All eyes on Abbas in West Bank
The Fatah leader has popular support, but faces lawlessness and other challenges.
from the June 22, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
But Abbas is starting from shaky ground. His establishment of an emergency government and suspension of the Hamas-run legislature leaves the PA on thin constitutional ground, stirring expectations for new elections.
Observers say his top priority will be getting control of gunmen – many from his own party – who have undermined law and order in the West Bank. At the same time, Abbas must confront top security officers in order to push through a badly needed overhaul of a PA paramilitary force that crumbled last week in clashes with Hamas.
"He needs to fire officers who misled him, and misinformed him," says Kadoura Fares, a former minister under Abbas and a Fatah activist. "If in Gaza they were weak, that means in the West Bank they will also be weak."
A recent public opinion survey by the Ramallah-based research group Near East Consulting suggested that Abbas has the support to take far-reaching steps. When asked which leader, Abbas or Haniyeh, they trusted more, Palestinians boosted Abbas's ratings by 3 percentage points, to 62 percent. In the West Bank alone, that rating was 73 percent. Haniyeh's rating was 38 percent among all Palestinians.
That's not to say Abbas emerged unscathed from the fighting. There is almost universal agreement among Fatah loyalists that Yasser Arafat, his predecessor, would have prevented the Hamas takeover. At the same time, the fighting revealed Abbas's sprawling party – which dominated the Palestinian national movement from the 1960s – to be in utter disarray.
"Fatah is in very bad shape. It is almost nonexistent. It is unable to determine its course of action," says Bassem Ezbeidi, a political science professor at Birzeit University. On the other hand, Hamas members are "not talkers, they are doers. They are movers and they are shakers."
But reports of brutality by Hamas has hurt the Islamists' image, and some credit Abbas with avoiding a civil war by keeping Palestinian security services largely out of the fighting.
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