Arafat’s nephew slams Abbas
A YEAR after fleeing the West Bank, a nephew of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has returned to Gaza and is challenging his uncle’s embattled successor, 86-year-old President Mahmud Abbas.
Nasser al-Kidwa, 69, a former Palestinian foreign minister, branded Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA) as “totalitarian”, and said it was acting with disregard for the people it is supposed to serve who are living under Israeli occupation. Support for Abbas among Palestinians has plummeted, according to surveys.
Kidwa returned to the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip after a year of self-imposed exile in France, and said returning to the occupied West Bank would not be safe.
Gaza, the Arafat family’s ancestral home, has been controlled by the Islamist group Hamas since 2007, bitter rivals of Abbas’s secular Fatah movement that Yasser Arafat co-founded in 1959. Kidwa was ejected from Fatah last year after trying to form a candidates list to challenge Abbas loyalists in Palestinian legislative polls that had been scheduled for May 2021. Abbas’s decision to cancel those polls, which would have been the first Palestinian elections in 15 years, fuelled further
charges of authoritarianism.
A stream of visitors – local leaders, academics and religious figures – have visited Kidwa at his modest Gaza City office. He claimed there was broad awareness about Abbas’s dictatorial tendencies, including with Fatah.
The Palestinian Legislative Council has not met since 2007, the year Hamas seized power in Gaza following street battles with the PA.
Abbas leads Fatah, the PA and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, effectively giving him full control over Palestinian politics in the West Bank.
Signs of resentment have been growing for months.
Last week, gun battles between militants and PA forces raged in central Nablus in the northern West Bank after Palestinian police arrested a prominent
Hamas member, with some in the city blasting Abbas over his continuing security co-operation with Israel.
Many believe that Abbas, whose health remains a subject of intense speculation, has already picked his successor. In May he issued a decree appointing Hussein Al Sheikh, a powerful insider, as the new PLO secretary-general, a move widely seen as an anointment. Al Sheikh is regarded by many as unpopular. Kidwa says that any agreement to install Al Sheikh, or anyone else as leader, following an undemocratic deal would be “refused by the Palestinian people”.
Like many experts, he warned that given Palestinian political divisions and the lack of an obvious successor, the days after Abbas’s death could be “chaotic”, and “maybe violent”.