US-Backed Palestinian President Abbas Resigns Suddenly

In a stunning blow to President Barack Obama’s plans for Middle East peace, Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas resigned today. (Watch his announcement and U.S. reaction on Aljazeera above.)

Meanwhile, the United Nations General Assembly voted to accept the Goldstone report on Israel’s and Hamas’s activities around last winter’s Gaza bombardment. The vote was 114 in favor, 18 against, and 44 abstentions. And Israel’s Navy intercepted a ship full of what appeared to be Iranian arms that it said were bound for Hezbollah, a move Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu described as war crimes.

Speculation was all over the place as to whether Abbas would actually leave office, with some observers certain that his announcement that he wouldn’t run in the January 24 Palestinian elections – which he just called for – was a bargaining chip against the right-wing Israeli government. Others thought Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chummy press conference earlier this week praising Israeli Prime Minister  Binyamin Netanyahu was the last straw for the 74 year old. Abbas insisted he wasn’t issuing an ultimatum; he said he truly intended to leave the post he has held since 2004. ”We have pledged with Israel to reach [a] two-state solution,” he said. “However, month after month, year and year, we have seen nothing but complacency and procrastination, and all of this led to a tainting of the negotiations.”

Abbas’s team focused their frustration on Obama. From the New York Times:

A top aide to Mr. Abbas said a large part of the “despondency and frustration” felt by Mr. Abbas and the entire Palestinian leadership was due to President Obama’s unrealized promises to the region. He said he feared that without a stop to settlements, Islamist rivals in Hamas could triumph and violence could break out.

“There was high expectation when he arrived on the scene,” the aide, Nabil Shaath, who heads the Fatah party’s foreign affairs department, said of Mr. Obama at a briefing. “He said he would work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it would play a major role in improving the American and Western relationship with the Muslim world. Now there is a total retreat, which has destroyed trust instead of building trust.”

A spokesman for Hamas was skeptical that Abbas really intended to step down, telling the AP, “His speech wasn’t for the Palestinians alone. It was for the United States and the international community, so they will give him more support in the elections.”

Rory McCarthy from the Guardian took a quick look at candidates to replace Abbas:

The most likely candidate to replace him is probably Marwan Barghouti, a popular Fatah leader who is now serving five life terms in an Israeli jail. He was convicted in 2002 of involvement in the killing of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk, but is seen as a potential leader by many Palestinians.

Barghouti is a fluent Hebrew-speaker who has supported peace talks with Israel but was also a prominent figure early in the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began in late 2000. There are other senior figures in Fatah who might want to run, such as Mohammad Dahlan, but they do not have the same popular following. Likewise Salam Fayyad, the prime minister who is not a Fatah member, might want to run but he too does not have a widespread public following.

However, writing on the New York Times website, the respected Palestinian journalist (and former Princeton professor) Daoud Kuttab noted that elections aren’t likely to take place, leaving Abbas in office:

The announcement that he will not seek another term becomes crucial only if elections will indeed take place. In 2006, Mr. Abbas refused all suggestions to the contrary and organized elections that led to the overwhelming victory for Islamists. While his and other Palestinian Liberation Organization nationalists will certainly win, it is highly unlikely that he will go ahead with such elections without Gaza’s participation and without some type of national unity agreement.

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