The Disastrous Legacy of Mahmoud Abbas

When Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas leaves the scene, all he will leave behind is a legacy of death and destruction. Ushered in on the wings of Yasser Arafat’s death and the terror campaign launched by the Palestine Liberation Organization and the PA in September 2000, the West touted Abbas as a “moderate” who could reform the PA and end terror.

This could not have been further from the truth.

In reality, Abbas was just another Holocaust-denying, terror-supporting, corrupt dictator who was bad for Israel, bad for the Palestinians, and bad for peace, which he undermined more than promoted.

As a result of policies that promote, incite, and reward terrorism; the systematic indoctrination of generations of Palestinians to hate Israel and Israelis; his insistence on treating genocidal terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as legitimate “Palestinian factions”; and his continued rejection of peace efforts, Abbas bears direct responsibility for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis.

If the PA is to continue playing any future role, Israel, the Palestinians, and the international community should do all they can to ensure that any future Palestinian leader is the absolute antithesis of Abbas.

Mahmoud Abbas was born in the Galilee town of Safed (Tzfat) in 1935. His family fled the town in 1948 for Syria because, as he explained, “just like Hebron, people were afraid that the Jews would take revenge for the [Arab] massacre [of Jews] in 1929. The 1929 massacre was most severe in Safed,” he continued. “The people [of Safed in 1948] were overcome with fear, and it caused the people to leave the city in a disorderly way.”¹

From Syrian and then Egyptian universities, Abbas was accepted to the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where he earned his PhD. His doctoral dissertation, a treatise on Holocaust denial, was entitled, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.”

Abbas Pays Cash Rewards for Terror

While Abbas abandoned the fatigues of Arafat and donned tailored suits as a means to feign legitimacy, from the outset, Abbas chose to openly promote, incentivize, and reward terror by revolutionizing the PLO/PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” policy.² While the PLO had been paying financial rewards to terrorists for decades and the PA had been paying the rewards since its creation in 1994, the policy was predominantly informal and based on internal regulations. In the twilight zone between Arafat’s death (November 2004) and Abbas’s election as head of the PLO and Chairman of the PA, the PA adopted the Law of Prisoners and Released Prisoners, Law No. 19 (2004). The law defined all terrorists arrested by Israel as the “fighting sector and an integral part of the fabric of the Arab Palestinian society” and guaranteed them substantial financial benefits.

Against the backdrop of the new law, in 2006, Abbas approved the regulations that codified the monthly salary payments paid by the PA to Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli prisons. In 2010, he drove a salary hike for terrorist prisoners, including a 300% rise,³ from 4,000 shekels per month to 12,000 shekels per month, for prisoners who serve more than 30 years in prison, i.e., murderers. He also codified the practice of ensuring jobs in PA institutions for released terrorists. Shamelessly, some of the released terrorists were even recruited into the PA security forces.⁴

But that was only part of the story. Alongside the PA payments to the terrorist prisoners and released convicts, the PLO (also headed by Abbas) runs an additional program that pays allowances to wounded terrorists and the families of dead terrorists, including the families of suicide bombers.

While this program had also been running for decades, the payments remained modest. Then came Abbas. Under Abbas, these payments rose in 2007, again in 2009, and again in 2013.⁵

By 2018, these two categories of payments – to the terrorist prisoners and released convicts and to the wounded terrorists and the families of dead terrorists – referred to as the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” policy, had reached an estimated 7.47% of the PA’s entire operational budget.

While the United States passed the Taylor Force Act, which conditioned U.S. aid to the PA on the abolition of the policy, Israel passed a law that imposed financial penalties on the PA for the program. Other countries ceased or limited their aid to the PA. Abbas dug his heels in, repeatedly declaring that even if the PA were left with just one penny in its coffers, he would pay it to the terrorists.

Over the years, Abbas has done his utmost to hide and conceal the PLO-PA terror payments. As part of the latest attempt, in February 2025, Abbas even issued official legislation to end the practice. Just days later, Abbas reiterated that the payments would continue. By October 2025, the scam was thoroughly exposed. Instead of taking responsibility and actually abandoning the policy, Abbas fired his Minister of Finance for allegedly continuing the payments without authority.

In addition to the substantial contribution of the payments to promote, incite, and incentivize terror, as a direct result of the policy, the PA lost billions of dollars in potential revenue and aid.

While the Palestinian practice of paying cash rewards to terrorists didn’t start with Abbas, he is singularly responsible for institutionalizing the “Pay-for-Slay” policy. For Abbas, prioritizing the terrorists over every other Palestinian sector was not just a slogan; it was a financial reality.

Abbas Poisoned the Minds of Palestinians for Generations, Destroying Any Hope for Peace

Confucius is famous for saying, “If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.”

Sadly for both Israel and the Palestinians, Abbas appears to have been a devout follower of the teachings of Confucius. While the PLO/PA was always hostile to Israel, under Abbas, the PA school curriculum became more and more radicalized.⁶ Palestinian children were brainwashed to hate Israel, hate Israelis, participate in terror, and seek the death of Israelis, themselves, or both.

The indoctrination to hate and denial of Israel’s right to exist, combined with the teaching that Israel, in its entirety, is destined to be destroyed, has influenced generation after generation of Palestinian children. The vast majority of the Palestinian population that grew up and was educated under the influence of the PA, in general, and under the influence of Abbas, in particular, has been fundamentally poisoned in a manner that can only be compared to the education of the Nazis.

While Hamas planned and executed, together with other terrorists, the October 7, 2023, massacre, it was the education system developed and fanaticized under Abbas that provided the fertile ground for the additional Hamas indoctrination.

To undo the long-term damage caused by Abbas, large parts of the Palestinian population, starting with the Gazans, will need to undergo an intensive program of de-Nazification.

The Political Lame Duck Who Destroyed the Last Remnants of Palestinian Democracy

Abbas’s failures were not limited to Israel-Palestinian relations but also included internal Palestinian issues. From the outset, Abbas’s position as PA chairman was tenuous. Elected in 2005, he won only 28% of the registered Palestinian voters.⁷ Since then, his popularity has consistently declined, with recent polls showing that 85% of Palestinians were dissatisfied with his performance⁸ and 88% wanted him to resign.⁹

Abbas didn’t care. According to Palestinian law, he was only meant to serve as PA Chairman for a four-year term, with the option, subject to re-election, of one additional four-year term. In practice, once he sat on his proverbial throne, Abbas never left.

To feign legitimacy, it was Abbas who demanded that Hamas, the PFLP, and other Palestinian terror organizations be allowed to participate in the last PA general elections, held in 2006. In the run-up to the elections, Abbas expanded the PA parliament and altered the electoral system to favor his own candidacy and that of his Fatah party. In return for substantial U.S. financial support, he promised victory. However, already by then, the Palestinians hated both Abbas and his Fatah party, and they overwhelmingly voted for Hamas,¹⁰ which won the elections by a landslide.

A year later, in 2007, Abbas deposed the Hamas government that had been elected and replaced it with a so-called “technocrat” government, over which he held complete control. The position gave him global recognition and access to billions of dollars. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Abbas was persona non grata and had not set foot in the Strip since 2005.

While he occasionally paid lip service to the weak calls of the international community to hold Palestinian general elections again, he never did. Contrary to the willful blindness of the international community, Abbas knew that if Palestinians again went to the polls, he and his Fatah cronies would again be booted out. Anticipating his eventual demise, between 2018 and 2022, Abbas initiated and completed the entire dismantling of even the last remnants of Palestinian democracy¹¹ by integrating the PA institutions into the institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he also headed.

According to recent polls, 87%¹² of Palestinians believed that PA institutions under Abbas were rife with corruption and nepotism.

Similar to Arafat, Abbas, inexplicably, accumulated a substantial personal fortune estimated to be over $100 million. His sons, Tarek and Yasser, run the large “Falcon” business consortium that controls much of the Palestinian commerce and labor market. The consortium includes tobacco, electrical and mechanical engineering, media, construction, and investment interests. They, too, have amassed huge personal fortunes.

For all the above reasons and more, a September 2023 poll showed that 62% of Palestinians believed that under Abbas, the PA had become more of a burden on the Palestinian people than an asset.¹³

Rejecting Peace

While consistently feigning moderacy and pragmatism, Abbas consistently rejected peace. In 2008, he rejected the offer by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to create a Palestinian state. According to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat,¹⁴ Olmert even offered that the area of the potential Palestinian state would be larger than the areas of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.

Instead of establishing an actual state as offered by Olmert, Abbas chose to pursue virtual statehood, repeatedly requesting that the United Nations recognize the non-existent “State of Palestine.”

Learn The Lessons of the Past, Or Be Condemned to Repeat Them

In October 2025, Abbas issued a “Presidential Decree,”¹⁵ anointing his long-time accomplice, Hussein Al-Sheikh, as his replacement.¹⁶ While Al-Sheikh will be presented as a moderate new face of the PLO, the truth is that he is just another terrorist wearing a suit cut from the same cloth as his predecessors. Al-Sheikh, similar to Abbas, reveres terrorists, is committed to continuing the “Pay-for-Slay” policy, and seeks PLO/Fatah unity with Hamas. If the international community allows Al-Sheikh to inherit Abbas, no one should be surprised to see the continued Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist and the continuation of terror and death.

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