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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas appoints Mohammad Mustafa as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank March 14, 2024 in this handout image.
Who is Muhammad Mustafa?
Mahmoud Abbas, the 88-year-old president of the widely unpopular Palestinian Authority, on Thursday named Muhammad Mustafa as the authority’s prime minister. Given Abbas’s age, and the need for a successor as leader of the PA who can offer some credible alternative to Hamas as the political voice of Palestinians, Mustafa will now become the subject of wide international scrutiny.
So, who is he? Mustafa is a trained economist with a degree from George Washington University in Washington, DC. His current job is head of the Palestine Investment Fund, the Palestinian Territories’ sovereign development fund. He has also served as the PA’s economy minister and deputy prime minister.
More to the point, Mustafa is a longtime PA insider who owes his career and standing to Abbas. For those hoping the aging president would choose a dynamic, independent-minded leader as PM who might lead in a bold new direction, Mustafa is an unpopular choice – one that signals Abbas intends to remain the dominant voice in the PA for as long as he can.
President Mahmoud Abbas gestures during a meeting in Ramallah.
Palestinian leader to make rare visit to Jenin
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas traveled to Jenin today for the first time in over a decade. Though the PA — formed after the Oslo Accords — is technically the chief security and administrative authority in the northern West Bank city, Abbas’ men have lost control of parts of the West Bank, including Jenin, which is now run by semi-autonomous rival military groups.
Why go now? Abbas’ trip comes a week after Israel conducted one of its most intense military raids in the West Bank in two decades, aimed at rooting out a new cohort of militants and their vast cache of weapons and military infrastructure.
Given that Israel and the PA are close security partners — meaning that Abbas’ men often clamp down on potential terror threats emanating from PA-governed cities — the scope of the operation in Jenin, where Israel conducted rare air raids, was an embarrassing sign of Abbas’ dwindling power and unpopularity.
Polling of the Palestinian electorate suggests that the PA is broadly seen as corrupt, too deferential to Israel, and failing to deliver for the Palestinian people. Indeed, 80% of those polled want Abbas to resign. (The 87-year-old Abbas has also refused to hold elections in the West Bank for over 15 years.)
Crucially, this rare visit comes amid growing reports that Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and is deemed a terror group by the US, is vying to take over parts of the West Bank, including Jenin. The last time the two Palestinian groups fought it out for control of Gaza in 2007, things got very, very messy …
Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the first Arab-Chinese summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Can China broker another Mideast rapprochement?
Mahmoud Abbas, the octogenarian head of the Palestinian Authority, doesn’t travel much these days. But this week he will head to China for a three-day visit and meet with President Xi Jinping.
Abbas’ trip comes after China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang recently told his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts that Beijing is ready to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that have been on ice for almost a decade.
For China, hosting Abbas is a low-stakes way to project itself further as a rising Middle East powerbroker after Beijing (surprisingly) brokered a détente between archrivals Iran and Saudi Arabia earlier this year. The Chinese overture itself is less about backing Abbas and the Palestinian cause, and more about Beijing trying to send a message to Washington, yet again, that the US is no longer the key influence peddler in the region.
Still, there is more performance than substance behind this play. For one thing, the US is Israel’s closest — and most important — ally, and the Israelis would never allow Beijing to circumvent Washington as the main arbiter between Ramallah and Jerusalem.
What’s more, Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term in 2005 and has refused to hold elections, is a wildly unpopular figure at home, while the Palestinian Authority has an extremely weak mandate as other factions vie for power in the West Bank. Indeed, he is hardly in a prime position to conduct major diplomacy on behalf of the Palestinian people.
Will Palestinians get to vote?
The last time Palestinians went to the polls was in 2006, after Mahmoud Abbas replaced longtime Fatah stalwart Yasser Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority.But factional infighting between Fatah and Hamas (designated a terror group by the US and EU) brought the Palestinians to the "brink of civil war," Abbas said at the time. Discord over power, ideology and vision led to a bloody battle that saw Fatah expelled to the West Bank in 2007, where it has ruled ever since, while Hamas maintains power in the overcrowded Gaza Strip.
Now, some 15 years later, Palestinians are set to vote in legislative elections next month. But intra-Palestinian cracks are again surfacing, suggesting that the long-anticipated vote could be scrapped. If Abbas' Fatah faction decides not to hold the vote, which has been delayed since 2010, the implications could be calamitous.
What's at stake? Abbas — who at 85 has led the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority for 16 years — does not want to give up his job or his party's grip on the West Bank. But Abbas' electoral prospects have been undermined in recent months by breakaway Fatah factions, particularly the one headed by jailed militant Marwan Barghouti, who is extremely popular with Palestinian voters. (In a recent poll, 28 percent of voters said they would vote for Barghouti's list, compared to just 22 percent for Abbas' once-dominant Fatah.)
Importantly, the carving up of support among Fatah-associated candidates would give a massive boost to Hamas, which, according to polls, would get 27 percent of votes across the West Bank and Gaza, to become the biggest party in parliament. Meanwhile, 57 percent of Palestinians in both areas say they would support a joint Fatah-Hamas list. For now, however, that option seems extremely unlikely given how acrimonious the relationship is.
Abbas is testing the waters. Fearful of political defeat, Abbas, who has a close albeit testy working relationship with Israel's security apparatus, is testing his options. In recent days, he has said that the upcoming polls might be delayed for an unspecified period of time, because Israel is not giving Palestinians in East Jerusalem enough access to voting booths. (The 1993 Oslo Accords stipulate that some Palestinians can vote at designated Jerusalem post offices; most will have to vote in the West Bank. Abbas and his loyalists say this will disenfranchise East-Jerusalem based voters.)
But critics say that Abbas is manufacturing a political crisis and using Israel's failure to formally facilitate the voting process as a pretext to annul the vote to avoid defeat.
What do Palestinian voters want? Surveys show that the top four priorities for Palestinian voters are the unification of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, boosting the economy, tackling corruption and removing the blockade of Gaza. Abbas knows that he is extremely unpopular, and that his government is oft-associated with cronyism and graft (some 84 percent of Palestinians in both enclaves say that PA institutions are corrupt). While voters don't think that Hamas will do a better job of improving their economic prospects, they do trust the militant group (more than the PA) to tackle endemic corruption.
Igniting Hamas' wrath. Sending a flurry of rockets into Israel in recent days, an emboldened Hamas made it clear to both the PA and Israeli leadership that there would be serious consequences if next month's vote were to be scrapped. Gazan sources also told a Lebanese outlet that relevant players should prepare for an uptick in violence if the polls don't go ahead.
Israel's position. It's still unclear, however, what Israel's official position is on the vote, and how much power it has to affect internal Palestinian politicking anyway. But this is all taking place against the backdrop of a violence-filled week in Jerusalem, where Arab residents — angry at restrictions placed on access to the Old City during Ramadan — beat ultra-Orthodox Jews and uploaded videos of the attacks to TikTok. In response, right-wing Jewish extremist groups marched through the city chanting "Death to Arabs." While recent nights were quieter, the situation is combustible, with many fearing that the clashes, so far confined to Jerusalem, could spread to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — and even elsewhere in the Muslim world, given the symbolic status of Jerusalem.
Looking ahead. International and regional heavyweights like the EU and Egypt are lobbying Israel to facilitate mass voting throughout East Jerusalem. But it seems like Abbas, not wanting to relinquish power, may have already made up his mind to shut down the vote and roll the dice.
Kushner: Palestine's Mahmoud Abbas is no 'great dealmaker or statesman'
White House senior advisor Jared Kushner, who masterminded the Trump administration's new Mideast peace proposal, had tough words for Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, accusing him of being more interested in "flying around" the world than running his government efficiently for his people.
So, who is Mahmoud Abbas?
Abbas runs the Palestinian National Authority (PA), the semi-autonomous government based in Ramallah that manages local affairs in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. He assumed this role in 2005 after the death of longtime leader Yasser Arafat. The 84-year old Abbas, known colloquially as Abu Mazen, is a veteran of Palestinian politics and peace negotiations: he accompanied Arafat to the White House to sign the Oslo Accords back in 1993.
Abbas has long pursued international recognition of Palestinian statehood. Palestine now has non-member state status at the UN, and in 2015, became a member of the International Criminal Court.
Abbas has firmly rejected the new US peace plan, which was written without input from Palestinian leaders, as "the slap of the century."
GZERO WORLD with Ian Bremmer airs nationwide on public television Fridays beginning at 11 a.m. ET. Check local listings. The interview will also be published in full on gzeromedia.com on Monday, February 3, at 6 a.m. ET.
Watch more:Kushner to Palestinians: 'Put up or shut up' on peace plan
Watch more:Kushner on Israeli annexation plans: not now
Read more:Trump's Middle East peace plan isn't meant to be fair
Kushner on Israeli annexation plans: not now
To understand Jared Kushner's comments in a broader context, here are a few things to consider:
What are the settlements? In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel captured the West Bank from neighboring Jordan, and soon after began setting up communities of Jewish settlers on this land. The West Bank is now home to over 400,000 Jewish Israelis, living in settlements among some 1.9 million Palestinians who, in turn, are not considered citizens of Israel and who must regularly pass through Israeli military checkpoints.
Palestinians see the Israeli settlements as an illegal development of land under military occupation, and much of the international community agrees. Defenders of the settlements say they are important for Israel's security, and that they are on land that is historically Jewish.
What would annexation mean? Right now, the settlements are not technically part of the state of Israel. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he wants to change that by annexing them outright. About half of Jewish Israelis support that idea.
Trump's Mideast proposal paves the way for Israel to annex Israeli settlements in the West Bank and to link them with special corridors, leaving the remaining territory for a future Palestinian state. Because some of the outlying settlements would be enclaves of Israel within Palestinian territory, a territorially contiguous Palestinian state would be virtually impossible.
But in his interview with Ian Bremmer, Jared Kushner says that while the Trump administration clearly supports annexation, it also wants Israel to wait until after the upcoming (Israeli) election to move ahead with any annexation plans.
GZERO WORLD with Ian Bremmer airs nationwide on public television Fridays beginning at 11 a.m. ET. Check local listings. The interview will also be published in full on gzeromedia.com on Monday, February 3, at 6 a.m. ET.
Watch more:Kushner to Palestinians: 'Put up or shut up' on peace plan
Read more:Trump's Middle East peace plan isn't meant to be fair
Kushner to Palestinians: 'Put up or shut up' on peace plan
White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, author of the Trump administration's newly announced Middle East peace plan, had tough words today for Palestinian leaders who immediately rejected the proposal. In a lengthy interview with GZERO Media's Ian Bremmer, he said that Palestinians have long played "the victimhood card," and that for the first time a "practical, rational plan" is on the table for them. Throughout the interview, Kushner hammered home his belief that the political power of the Palestinian leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, has been greatly diminished.
In the conversation, Bremmer presses Kushner on the details on the deal, including the Israeli endorsed map outlining a future Palestine, the challenges of delivering on a promise of $50 billion in funding for the region, and Kushner's own close ties to embattled Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
GZERO WORLD with Ian Bremmer airs nationwide on public television Fridays beginning at 11 a.m. ET. Check local listings. The interview will also be published in full on gzeromedia.com on Monday, February 3, at 6 a.m. ET.
Watch more:Kushner on Israeli annexation plans: not now
Read more:Trump's Middle East peace plan isn't meant to be fair