Understanding Abbas’s Decision to Appoint Rawhi Fattouh as His Successor

The decision of 89-year-old Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to issue a “constitutional declaration”¹ appointing Rawhi Fattouh, the Chairman of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), to “temporarily serve as PA President pending the holding of presidential elections,” signifies, in essence, the final nail in the coffin of the Palestinian Authority. While intentionally worded misleadingly, the so-called “constitutional declaration” is the latest in a series of decisions made by Abbas over the last six years,² all intended to replace the PA bodies with those of the Palestine Liberation Organization, over which Abbas and his Fatah party have complete dominance.

The PA was created under the Oslo Accords. The Accords provided that the PA would have two central governance bodies – the PA Chairman (President) and the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), which would function as the PA parliament. After its creation, the PA enacted legislation, mostly mirroring the provisions of the Accords, for the election of these two functionaries. In theory, the PA laws provided that the Chairman would be elected for a four-year term,³ after which the incumbent could run for a second and final term. Elections for the PLC were also to be held every four years.⁴

PA law aside, elections for the position of PA Chairman have only been held twice in the last thirty years. Yasser Arafat won the first election,⁵ held in 1996, and stayed in the position, without further elections, until he died in 2004. Abbas won the second election,⁶ held in 2005, and has stayed in his position, without ever holding additional elections until this day.

The PLC suffered a similar fate. The first elections for the PLC were held in 1996, with Fatah, the party of Arafat and later Abbas, winning the majority of the PLC seats.⁷ The PLC elected in 1996 continued to function until 2005. The second PLC elections were held in 2006. Despite employing several different tactics and receiving substantial U.S. support, Abbas’s Fatah lost the elections, with its rival, Hamas,⁸ the internationally-designated terror organization that led the October 7, 2023, massacre, winning 74 of the 132 PLC seats.⁹

Following the 2006 elections, Hamas, then led by Ismail Haniyeh, appointed Abdel-Aziz Dweik as the Speaker of the PLC and formed the PA government. After Israel and the international community refused to continue funding the PA, under growing pressure in early 2007, Abbas deposed the Hamas government. Initially, Abbas replaced the Hamas government with a so-called “technocrat government,” which soon thereafter morphed into a Fatah-led government.

In June 2007, responding to Abbas’ move, Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip. Since then, until the October 7 massacre, Hamas dominated the Gaza Strip, while Abbas and his periodically changing Fatah governments ruled the areas under PA control in Judea and Samaria.

After the rift, and partly due to the arrest of many Hamas members of the PLC following a June 2006 raid from Gaza into Israel, during which terrorists killed several people and kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the PLC ceased to function.

This time following PA law, in the absence of a functioning PLC, Abbas assumed all the legislative powers of the PLC and started issuing “Laws by Decree.” In Gaza, Hamas issued laws of its own. While the PLC had ceased to function, it was never officially disbanded.

In late 2018, Abbas decided to formally dissolve the 2006-elected PLC.¹⁰ He did so to avoid Hamas again seizing control of the PA, without ever holding elections. The fear arose since the PA law¹¹ provided that if the PA Chairman died or became incapacitated, he would automatically be replaced by the Speaker of the Parliament who, at the time, was still Abdel-Aziz Dweik. Abbas sought to prevent this automatic function of PA law, in the fear that once Hamas/Dweik assumed his “temporary” position, he too would never step down and never call the elections required.

Before dissolving the PLC, Abbas promoted a structural change in the PLO that would grant him enhanced control.

To facilitate his control over the PLO, in May 2018, Abbas ensured that the Palestinian National Council (PNC) transferred its powers to a much smaller and more easily dominated Palestinian Central Committee (PCC). The PNC is the legislative institution of the PLO that almost never convened, due to its size and the geographical dispersion of its members.

Following the transfer of power from the PNC, in February 2022, Abbas then pushed to elect Rawhi Fattouh as the Speaker of the PNC and promoted a decision in the PCC ordering the PLO Executive Committee to reformulate the institutions of the PA.

Having now merged the PA institutions into the PLO structure, and replacing the PLC with the PNC, Abbas’ choice of Fattouh as his interim replacement, was not a positive appointment of a successor, but rather a function of Abbas finally imposing the PLO on the PA.

To avoid openly saying that Abbas had dismantled the PA’s electoral and governing mechanisms, as designated by the Oslo Accords, and replaced them with the PLO, the wording of the announcement published by Wafa, the official media mouthpiece of the Palestinian leadership, was intentionally misleading: “President Abbas issued a constitutional declaration stipulating that should the post of PA President become vacant, the Chairman of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) shall temporarily serve as PA President pending the holding of presidential elections as per the Palestinian Elections Law.” Using this wording, Abbas presented to the unfamiliar eye the ostensible reality that the PNC is somehow connected with the “Palestinian (i.e. PA – M.H.) Elections law,” when in reality, no such connection exists.

Abbas’s choice of Fattouh as his interim replacement effectively allows him to temporarily placate all of the other Palestinian leaders, such as Hussein A-Sheikh, Mahmoud Al-Aloul, Marwan Barghouti, Jibril Rajoub, Majed Faraj, Muhammad Dahlan, et al., who all see themselves, each for their own reason, as his replacement.¹²

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