Sep 24, 2015

These are no longer signs of distress; rather they are calls for help, coming simultaneously from both Palestinian leaderships in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Both political leaderships, which tore the Palestinian Authority (PA) into two entities, have reached almost at the same time a dead end and a major leadership crisis. Regarding the question that greatly preoccupies Palestinians today — namely which movement is more to blame for the situation — there is no one definitive answer. Each one of them embraced markedly different avenues and ideologies. To date, neither one proved successful: neither Hamas’ armed struggle nor the conciliatory approach of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Both leaderships are largely responsible for driving Palestinians to despair and hopelessness.

On his way to address the UN General Assembly in New York, Abbas — together with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — participated in the opening Sept. 23 of a large mosque in Moscow. At the same time, his associates relate, he received the results of the public opinion poll conducted in September by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research headed by Khalil Shikaki. According to the poll, about two-thirds of Palestinians are telling Abbas loud and clear that it is high time he stepped down. More than half the respondents in the West Bank and Gaza no longer believe in the two-state solution, while a large segment of the population (42%) supports — when asked about the issue in a general manner — the resumption of an armed intifada as the most effective way for reaching Palestinian statehood.

Abbas has openly said that unless a positive diplomatic change takes place within the coming months, he will step down. At a meeting on Sept. 20 with four former Israeli ambassadors to Paris — Daniel Shek, Nissim Zvili, Elie Barnavi and Yehuda Lancry — he reportedly said in a moment of candor, “I’m already old. If in two or three months’ time I see that there’s no hope, I won’t stay in the job.”

Should the Palestinian president go through with his threat to resign, the leadership crisis in the West Bank will also take its toll on the Gaza Strip and Hamas’ leadership there. As ironic as this may sound, Abbas currently embodies the last hope of the Hamas leadership to extract itself from the crisis it is submerged in. More than eight years after the military coup in Gaza, Hamas’ former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told UN envoy to the Middle East Nikolay Mladenov on Sept. 17 that the movement would agree to let the PA — under Abbas — rule the Gaza Strip again. The main point now is for Hamas to be able to pay the salaries to the employees of its sprawling establishment, thus possibly also ensuring its own survival.

On Jan. 26, 2006, Hamas was elected to the PA by a landslide majority. Heading Hamas’ slate Change and Reform, Haniyeh probably did not imagine that he would be able to provoke such a wave of support within the Palestinian street — people who voted for Hamas not solely on the basis of its ideology but also as an act of punishing Fatah and Abbas for the many years of corruption in the PA, and its failure to bring about a diplomatic solution.