Though it seems a bit premature, there’s been an uptick this week in speculation about who will succeed President Abbas. Abbas’ term isn’t up for another 18 months and early elections are off the table, but a failed November peace conference could change all that.
Marwan Barghouti is of course one of the names most often tossed around as the Palestinians’ likely next leader. Israel’s infrastructure minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer gave Barghouti’s cause a boost this week when he called on the government to release the Fatah leader from jail, where he’s serving five life sentences for masterminding Fatah’s suicide bomb wave during the second intifada.
The other name I keep seeing mentioned is that of the hardline and elderly Ahmed Ghaneim, aka Abu Maher, an aging PLO leader who stayed behind in Tunis in 1994 because he opposed the Oslo peace accords.
The Al Ahram weekly reports:
Sources within Fatah have indicated that the Palestinian president is studying the possibility of not nominating himself and that deliberations are currently in progress within the faction over an alternative candidate. One possibility, according to a recent leak from within Fatah, is Abu Maher Ghneim, head of the movement’s organisational committee. Yet the prospect of Ghneim’s candidacy is difficult to imagine, firstly because he is vehemently opposed to Oslo and secondly because he refuses to return to the West Bank as long as it is under Israeli occupation.
Pinhas Inbari, an Israeli author affiliated with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, offers up an interesting analysis. The conflict is between the PLO’s founding generation old timers (Abu Alaa, Abu Maher, etc), the young guard affiliated with the Tanzim (Barghouti), and the independent business elite (Salam Fayad).
[Abbas ]has told the members of the old guard that he is keeping them away from Olmert’s business (ie the November peace conference) so that the “independents” bear the burnt of the failure of the conference.
Yediot Aharanot’s Roni Shaked reported on Ghaneim yesterday buried half way through an interview with Barghouti. Wrote Shaked:
About a month ago, at a meeting of the Fatah Central Committee, it was decided that Ahmed Ghanim (Abu Maher) would be his replacement.
1 response so far ↓
1 JamieSW // Sep 25, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I suspect that Abbas will not remain in office too much longer. His hands are completely tied - he can’t make any progress on the diplomatic front because a pre-requisite for doing so is negotiations with Hamas, which he can’t do because U.S./Israeli engagement with him is preconditioned on Hamas’ continued isolation.
My guess is that his replacement, whoever it trusn out to be, will start talking to Hamas again pretty sharpish. The status quo is simply unsustainable and undesirable, from the Palestinian point of view, and Hamas isn’t simply going to disappear.
Mark Perry of Conflicts Forum.org offers a very interesting analysis along these lines.
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