RAMALLAH, West Bank, 11 January 2005 — 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 to have the injury treated.
To win the Palestinian Authority presidency and claim his place as the successor of the late Yasser Arafat, Abbas has done things that probably never would have crossed his mind during his decades as a bureaucrat in the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In the past 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 militants who saluted him with volleys of gunfire.
Normally modest and quiet in his demeanor, Abbas became a flag-waver for the Palestinian cause. At his final rally, someone handed him an enormous Palestinian banner, and 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 his 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 served as the first Palestinian prime minister in 2003. Stymied in different ways by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he quit after four months.
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 is known to be uncomfortable with public displays of religious fervor.
He was said to have been devastated by the death 21/2 years ago of his son Mazen, who suffered a fatal heart attack at 42. Like many Palestinian men, Abbas takes his nickname from his eldest male child, and is widely 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 stating of their traditional agenda, many Palestinians see Abbas as too accommodating of the United States and Israel. He angered many Palestinians when, at a summit attended by President Bush in Aqaba, Jordan, in 2003 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 1948 war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, fleeing to Syria and beginning what would be for him a long exile.
Along with Arafat, Abbas was a founding member in the 1960s of Fatah, which became the foundation of the PLO. But he distanced himself from guerrilla activities and terrorist attacks, devoting himself to managing the movement’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 that date to the 1970s. He played a leading role in secret talks that led to the 1993 signing of the Oslo, Norway, interim 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 in the aftermath of Arafat’s death, when Abbas almost immediately embarked on a fence-mending tour of the Arab world, seeking to establish ties with those 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, or the Lebanese for inflaming their civil war.
On the Israeli side, observers are being careful not to draw conclusions about Abbas based on his behavior when he was essentially under the thumb of Arafat. During that era, Sharon at one point rather patronizingly compared him to a baby bird that hadn’t yet grown feathers.
