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Guest Essay
By Samer Sinijlawi
Mr. Sinijlawi is a political activist and chairman of the Jerusalem Development Fund.
I got into politics when I was 15, joining Fatah Youth in Jerusalem during the first intifada in 1987. Several years later, and with other young Fatah leaders, I met Mahmoud Abbas in his office in Ramallah, West Bank. He was the No. 2 in the Palestine Liberation Organization back then. He was in his 50s; we were in our 20s. Despite the age gap, we always enjoyed spending time with him. “You are tomorrow’s leaders,” he would tell us.
Today, Mr. Abbas is in his late 80s, we are in our 50s, and that tomorrow never came.
Thirty years after the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians who led the first intifada — and helped bring some of their exiled leaders back from Tunisia — feel they have been betrayed. Mr. Abbas’s leadership as president of the Palestinian Authority has failed to deliver democracy to his people, failed to keep them safe, failed to manage a viable economy and failed to ensure they can live a dignified life. Sometimes it seems as if all we get from Mr. Abbas these days is an embarrassing speech once a year at the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York.
The Palestinian Authority’s leadership has lost its moral conviction and grown increasingly detached from what Palestinians need and want. Over the past decade, several public opinion polls have shown that between 70 percent and 90 percent of Palestinians want Mr. Abbas, who is 88, to resign. The last Palestinian elections, held in 2006, resulted in a deep political rift that left the Islamist party Hamas governing Gaza and Mr. Abbas and his Fatah party leading the authority in the West Bank. Today, most Palestinians want to choose new leaders in a free, fair and safe vote.
So much of what will happen after this war remains unclear. But what seems inevitable is that Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip will be over. The Palestinian Authority is increasingly invoked as the one entity that could step into the breach and bring unity back to Gaza and the West Bank. But for us Palestinians, that solution will have legitimacy only if there are fundamental changes in the authority’s structure — and that........