Mahmoud Abbas spent most of his life, before becoming the Palestinian president, in the shadow of Yasser Arafat, the longtime leader of the Palestinian struggle, but he never gained the same status in that role or brought his people closer to the goal of establishing a state.
Based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the 87-year-old's role has been further undermined by the rise of Hamas, the Islamist group that has controlled Gaza since 2006, and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Abbas on Tuesday, after he reiterated Washington's support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, Abbas previously said that Western governments undermined that goal because they did not recognize Palestine as a state and did not hold Israel accountable, Reuters reports.
Now that goal seems distant as the bloodshed in the West Bank grows, with Israel's new right-wing government vowing to expand settlements in the West Bank and threats from Hamas and Israel growing louder.
The Israeli army announced yesterday that it had intercepted a rocket launched from Gaza, after sirens sounded in Israeli areas near the Strip.
"The Israeli government is responsible for what is happening today, because of its actions that undermine the two-state solution and are a violation of the signed agreements," Abbas said during Blinken's visit, an accusation that the Palestinian president often makes and Israel consistently rejects.
The first generation of exiles
Abbas is a first-generation Palestinian exile, born after colonial powers drew new borders in the Middle East, and is old enough to remember the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when half of the 1,4 million Palestinian Arabs - including Abbas - fled. or was expelled from their country to a new life as a refugee.
He is one of the early members of Fatah, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that has dominated Palestinian politics for decades. He became the leader of both organizations when Arafat died in 2004, and a year later was elected president of the Palestinian Authority, which has limited sovereignty in the West Bank.
The highlight of his career was in 1993 at a White House ceremony where he and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres signed the Oslo Accords, which offered the possibility of Palestinian autonomy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Behind them stood United States President Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who applauded.
Dressed in a suit and tie - in stark contrast to Arafat's headscarf and military boots - Abbas' advocacy of dialogue over violence and long service as a negotiator fueled hopes that a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be reached.
However, when Arafat died more than a quarter of a century later, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process stalled, and relations with Washington were at an all-time low. Critics accused the narrow circle of people around Abbas of corruption, nepotism and incompetence.
Avoids public appearances
Abbas has made fewer public appearances in recent years, and multiple hospital visits have raised doubts about his ability to lead the Palestinian government through the political crisis.
One public appearance in 2018 backfired when - not for the first time - he was accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in a speech. Amid international condemnation of his statements, he was forced to apologize.
Abbas was born in 1935 in Safed, a city in what was then the British part of Palestine, and now in the north of Israel. He fled as a child to Syria due to the conflict over the creation of Israel, and later worked in Qatar, where he joined others in Fatah, joined other Palestinians, including Arafat.
After Israel conquered and occupied the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Six-Day War, Arafat's Fatah took control of the PLO and a decade-long campaign against Israel began, with leaders moving from Jordan to Lebanon and later to Tunisia.
When the Palestinian leadership returned from exile in Gaza after the Oslo Accords, Abbas was full of optimism, promising: "I will live in Palestine." However, the peace negotiations faltered in the following years.
Abbas won the 2005 presidential election, but his Fatah was defeated in the parliamentary elections of 2006. Hamas marginalized Fatah in the Gaza civil war, leaving Abbas in control of the Palestinian-ruled areas of the West Bank, but there have been no Palestinian elections since.
Attempting to regain the initiative, Abbas made a unilateral move to seek Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. In 2012, Palestine received the status of a "non-member state" in the UN General Assembly. However, the goal of establishing a Palestinian state was slipping away.
Abbas has had little influence over US presidents, whose role is crucial in Middle East diplomacy, and now operates even more isolated as regional allies the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco sign diplomatic deals with Israel.
"After having contributed to the achievements that put our people in the forefront of history, I remain deeply concerned that history could run over us, that we could lose control and suffer irreparable failure," he warned back in 1994.
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