Mahmoud Abbas

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Mahmoud Abbas, known throughout Palestinian politics as Abu Mazen, is president of the Palestinian Authority and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization: a Fatah co-founder and the PLO’s chief negotiator at Oslo, who also wrote a doctoral dissertation minimizing the Holocaust and alleging Zionist collusion with the Nazis, and who has now governed for more than two decades on a four-year presidential term that expired in January 2009. He presides over a Palestinian Authority that pays scaled monthly salaries to convicted terrorists based on the length of their sentence, has postponed every national election since 2005, and at 91 has no elected successor and no agreed process for choosing one.

Origins: Safed to Fatah

Abbas was born on 26 March 1935 in Safed, in Mandatory Palestine’s Galilee; his family fled to Syria in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence, and he grew up a refugee, working as an elementary school teacher before earning a law degree from Damascus University. In 1959 he was among the founders of Fatah alongside Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir, and by the 1960s he had become one of the movement’s senior organizers. In 1982 he completed a doctorate in history at Moscow’s Oriental College; three years later he became a member of the PLO Executive Committee. He was one of the architects of the secret back-channel that produced the 1993 Oslo Accords, and signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn alongside Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. For three decades he was cast, accurately, as the PLO’s chief diplomat and its figure most invested in a negotiated settlement with Israel, in contrast to the armed factions around him.

The Holocaust thesis

Abbas’s 1982 doctoral dissertation, published in Arabic in 1984 as The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, argued that the death toll of the Holocaust had been inflated for political purposes and alleged that Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazi regime to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine. He has never formally retracted its central claims. On 30 April 2018, addressing the Palestinian National Council, he told the assembly that centuries of European antisemitism arose not from hatred of Jews as such but from Jews’ “social behavior,” specifically moneylending and banking, a claim he supported by citing Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin. Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, the European Union and the US State Department’s antisemitism envoy all condemned the speech as historical distortion; Abbas apologized days later for “any statement that hurt” Jewish feelings, without withdrawing the underlying claim. He has returned to variations of the theme since, including a 2022 remark that Israel had committed “50 holocausts” against Palestinians, the kind of equivalence historians classify as Holocaust inversion. At other moments he has called the Holocaust “the most heinous crime in human history,” a statement in open tension with his own dissertation; the pattern is not one of consistent denial so much as a distortion he reaches for whenever it serves an argument.

Two decades on a four-year mandate

Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority on 9 January 2005, weeks after Arafat’s death, winning 62 percent of the vote in a term the Palestinian Basic Law fixes at four years. That term expired in January 2009; he has not stood for reelection since, and no presidential election has been held in the twenty years that followed. The one national election that did go forward on his watch, the January 2006 parliamentary vote, was won by Hamas, triggering a year of factional violence that ended in June 2007 with Hamas expelling Fatah’s forces from the Gaza Strip by force. The territory has been split between his West Bank government and Hamas’s Gaza administration ever since. In January 2021 Abbas set new presidential and legislative election dates by decree, the first in fifteen years; in April he postponed them indefinitely, citing Israel’s refusal to guarantee voting in East Jerusalem. Rival Fatah lists, including one built around the jailed and popular Marwan Barghouti, had been polling strongly enough to beat him; most observers concluded the Jerusalem justification was pretext for an election Abbas expected to lose.

Paying for attacks

Since the 1990s the Palestinian Authority has run a stipend system, later formalized in Palestinian law, that pays monthly salaries to Palestinians imprisoned for attacks on Israelis and to the families of those killed carrying such attacks out, scaled to the length of the sentence: a few hundred dollars a month for short terms, rising past $3,000 a month for prisoners serving thirty years or more. The program, known as pay-for-slay, consumed roughly 7 percent of the PA’s budget, on the order of $300 million a year, through the late 2010s. It prompted the US Congress to pass the Taylor Force Act in 2018, named for an American army veteran murdered in a 2016 Tel Aviv stabbing attack, cutting most bilateral aid to the PA until the payments stop. Abbas signed a decree in February 2025 restructuring the fund around financial need rather than sentence length; a US State Department review covering September 2025 to February 2026 found the Palestinian Authority was still paying salaries to convicted terrorists, including men released under the October 2025 ceasefire, the first formal US determination that the rebranding had not ended the underlying practice.

What sets Abbas apart, and why it doesn’t clear him

Abbas is not Hamas: he has repeatedly condemned suicide bombings and rocket fire as counterproductive to Palestinian interests, and his security services maintain coordination with Israel that Israeli commanders credit with disrupting attacks originating in the West Bank, coordination for which he is widely denounced inside Palestinian politics as collaboration.

That record cuts against him as much as for him. He is, by any reading, the Palestinian leader who has invested the most in negotiation and the least in an alternative to it: in 2008 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered him a state on roughly 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank plus Gaza, land swaps for the rest, and a capital in East Jerusalem, and Abbas neither accepted the offer nor formally countered it before talks lapsed. That makes his refusal to hold an election in twenty years, and his authorship of a Holocaust-minimizing thesis he has never disowned, harder to excuse as someone else’s extremism, not easier. At 91, with no elected vice president and no agreed successor, who governs next, and how is a question Abbas himself created by refusing to answer it at the ballot box.

Fatah · Palestine Liberation Organization · Yasser Arafat · What should come next, and who runs Gaza · The Record · The PLO Charter vs the Hamas Charter