{"id":1213435,"date":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=444770"},"modified":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T11:00:00","slug":"mahmoud-abbas-holocaust-controversy-spotlights-deep-disillusion-with-palestinian-authority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/09\/15\/mahmoud-abbas-holocaust-controversy-spotlights-deep-disillusion-with-palestinian-authority\/","title":{"rendered":"Mahmoud Abbas Holocaust Controversy Spotlights Deep Disillusion With Palestinian Authority"},"content":{"rendered":"
Mahmoud Abbas, the<\/u> usually low-profile president of the Palestinian Authority, was widely condemned around the world this week, including by prominent Palestinian intellectuals<\/a>, after making antisemitic comments<\/a> about the Holocaust in a televised speech to his party last month. While Abbas\u2019s words and actions rarely command significant international attention, the incident put a spotlight on his deep unpopularity among Palestinians, some 73 percent<\/a> of whom want him gone, and their growing disillusionment with the PA.<\/p>\n Abbas, whose spokesperson disputed<\/a> that his remarks were antisemitic, was one of the architects of the Oslo peace process, which commenced with a historic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn 30 years ago this week. Oslo has long been dead<\/a> to Palestinians<\/a>, whose hopes in the statehood promised to them under the deal collapsed years ago.<\/p>\n Now, faced with the most far-right extremist Israeli government to date, escalating settler and military violence that have laid bare the PA\u2019s inability to protect its people, and Abbas\u2019s increasingly authoritarian rule, many Palestinians have also begun to question the future of Oslo\u2019s most enduring legacy: the PA itself. As Palestinians look with growing concern to an unclear succession path following Abbas, who is 87 and has ruled since shortly Arafat died in 2004, they are also asking whether the institution itself can \u2014 or should \u2014 survive a political moment so profoundly distant from that of its establishment.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a very big question mark about the sustainability of the Palestinian Authority,\u201d said Ammar Dwaik, director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, Palestine\u2019s official rights ombudsman.<\/p>\n It was a question I heard from many Palestinians across class, generation, and political allegiance during a trip to the occupied West Bank earlier this year.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of the PA?\u201d asked Ehab Bseiso, a former minister of culture whom Abbas fired in 2021 after he publicly criticized Palestinian security forces\u2019 killing<\/a> of an outspoken critic of the PA. \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of having a PA if we still have expansion of settlements, incursions, killings, shootings, and so on? There\u2019s nothing that the PA can offer. It\u2019s been trapped in one function: maintaining order, condemning Israeli violations, addressing the international community. It doesn\u2019t match the anger and frustration on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n Bseiso pointed to Abbas\u2019s rule-by-decree governance, with no elections held in a generation and Parliament dissolved years ago. \u201cThe whole Palestinian political future is linked to, \u2018What\u2019s going to happen after Abbas is gone?’\u201d Bseiso said. \u201cThat\u2019s a failure in itself, because if we had institutions, this question wouldn\u2019t have been emerging. In a healthy political system, one president goes and another comes. But we have no institutions, there is no Parliament, no elections for the last 18 years.\u201d<\/p>\n The authority has become \u201cirrelevant\u201d to many Palestinians, echoed Mustafa Barghouti, a co-founder of the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, a third party aiming to overcome the split between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, Abbas\u2019s party.<\/p>\n Abbas Zaki, a veteran Fatah member, put it more bluntly. \u201cThe PA is over, they are finished,\u201d Zaki said. \u201cWe need to reorganize ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n