Abbas Steps Out of Arafat’s Shadow

One day last week, as Mahmoud Abbas was campaigning in the Gaza Strip, an aide accidentally pressed a button that rolled up the window of his armored car. The heavy glass sliced off the tip of a finger on Abbas’ right hand.

The 69-year-old candidate gamely delivered his rally speech as scheduled, and only then did he go to a hospital for treatment.

To win the Palestinian Authority presidency and claim his place as the successor to the late Yasser Arafat, Abbas has done things that probably never would have crossed his mind during his decades as a Palestine Liberation Organization bureaucrat.

In the last two weeks, the soft-spoken former schoolteacher, never comfortable with public appearances, has crisscrossed the West Bank and Gaza Strip, presiding over one raucous campaign rally after another. Abbas, a man known for his distaste for violence, has been carried on the shoulders of masked, gun-toting militants before cheering crowds.

Normally modest and quiet in his demeanor, Abbas literally became a flag-waver for the Palestinian cause. At his final rally, someone handed him an enormous Palestinian banner. After a second’s hesitation he grasped the flagpole, which was almost too heavy to hold.

After spending half a lifetime in the shadow of the flamboyant, autocratic Arafat, Abbas is emerging as his own man, albeit one beset by troubles within and without the Palestinian Authority.

“Sometimes a person demonstrates unexpected qualities, and grows into a role in a way you would not anticipate,” said Ziad abu Amr, a Palestinian lawmaker who has known Abbas for many years. “I think we saw that during this campaign.”

Even to those who have spent a great deal of time in his company, Abbas is something of a mystery. Courtly and courteous, he can also be prickly and quick to take offense.

He has little stomach for political infighting, and is described as likelier to walk away from a confrontation than risk his dignity by staying -- as happened when he resigned in 2003 after four months as Palestinian Authority prime minister after being stymied, in different ways, by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

An intensely private man, Abbas has always had the air of an outsider. In the largely secular milieu of the PLO, he is a devout Muslim. But he is also known to be uncomfortable with public displays of religious fervor.

He was said to have been devastated by the death 2 1/2 years ago of his son Mazen, 42, who had suffered a heart attack. Like many Palestinian men, Abbas takes his nickname from his eldest male child, and is popularly known as Abu Mazen.

Although Abbas appears fairly vigorous, questions have been raised about his health. Several years ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent surgery in the United States. Aides say he recovered completely.

During his brief campaign, Abbas hewed closely to the Palestinians’ long-standing positions on core issues. He called for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. He demanded the uprooting of Jewish settlements and the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Despite his forceful advocacy for their traditional agenda, many Palestinians see Abbas as too accommodating to the United States and Israel. He angered many Palestinians when, at a 2003 summit in Aqaba, Jordan, to launch the “road map” peace plan, he alluded in a speech to historic Jewish suffering but said little about his own people’s plight.

Abbas was born in 1935 in the town of Safed, in what is now northern Israel. He was 13 when his family, along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, became refugees during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948, fleeing to Syria and beginning what would be a long exile.

Along with Arafat, Abbas was a founding member in the 1960s of Fatah, a nationalist movement that became the foundation of the PLO. But he distanced himself from militant activities and terrorist attacks, devoting himself to managing the organization’s finances. He never adopted the rumpled military-style garb favored by Arafat, choosing instead the same sober business suits he prefers today.

Even though the PLO was anathema to Israel in its guerrilla heyday, Abbas had friendly contacts with Israelis dating from the 1970s. He played a leading role in secret talks that led to the 1993 signing of the Oslo peace accords. Early on in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now in its fifth year, he voiced the then-unthinkable view that the armed struggle was a mistake.

The new leader’s conciliatory streak showed itself after Arafat’s death, when Abbas almost immediately embarked on a fence-mending tour of the Arab world, seeking to establish ties with those nations the late leader had alienated. The Kuwaitis, for example, never forgave Arafat for voicing support for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein when he invaded their emirate.

On the Israeli side, observers are being careful not to draw conclusions about Abbas based on his behavior when he was essentially under Arafat’s thumb. During the short period Abbas was prime minister, Sharon at one point rather patronizingly compared him to a baby bird that hadn’t yet grown feathers.

One former Israeli intelligence official saw some possible parallels between Abbas and Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader who was assassinated in 1981 by Muslim radicals.

“Sadat was also considered something of a colorless bureaucrat when he took over from Nasser. No one expected much of him,” the official said, referring to the former Egyptian president and advocate for a united Arab world, Gamal Abdel Nasser. “But [Sadat] made war on us, and then he made peace with us. It is very, very different being the No. 2 and being the No. 1.”