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Mahmoud Abbas: West Bank Strongman

(Newsweek) Grant Rumley - Amid all the preparations for a French-led conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace in the next year, Western officials continue to turn a blind eye to the increasingly autocratic tendencies of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. In the past year alone, Abbas has cracked down on journalists, teachers, and political rivals without serious rebuke from Europe or the U.S. Since the collapse of the U.S.-led peace negotiations in 2014, as the Obama administration withdrew from day-to-day Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Abbas gradually tightened his hold on Palestinian civil society. He is now 11 years into a four-year term, and he recently issued a presidential decree forming a hand-picked, nine-member Palestinian constitutional court to confirm his presidential decrees. Abbas' increasingly tyrannical government in the West Bank does not only handicap political expression - it also sets back the very legitimacy of the Palestinian national project. The writer is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
2016-05-06 00:00:00
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