Will Abbas be the final Palestinian president?

Last month, Foreign Policy, the venerable online news magazine, profiled the Palestinian Authority’s second-in-command, 62-year-old Hussein Al Sheikh. As the internal battle to replace Mahmoud Abbas, the 87-year-old PA president, heats up, the magazine suggested that Al Sheikh, despite his many transgressions, “stands a chance of becoming the next leader of the PA.”

But instead of assessing Al Sheikh’s popularity among Palestinians, especially in the security forces, Foreign Policy took Sheikh’s measurements by Western standards, highlighting allegations of corruption and harassment of female coworkers.

While rooting out corruption and harassment should be top priorities for any government, the Palestinian reality threatens the existence of the government itself. Without a government, discussing policies becomes irrelevant, a distraction from the more pressing issue of a possible Palestinian civil war in the post-Abbas era.

Al Sheikh may be the PA’s number two now, but it’s far from certain he can withstand the inevitable challenges that will confront his succession.

Al Sheikh was a young activist when he spent time in an Israeli jail, where he became fluent in Hebrew. This allowed him to play instrumental roles in coordinating between the PA and Israeli authorities on security matters. Al Sheikh thus climbed the ranks inside Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). In the spring of 2022, Abbas appointed Al Sheikh as the PLO’s secretary general, effectively anointing him successor.

But Al Sheikh’s meteoric rise didn’t mean he was popular with the public. On his way to the top, Al Sheikh lost his brother in a road rage shootout in Ramallah, in 2020. Two years later, the two killers were sentenced to 15 years and turned out to be security personnel, raising speculation that the incident was a message from Al Sheikh’s rivals.

If Al Sheikh wants to become PA chairman, he’ll likely have to fend off challenges from stronger and more popular contenders. His competitors, like Al Sheikh himself, are non-Islamists who have cooperated well with Western and Israeli authorities. While these men should work together to reform the PA and crack down on violent militants and Islamists, it’s doubtful that any of them would settle for anything less than becoming the undisputed PA chief.

Among the contenders for the post is Mohammed Dahlan, 61, a former senior Fatah figure and PA security chief whom Abbas expelled from Fatah in 2011. Although recent surveys show Dahlan to be twice as popular as Al Sheikh, Dahlan has consistently polled third among leading candidates. His ticket was projected to win seven percent of the vote in April 2021 until Abbas canceled the election.

Another rival is Tawfik Al Tirawi, 74, another former PA intelligence chief. A member of Fatah’s Central Committee, Al Tirawi has also fallen afoul of Abbas and lost most of his official positions. Despite being sidelined, Al Tirawi still commands a strong following among security personnel as well as within the West Bank’s armed clans.

Dahlan and Al Tirawi are believed to be allies. Should they form a united front against Al Sheikh, they could prevent him from taking over, by force if necessary.

A third contender is 70-year-old Jibril Rajoub, a former security chief and, like Al Tirawi, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee. Rajoub still carries favour with Abbas and is therefore on better terms with Al Sheikh than either Dahlan or Al Tirawi.

Like Al Sheikh, Rajoub is unpopular with the public. He led the PA’s fearsome Palestinian Preventive Security organization until 2002, when he was ousted for using force to crush political dissent and harass opponents. But unlike Al Sheikh, Rajoub commands the loyalty of a few thousand armed men who will make it harder for Al Sheikh to assume the PA’s top job.

When Abbas dies, other armed Palestinian factions – such as Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – could smell blood and try to wrestle territory from the hands of the warring PA strongmen. If Hamas, the PIJ, or both, manage to displace the PA, the West Bank could be turned into another Gaza Strip. But the West Bank has a higher elevation than Gaza, giving Hamas, the PIJ, and ultimately their sponsor, Tehran, a better view of Israel and its strategic and sensitive spots.

Some might imagine that Israel will watch with glee as Abbas’s successors tear themselves apart. But a civil war carries huge risks for Israel and the region, and increases the chances of an Islamist takeover of the West Bank. If that were to happen, Israel might find itself back in pre-Oslo days, suspending Palestinian self-government until Palestinians can figure out how to produce an authority that can run their affairs without threatening Israel’ security.

As Al Tirawi noted in 2022, infighting among Palestinians will complicate the transition to power after the current president is gone. “Abbas will be the last president of the PA,” he said. That’s the actual narrative that the West’s Washington-centric storylines should be focused on.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.