Review

Abstract

Menachem Klein dates his involvement in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts to a hot day in August 1993 when news reached him in Jerusalem of the secret peace accords brokered in Oslo, Norway. With the ushering in of a new era seemingly destined to end the century-old conflict over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, Professor Klein shifted his scholarly attention away from Egypt toward Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking as the focus of his academic and political advisory work. Arafat and Abbas: Portraits of Leadership in a State Postponed, is the most recent outgrowth of his subsequent involvement, coinciding with the rise and apparent failure to forge a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace based on the mutual recognition agreement reached in Norway.Klein's book is structured as a political portrait of the two men who have led the Palestinian national movement over the past sixty years. He compares and contrasts Yasser Arafat's rise to power with that of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat founded the Fatah movement in 1959, took over the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) a decade later, and ultimately established and led the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994. Following Arafat's 2004 death, Mahmoud Abbas inherited his predecessor's leadership roles, presiding over the three Palestinian bodies (Fatah, PLO, and the PA) until now. Klein assesses the two leaders through the prism of their respective foreign and domestic policies and concludes by looking at the struggle already underway to succeed the incumbent Abbas.Embedded in this book, which partly draws from previous articles by Klein, is a second narrative: the failed promise of the Oslo Accords to negotiate a conclusive resolution to the more than century-long struggle between two rival nationalist movements claiming the same land as their patrimony. In assessing these intensive diplomatic efforts, Klein widens the book's analytical aperture to examine what he sees as the role of the other main international protagonists—Israel and the United States—in the failure to forge a conflict-ending solution. While such an ambitious agenda is commendable, the book's narrative jumps backward and forward in time, making for a challenging read to all but those extremely familiar with the events depicted.Yasser Arafat's emergence to lead the Palestinian nationalist movement followed the loss, dispossession, and defeat in 1948. Klein sees Arafat less in terms of leadership but more as the Palestinian national icon reflecting their collective experience. Arafat symbolizes both humiliation and self-empowerment through armed struggle as well as total dedication to the national liberation struggle around which Fatah built a mythology.In contrast, Mahmoud Abbas represents the “anti-icon” in this portrait, emerging from the margins of Fatah's founding generation as Arafat's improbable successor. Unlike his other Fatah peers, Abbas was no revolutionary or political in-fighter. Indeed, he was selected to succeed Arafat precisely because he was the unthreatening consensus candidate. Abbas emerged as the movement's leader amid the chaos and bloodshed of the Second Intifada not like a guerrilla fighter, but seeming more like an accountant—cautious and dry. He was the man for the moment—clearly and consistently opposed to any Palestinian violence or terrorism against Israel, in contrast to Arafat's continued ambiguous approach toward violence, following his 1993 avowed repudiation of such means. Klein notes that Abbas has not waivered on this stance throughout the past decade and a half in office, believing that such methods have been catastrophic for the Palestinian state-building project and for realizing a negotiated peace with Israel.Yet Abbas's demeanor is problematic for a leader of a national movement and a state-in-the-making, as Klein notes. He closets himself in his Muqatah headquarters, rarely leaving or meeting constituents or young activists, increasingly disconnected from his own people. Klein describes Abbas as fearful of the unchecked passions of the Palestinian people whom he views as lacking in self-control and restraint. The author disapproves of Abbas's unwillingness to embrace calls to mass mobilization or peaceful popular resistance or to engage with Palestinian intellectuals. Gradually but distinctively, Abbas comes to rely on Palestinian security forces, rather than politics and alliances, to secure his position. Abbas is a tragic “Sisyphean leader” (33) in Klein's estimation, following along Arafat's path, but creating no new opportunities, and certain to fail.In the realm of foreign policy, Klein deems Arafat successful for navigating the Palestinian national movement from the periphery of Arab politics back to the center, returning the exiled leadership to its homeland to join its people in what the author calls a remarkable achievement. Arafat is bold and revolutionary in this depiction. In contrast, Abbas is portrayed as reactive, plodding, and reclusive. Klein distills from Abbas's speeches and public declarations a simple, rational, and largely unchanging approach: First, operate the Palestinian Authority as a state, expand international support for its status as a state-in-the-making, and then impose upon Israel a peace agreement. Abbas, like Arafat, believes the Palestinians made their strategic concession by accepting a state in just 22 percent of historic Palestine; it is now up to Israel to accept it, or for the world to force Israel to do so.Abbas's greatest accomplishment, in Klein's assessment, came in 2012 when the United Nations General Assembly upgraded the status of Palestine to a nonmember observer state. This and other international efforts, such as confronting Israel in the International Criminal Court, alone are not likely to bring about Palestinian independence, according to Klein. Nonetheless, the author believes such efforts will keep the Palestinian desire for independence alive, perhaps to be realized by Abbas's successor.Klein credits the Trump administration's actions with precipitating a dramatic shift away from Abbas's passivity. Klein suggests the Palestinian leader has been seemingly knocked out of his reactive and passive stupor by what is deemed as President Trump's move to “formalize and legitimize Israeli apartheid” (83). This, Klein contends, has transformed Abbas into a “serial policy initiator” (83) —undertaking a far-reaching campaign to limit Trump's damage and unite the Palestinians in opposition to the US administration. This has also led Abbas to relent in his opposition to populism, turning to the Palestinian masses and permitting Fatah-organized “Days of Rage” demonstrations against Israel.Klein prematurely credits Abbas with having “succeeded in deterring Arab leaders from publicly accepting Trump's policy,” having published this book in 2019 prior to the decision by the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Bahrain to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Klein, like most regional analysts, failed to anticipate these Arab states' willingness to break with the longstanding taboo of formalizing ties with Israel prior to Palestinian statehood. Thus, we are deprived of his assessment of how this changed regional environment will affect the future of the Palestinian national movement.Klein casts a more critical eye toward internal Palestinian politics, adeptly describing how limited institutions of Palestinian self-governance were created by Arafat and Fatah, later to be inherited and perpetuated by Abbas. While Arafat established corrupt and authoritarian institutions, he is nonetheless also credited with allowing a modicum of democracy to emerge and function within the Palestinian Authority. Not so Abbas who, while making the security services accountable to his civilian leadership, has nonetheless used those forces to quash and eliminate the remaining vestiges of democratic rule. PA institutions now fail to respect the rule of law and human rights violations have become widespread. Democratic institutions and principles have ceased to exit, and decision-making and authority have been concentrated in the hands of one man to an even greater extent under Abbas. In his own way, Arafat was more inclusive, consistently seeking to coopt real or potential political adversaries. Abbas, with increasing heavy handedness, has scorned, marginalized, and hounded potential rivals. Unlike Arafat, Abbas even refuses to designate a successor for Fatah, the PLO, or PA.In contrast to Arafat and Abbas's PLO and “cult of personality” is Hamas, which Klein calls a consensus decision-making movement devoted to religious precepts. Klein provides a less-than-convincing revisionist interpretation to the generally accepted view of Hamas as responsible for West Bank–Gaza split. Relying on several questionable Western accounts, Klein accuses Abbas of launching the first salvo in the Fatah-Hamas split by seeking to undermine Hamas's 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council victory through covert means, at American and Israeli instigation. He portrays Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza from the PA the following year in this context and faults Abbas for subsequently employing heavy-handed tactics against the entrenched Hamas leadership. Abbas is portrayed as stubbornly widening the schism between the West Bank and Gaza by refusing to compromise on his strict one-gun-one-authority approach. Klein's depiction of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas's Gaza-based leader since February 2017, as having adopted nonviolence as the movement's modus operandi seems premature. Klein correctly notes, however, that Abbas's approach toward Hamas has in recent years become more rigid than Israel's, which he credits with having moved to a de-escalation strategy, abandoning its earlier approach of either bringing down Hamas or imposing the PA on it.Beyond the Fatah-Hamas divide, Klein identifies some new currents among Palestinian intellectuals that he credits with providing a new paradigm to challenge Abbas's authoritarianism as well as Israel: states' rights. He notes a dynamic and shifting intra-Palestinian debate away from the PLO's nationalist discourse focused on territory toward what Klein calls a native rights and settler-colonialism model adopted from progressive Western academic and activist circles. Klein claims these emerging thinkers “belong to the right side of history” (121). Notably, proponents of this new thinking seek to create a new partnership between Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and Palestinian-Israelis. Klein suggests that this marks a dramatically changed perception among Palestinians away from the view prevalent since 1948 of Israeli-Palestinians as collaborators. Instead, he suggests, West Bankers increasingly see the struggle of Israeli-Palestinians within Israeli civic institutions as a model to emulate and endorse. He foresees the future convergence of these two Palestinian constituencies in a joint struggle for equal rights.When it comes to the book within the biography—the failure of Oslo to deliver peace—Klein is widely critical. He faults Arafat and Abbas for their antidemocratic ways, for naively putting their faith in the international community, for failing to adopt new ideas, and for scorning unity and not sharing power more broadly. The book acknowledges that both Arafat and Abbas failed to realize Palestinian independence or build effective institutions, though Klein speculates that history might later come to view Abbas's Palestinian Authority as having formed the nucleus of an independent Palestine.Klein is reluctant to cast too much blame on either Arafat or Abbas, treating both largely as powerless men attempting to survive in the face of what he calls “Israeli and Western physical and political siege” (171). Klein strongly contends that the Palestinians were ultimately “neglected and betrayed” (171). This was not inadvertent, he alleges. Instead, he argues that Israel, the United States, and by default Europe have actively prevented the realization of the two-state solution. If Arafat is to be faulted, it is for making strategic concessions in the naïve assumption that Oslo's interim arrangements would inevitably lead to Palestinian independence.The weight of responsibility for the failed Oslo experiment in Klein's telling rests with Israel and the United States. Israel never gave Oslo a chance, he suggests: Rabin and Peres from the onset opposed any solution involving an independent Palestine, Barak sought to reveal Arafat's “demonic face,” and Olmert provided Abbas with a “peace deal diktat” (45). Netanyahu, he argues, seeks Abbas's surrender, not a compromise solution. Meanwhile, President Obama, according to Klein, was indifferent while his secretary of state, John Kerry, was haplessly misled by Netanyahu.Yet Klein's indictment extends beyond individuals: Israel is, in his terminology, the “colonialist power” (173) and an “ethnic regime” (41). Its “military ethos makes the Israeli side goal-oriented, interested in practical details rather than abstract principles or legal and formal questions” (49). Israel, he claims, tends to solve diplomatic problems via military means. Israeli diplomats use ideas and proposals, he claims, the way its army uses exploratory fire to probe and exploit its enemy's weaknesses. It uses divide-and-rule tactics to dominate the opposing negotiating team: “The goal is to obtain the maximum gains in exchange for minimal concessions” (49). With such a negotiating partner, the Americans, he argues, failed to reward Abbas's moderation, refused to pressure Israel, and thus left the Palestinians disappointed.Klein suggests that the very characteristics that made Arafat a national symbol to Palestinians is what made the Palestinian leader a demon for the majority of Israelis. “Based on Arafat symbolizing the national movement, Israelis quickly moved from demonizing Arafat to perceiving the entire Palestinian nation negatively,” Klein writes (15). “Almost two decades later, the demon still rules the Israeli mind,” he alleges (19).Klein's running assessment of the power imbalances among Oslo's protagonists is not incorrect. The 1993 Oslo Accords were signed within the context of the United States's preeminence in the international system following the Soviet Union's collapse. It is true, as Klein notes, that the last quarter century of American primacy was largely unchallenged by Europe or Russia. Moreover, the iconic Rabin-Arafat White House lawn handshake came amid a Palestinian nadir following Arafat's miscalculated support for Saddam Hussein and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.One serious analytical question worthy of consideration is whether or not this distribution of global and regional power helped or hindered Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts. Klein sees the power imbalance as unquestioningly harmful and unfair. Such a categorical view is disputable. Arguably, the Oslo breakthrough was made possible by shifts in the global and regional balance of power that followed the Soviet Union's collapse, leaving the West's international leadership unrivaled. The Cold War's dramatic, sudden, and peaceful ending removed one of the Middle East's gravest fault lines—one that had brought the region to the brink of nuclear confrontation just twenty years prior in 1973. With the end of Soviet backing of the Middle East's rejectionist bloc, a long-sought-after international peace conference—Madrid—was made possible in 1991. This, in turn set the stage for face-to-face negotiations not only between Israel and the Palestinians, but also between Israel and neighboring Jordan and Syria.Klein is correct in asserting that Israel has long held a preponderance of power relative to the perennially weak Palestinian national movement. But it was that very imbalance, demonstrable during and immediately after the First Palestinian Intifada, that led Rabin to recognize that military power alone could not vanquish the Palestinians and their national aspirations. Former Defense Minister Sharon's move to remove the PLO from Lebanon had been just as unsuccessful in crushing the Palestinian movement, as had been his own effort to defeat the first Intifada through force. Indeed, it had been the United States's longstanding contention that only a strong and secure Israel would allow it to take calculated risks for peace and reconcile with its adversaries. One might fault Israel's failure to sufficiently empower the Palestinians without viewing Israel's strength as a liability to peacemaking, but rather a necessary precondition for it.The corresponding and perhaps more central question, when assessing Arafat and Abbas's legacy, is whether the Palestinians' relative weakness robbed them and their national movement of choices, power, and indeed all agency. The Palestinian national movement's own history attests to the power of the weak. Klein aptly describes how the Palestinian national movement, from its earliest days following the defeat of 1948, leveraged its relative weakness to its advantage: First and foremost by asserting the Palestinian right to voice their national aspirations, rather leave it to the Arab states that had repeatedly failed to deliver results on their behalf. The movement also succeeded—albeit with significant human and political cost—in deploying violence, terrorism, and armed struggle against stronger adversaries to gain international notoriety and recognition of their national aspirations. In the span of some fifteen years, Arafat went from complete obscurity to international fame, as enshrined in the image of his pistol-brandishing appearance at the United Nations General Assembly's rostrum some twenty years before Oslo.More fundamentally, one of the Palestinian national movement's greatest assets, which Klein does not examine, has been the strength of its narrative and its power to confer legitimacy. Klein's notes correctly Israel's preponderance of power with respect to the Palestinians. Yet Arafat himself recognized early on that the Palestinians retained a powerful “no”—to recognizing Israel, to relinquishing Palestinian individual and national claims, to granting full Arab acceptance of Israel and Zionism—that has remained the strongest instrument in the Palestinian toolkit. Neither America's might nor Israel's military power have managed to overcome the strength of the Palestinian veto. And while Oslo may have not gained the Palestinians a state, it enshrined the Palestinians' centrality to any conflict-ending agreement that would conclusively terminate the outstanding claims—moral, material, territorial, and national—left unresolved since 1948. Israel alone cannot determine its final boundaries. The Palestinians remain essential to any postwar settlement that finalizes Israel's eastern border, along with the other final status issues remaining on the Oslo agenda.One analytical byproduct of viewing Arafat and Abbas as largely powerless and without agency is that it renders many Palestinian choices and decisions as inconsequential or ascribes fundamental responsibility to others for their failures. Many of the Palestinian leadership's actions and decisions are given short shrift. Thus, an opportunity is missed for a deeper examination of Arafat's and Abbas's respective strategies and some of their most consequential decisions.One such critical decision worthy of further analysis is Arafat's agreement to the 1993 Declaration of Principles. Those accords mandated the establishment of an interim Palestinian authority to administer Palestinian population centers and enlarged swaths of territory during a five-year transitional period in which Israel and PLO would negotiate a permanent conflict-ending agreement. Klein notes that Arafat and then Abbas saw this step as a strategic concession in return for which Israel and its backers were meant to deliver the Palestinians an independent state. What were Arafat's calculations in making the decision to accept the interim status of the PA? Was their strategy for realizing their objectives fatally flawed, and did any subsequent Palestinian actions contribute to their failure? Did either leader plan for contingencies, and did they believe they had alternative choices along the way should the process become stymied, as it did?A related strategic choice worthy of further examination is Arafat's 1993 decision to recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce terror and violence, and his subsequent and sometimes ambiguous commitment to it. Klein observes that this move allowed the PLO leadership to leave exile and reconnect with its constituency on the ground. However, the reader is still left without any window into Arafat's thinking or calculations. Also helpful would be some examination of Palestinian, as well as Israeli, shortcomings in fulfilling their commitments. Klein blames Israel and the United States for failing to deliver on Oslo's promise. Yet left for further consideration is how the agreement may have been conceptually flawed from the onset, or whether and how Palestinian missteps—and not Israel and the United States alone—contributed to the failure to translate the interim accords into final agreements.Arafat and Abbas's examination of Palestinian foreign policy, like the entire book, is the story of national aspirations left unfulfilled. Yet focusing so heavily on the international community's failures to deliver upon Oslo's promise and for allegedly blocking Palestine's emergence leaves unexamined many important and indeed successful aspects of the two leaders' diplomatic efforts over the years. It is also striking that Klein, a serious and accomplished scholar of Arab politics well versed in the language, relies almost entirely on secondary English-language sources for this study. It is also surprising that the author, given his involvement in Israeli-Palestinian relations since 1993, did not cite any first-hand interviews or conversations with Palestinian politicians and intellectuals for this study.While Klein addresses Arafat's and Abbas's mismanagement of negotiations and failure to produce a state, left for further exploration are how they managed to accumulate incremental tactical gains along the way, and how they managed against the odds to place and maintain Palestine on the international agenda. Arafat's peripatetic international travel, media savvy, and sheer perseverance helped move the Palestinian cause from relative obscurity to the upper reaches of world affairs over a relatively brief period of time. Arafat was famously in constant motion, jetting from one world capital to another in order to cajole world leaders into supporting the Palestinians.Moreover, Arafat is perhaps too easily dismissed as a negotiator. Klein focuses on Arafat's subsequent negotiations with Israel in a brief section on the mismanagement of peace talks. Here, he highlights PLO dysfunction at Camp David, seeing it as a symptom of their weak statelessness. Left unacknowledged is that while subjected to several weeks of relentless round-the-clock pressure by the president of United States to make greater concessions, Arafat stood his ground. Moreover, over the next half year, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations continued against the backdrop of the Second Intifada, with Arafat succeeding in extracting further offers and better negotiating terms from Israel and the United States in talks outside of Washington and at Taba later that year. How Arafat managed to once again manipulate violence to improve an admittedly weak negotiating hand bears further study.Klein speculates that in the future Abbas's efforts may be seen as having laid the groundwork for independent statehood. In doing so he recognizes that the outcome remains not predetermined. Moreover, while he credits Abbas with having attained nonstate observer status for the Palestinians at the United Nations in 2012, left for further serious examination is just how he did it. Unpacking Abbas's greatest diplomatic achievement could provide insight into the Palestinians' prospects for an international approach, and how they may seek to leverage this status into future tangible gains.One of the most intriguing yet unexplored areas of Klein's study is Arafat's and Abbas's complex relationship with the broader Arab world. The interplay between the struggle for Palestine and the Arab states is not only central to the story of the Palestinian national movement, but it also lies at the heart of inter-Arab politics and the story of twentieth-century Arab nationalism. Klein notes that the Palestinian national movement was established to wrestle power away from the Arab states' effort to advance the Palestinian cause on their behalf. Thus, a structural tension was built into the foundation of the relationship between the Palestinian national movement and the Arab states.This tension would remain central to both Arafat's and Abbas's ensuing relationships, alliances, and conflicts with the Arab states over the years. These relations played a major role in the unfolding of Palestinian politics and diplomacy as featured in Klein's study. It also led to tremendous conflict. Klein mentions only in passing Arafat and the PLO's clashes, civil warfare, and ultimate expulsion first from Jordan in 1970, and then again within Lebanon in 1982. But nowhere is Arafat's strategy and statecraft toward the Arab states examined. Nor does he examine the interplay between the Arab states' peacemaking efforts with Israel and those of the Palestinians.The most glaring omission here is the entirety of Egypt's 1977 outreach to Israel, and the peace treaty subsequently signed between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Many of the core arrangements embedded in the 1993 Oslo framework—transitional Palestinian self-rule, elections, incremental IDF withdrawals—were based on the Framework for Peace agreed to by Israel and Egypt in 1978 at Camp David. Though Egypt's peace agreement left Cairo ostracized from the Arab world for many years—another example of the power of the Palestinian cause—it formed the framework for what followed between Israel and the PLO. Left unanswered, therefore, is the following fundamental question: Having seen and rejected the Egyptian autonomy arrangements, why did Arafat later agree to terms with Israel that were remarkably similar? Were he and the PLO trying to capture a perceived missed opportunity? Or more likely, did they believe that the concept's likely outcome had been sufficiently modified by Israel to allow for a different result—statehood rather than limited autonomy?Also absent from Klein's analysis is any real exploration of how the Palestinian cause has been marginalized within the broader Arab agenda, and what role Abbas, in particular, may have played in this outcome. Palestinian relations with the larger Arab world have undergone a tectonic shift over the past two decades. In the first half of 2001 Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah was prepared to precipitate a major clash with the new US president George W. Bush over the Palestinian issue. The following year, at the Beirut Arab League summit, the Palestinian plight was once again enshrined as the central leitmotif in inter-Arab politics.Abbas's complex relationship with the Arab world, and its impact on his efforts to achieve Palestinian independence are similarly unaddressed. When Abbas took power, he was warmly received throughout much of the Arab world as a welcome alternative to Arafat, who had been a difficult interlocutor for many. Abbas quickly forged a close relationship with President Hosni Mubarak and henceforth sought Egyptian support for his diplomatic efforts with Israel. In contrast, today, Abbas is largely a peripheral figure within the larger Arab world, isolated and without any real allies, patronage, or friends, save for the partial exception of Jordan's King Abdullah. A more nuanced analysis of Palestinian foreign policy would explore Palestinian relations and alliance management with the broader Middle East, not just Israel.Despite all that has been written about them, both Arafat and Abbas remain enigmatic figures, elusive to the historian, biographer, and scholar. Their iconic (and anti-iconic) place on the mantelpiece of the Palestinian national movement have insulated them from closer, more dispassionate scrutiny. Their continued centrality to current Palestinian politics and to the ongoing quest for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, which was promised but not delivered by Oslo, have made such inquiry more difficult yet all the more necessary. Their lives are infused with current, as well as historical, importance and relevance.Klein is right to treat both Arafat and Abbas as men of their time. Both of their lives reflect many of the differing strains of thinking among their generation that was defeated and dispersed in 1948. Their options limited, their future obscure, both came to embody the differing paths the Palestinian national movement has taken as it went from vanquished, defeated, and exiled to reconstituted, however tenuously, on the land.Still awaiting much deeper examination and scholarship are Arafat's and Abbas's respective approaches to leadership, the choices they made, the internal rivalries and struggles they faced and navigated, and the legacies they left in their wake. Ample room remains for an exhaustive biography of each of them and the national movement they shepherded through the struggle with Israel, the thicket of Middle East politics, and the highest reaches of international politics. Many Palestinian players central to this saga are aging, and thus need to be engaged now if they are to provide their testimony to both the men and the national struggle.