oslo process to deceptions that the Prophet Muhammad engaged in against rival tribes. Its purpose was for Arafat and the PLO — severely weakened by the fall of the Soviet Union, its chief sponsor — to rebuild, consolidate, and then resume working toward Israel’s destruction. As he stated in a 1996 speech in Stockholm: “We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. … We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.”

Importantly, the PA was not meant to give Palestinian Arabs a state, as then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made clear. Rather, it was, to use a phrase popular at the time, a “chance for peace.” But more than three decades after the PA’s establishment, peace seems more distant than ever. 

Abbas doesn’t just control the PA. He also heads the Fatah movement, which has dominated the Authority since its inception. Further, he controls the PLO, which, for much of its existence, was a designated terrorist group, a designation the U.S. removed in the run-up to Oslo. As the head of the PA, the PLO, and Fatah, Abbas has enormous power. And over the years, that power became increasingly concentrated.

Abbas was elected president of the PA in 2005, shortly after the death of his predecessor, Arafat. Previously, Abbas had served as a longtime PLO functionary, acting as the group’s foreign emissary and fundraiser. Abbas is, in every sense, a colorless apparatchik. By contrast, Arafat was charismatic, his face and persona having come to represent the Palestinian movement.

With his keffiyeh, aviator sunglasses, and beard stubble, Arafat first received media attention in the 1960s and 1970s, when the PLO was hijacking airplanes and perpetrating terrorist attacks. As journalist Danny Rubinstein documented in his 1995 book, The Mystery of Arafat, it was a carefully cultivated image. In key respects, Abbas would be his opposite. 

Abbas never had Arafat’s street cred or his terrorist bona fides — two facts that hindered his popularity. He was not capable of delivering colorful speeches, either to the United Nations or the Palestinian people. As the Middle East analyst Grant Rumley pointed out, Abbas “was never the master of retail politics. … He wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t an activist.” Instead, he’s a “bureaucrat” whose “governing style is more closely akin to the Soviet style.”

Shortly after Abbas took over the PA, he lost territory and power.

In January 2006, Hamas, Fatah’s preeminent rival, won the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the PA’s unicameral legislature. A brief but extremely bloody civil war followed. As a result of that internecine conflict, Hamas seized Gaza, effectively halving the territory that had been given to the PA at its creation a little more than a decade before. Fatah’s loss of Gaza changed the PA, and it changed how Abbas ruled, almost from the outset. 

As Rumley and Amir Tibon noted in their 2017 biography of Abbas, The Last Palestinian, the current PA leader began to centralize power immediately. Abbas fired 17 of the Authority’s 24 Cabinet members, replacing Arafat loyalists with his own supporters. As Middle East analyst Jonathan Schanzer highlighted in his 2013 history of the PA, “Abbas moved aggressively to consolidate political and economic power,” and “the nepotism and political patronage that characterized the Arafat era again became the norm.” Worse, the new PA president “undermined some of the PA’s own laws” and “co-opted or weakened institutions that promoted transparency and accountability.”

The PA hasn’t held elections since. The Palestinian Legislative Council hasn’t met in nearly two decades. The doors to parliament are “shuttered,” AFP reported in January 2020, and while the postman still delivers mail to the lawmakers’ boxes, “many haven’t been checked in years.” That is, there is no political opposition under the PA, nor is there a functioning or healthy political system. 

Abbas has imprisoned or banished any possible rivals for power. He has threatened, jailed, and tortured his critics, even for “crimes” such as criticizing official sports teams. Dissent isn’t tolerated, nor is there an independent judiciary. Laws — “edicts” is a more fitting term — are issued via presidential decree.

Under Abbas, there is no separation of powers. The courts, the police, the civil service, and the intelligence agencies all do as he commands. Accordingly, Abbas has presided over a period in which many of the nascent institutions created by Oslo are, at best, brittle. In many cases, they are outright extinct. Democracy under the PA was, and is, stillborn.

Yet, Abbas reigns, but he doesn’t truly rule. Many areas controlled by the PA are effectively lawless. In some cases, crime and clan feuds have risen to such levels that neighboring Jordan, which controlled Judea and Samaria (and named it the “West Bank”) from 1948 to 1967, has threatened to intervene in recent years. It has often fallen to the Israel Defense Forces to carry out counterterrorism operations, while the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, the entity tasked with those duties, remain either incapable or unwilling.

Abbas and his Fatah movement are extremely unpopular. A May 2025 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that only 1 in 5 Palestinians is satisfied with Abbas’s performance as president of the PA, and an astonishing 81% want him to resign. The survey also found that if presidential elections were held, Abbas would lose to Khaled Mashal of Hamas and Marwan Barghouti, the infamous head of Fatah’s Tanzim Brigades who is imprisoned for murder. That is, Palestinians prefer two archterrorists over Abbas. That bodes poorly for the future of Palestinians and Israelis alike.   

There are many reasons behind Abbas’s unpopularity. The autocrat is viewed as both feckless and corrupt. Abbas’s family has enriched itself and lives in luxury. As the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs noted in a 2016 report, Abbas’s sons “own an economic empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they rely on their connection with their father.” And when Abbas’s security forces do cooperate with the IDF on counterterrorist operations, they are tarred as “collaborators.”

Abbas also lacks a clear successor. Palestinian Basic Law stipulates that the speaker of the PA’s parliament is to be the interim head of government. But the PA no longer holds elections, and when it last did, Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, won them. To try to circumvent this, in 2016, Abbas decreed a special court into existence — but its legitimacy is up for debate.

To be sure, Abbas has had a number of deputies. Yet they’ve been chosen because they were nonthreatening loyalists, not because of their ability to govern over the majority of Palestinians. Most recently, the PLO’s Executive Committee, effectively a rubber stamp for Abbas, named Hussein al Sheikh as that entity’s vice president. Yet, as the Times of Israel pointed out, “The decree naming al-Sheikh to the post stops short of granting him formal succession powers.” Abbas’s aides rejected the idea that al Sheikh is an heir.

Over the years, several analysts of Palestinian politics have attempted to game out what would happen should Abbas die in office — a not-unlikely scenario given his age and extensive smoking habit. The imprisoned Barghouti, whose popularity on the street is unrivaled, is frequently mentioned. So, too, is the longtime Fatah apparatchik Jibril Rajoub, a PLO operative only a few years younger than Abbas. 

Another possibility is Majed Faraj, the PA’s intelligence chief. Over the years, a variety of rival Palestinian terrorist groups have attempted to assassinate Faraj, who has extensive security contacts with American and Israeli officials. Ultimately, chaos seems to be the only certainty should Abbas shuffle off his mortal coil. Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat, observed that Abbas’s successor will likely come down to “who’s got the guns, who’s got the money, who has the best capacity to retain and maintain them.”

Iran, Hamas’s chief patron, has taken notice. Tehran calls for Israel’s destruction. Its strategy has been to surround Israel on all fronts, seeking to create a “ring of fire” and grind the Jewish state down in a war of attrition. To that end, Iran has funded, trained, and at times even created various proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various terrorist militias in Syria and Iraq. Hamas is one of several Gaza-based groups that Tehran sponsors. The mullahs would love to get their hands on the West Bank, which has long been a territory that Israel and its allies consider to be strategically vital. 

Much of what plagues Palestinian politics is nothing new. The Palestinian movement has long been beset by divisions and internecine conflict. Indeed, such strife and discord have been the rule, not the exception. Ditto for the autocracy and a single ruler controlling multiple institutions, often with help from foreign patrons.

In its century of existence, the Palestinian Arab movement has arguably had a mere three leaders: Abbas, Arafat, and Arafat’s distant cousin, Amin al Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism. Indeed, it was Husseini who set the tone, shaping Palestinian political life to the present day. In a Jan. 4, 2013, speech, Abbas called Husseini a “pioneer.”

Born in 1895 to one of Jerusalem’s leading families, Husseini was a small, redheaded man with a fair complexion. His New York Times obituary would describe him as being a “handsome and soft-spoke Muslim gentleman” with the face of a “jolly elf” and possessing “keen and smiling blue eyes.” But lurking beneath those eyes was a cunning and manipulative killer.

Husseini served briefly in the Ottoman army during World War I and later worked as an Arabic translator for Reuters’s Jerusalem bureau. As the late Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz noted in their seminal 2014 book, Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, evidence suggests that Husseini likely worked as a spy for the British, which ended up being the occupational authority over the land after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. Husseini’s service as a British spy didn’t stop him from working with anti-British elements, including the French and Arab nationalists. This duplicity and playing different patrons off of each other would be carried on by his political heirs.

The Ottoman decision to side with Imperial Germany was fateful. The majority of its Arab and Turkish subjects had fought against the Allied Powers. The empire was eventually largely divided between British and French authorities, both of which set up “mandates” to rule over certain areas temporarily. 

The Mandate for Palestine was assigned to Britain by the San Remo conference in April 1920. That area encompassed modern-day Israel, present-day Jordan, and areas currently controlled by Fatah and Hamas. The word “Palestine” had its origins in “Syria Palaestina,” the name that the Romans gave to Judea after expelling most, but not all, of the Jews in the second century CE. A Palestinian Arab state had never existed, and the Jewish presence in the land predated the Arab and Islamic conquests by millennia.

The San Remo conference and the subsequent 1924 Anglo-American Convention enshrined Jewish territorial claims into international law. In the final year of World War I, the British had issued the Balfour Declaration, which called for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in the Ottoman region that had variously been called “Palestine” or “Southern Syria.” Under the Ottomans, Jews and other non-Muslims lived as dhimmis, or second-class citizens, with substantially fewer rights. And it was this aspect, the idea of Jewish social and political equality, that Husseini could not abide. This set him on a collision course with Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.

Husseini gained infamy after inciting anti-Jewish riots in Jerusalem in 1920, in which five Jews were killed and hundreds were injured. 

The first major instance of organized political violence, terrorism, against Jews is revealing for two reasons. First, some ruling British Mandate authorities who themselves opposed the creation of a Jewish “national home” encouraged Husseini and other Arab leaders to show their opposition. Second, the violence was perpetrated to encourage these same authorities to allow the area to become part of King Faisal’s newly created Arab Kingdom of Syria. Faisal, part of the Hashemite clan from what is today Saudi Arabia, had briefly taken portions of present-day Syria from the French. This aspect is worth emphasizing: Arabs were not rioting to pressure Mandate authorities to create a Palestinian Arab state ruled by “Palestinians.” Rather, they were protesting Jewish social and political equality and petitioning to be ruled by a Muslim leader, even if he was from a foreign and distant land. Palestinian nationalism was born with an identity predicated on opposition: From the beginning, the emphasis was on a negative — eradicating Jewish rights and not on nation-building. This would prove fateful.

Indeed, during this period, the very notion of Palestinian Arab nationalism was nascent and, as the historian Yehoshua Porath has pointed out, largely confined to a small minority of literate Arab Christians. The rioters themselves variously chanted: “Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs” and “We will drink the blood of the Jews,” while Husseini held up a picture of Faisal, proclaiming, “This is your king!” One prominent Arab nationalist, Aref al Aref, further incited the crowd: “If we don’t use force against the Zionists and against the Jews, we will never be rid of them.”

Instead of being punished for this violence, Husseini was rewarded. In the summer of 1921, the British named him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, making him the community’s preeminent religious and political figure. They also created a Supreme Muslim Council and placed him at its head, gifting the young Arab leader significant patronage power. 

Husseini repaid these favors by inciting more anti-Jewish riots, notably in Hebron in 1929, in which 67 Jews were massacred and hundreds more were injured. Jewish orphanages were among the targets. In the 1930s, Husseini reached out to the fascist powers of Nazi Germany and Italy, eventually receiving funds and arms that he would use to launch the so-called “Arab Revolt” in 1936. This revolt was, in fact, the “first intifada,” and Husseini didn’t just target Jews — he also murdered British authorities, as well as Arab rivals for power, notably members of the Nashashibi clan. Husseini and his terrorist group used hospitals and mosques to hide men and munitions. Importantly, the violence was spurred on by another rival for power, Sheikh Izz ad-Din al Qassam, a fiery Islamist cleric born in present-day Syria who was killed by the British in 1935. In many respects, Qassam and his terrorist group were precursors to Hamas, which has named its Qassam rockets in his honor. Six decades later, Hamas would engage in a gruesome competition with Fatah to outdo one another with terrorist attacks during the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Arab revolt was eventually put down, and Husseini fled to Nazi Germany — but not before inciting another pogrom in Baghdad, Iraq. Husseini spent World War II as an active, and later indicted, Nazi collaborator. Yet, he would escape justice.

In 1947, the U.N. voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Zionists voted to accept the partition, effectively one of many “two-state solutions” to the conflict. By contrast, multiple Arab armies converged to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. Husseini and his “Army of the Holy War” and components of the Muslim Brotherhood joined them, only to fail.

From his exile in Lebanon, Husseini continued to orchestrate terrorism and murder rivals and critics, most notably King Abdullah of Jordan, labeled a “traitor, agent in the British service and friend of the Jews,” in 1951. Husseini met with Arafat, who founded the Fatah movement in 1959, on multiple occasions. As Rubin and Schwanitz recounted, he “suggested Arafat adopt a two-state strategy. First, the movement should gain control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured by Israel in 1967, and turn it into a Palestinian state. Next, it should use this land as a base for destroying Israel.”

By the time of his death from cancer in 1974, Husseini had passed the baton. Arafat was the future of the Palestinian movement. But the past was the precedent. Arafat would similarly reject peace with Israel, support terrorism, and murder rivals and critics. Little has changed since.

WHO BUILT GAZA’S METRO? FOREIGN AID MADE TUNNEL NETWORK POSSIBLE 

The founding of the Palestinian movement set the trend. Just as Husseini received fascist funds, Arafat benefited from Soviet largesse, and Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, with support from Tehran. Just as the British rewarded Husseini’s anti-Jewish violence, the West continues to reward the PA, and even Hamas, with aid and diplomatic support. At no point has there been pressure to build functioning institutions or to hold leaders to account. Instead, Palestinian leaders have concentrated power, using patronage and violence to preserve their rule.

In Palestinian politics, what’s past is prologue. And the future is bleak.

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.