The Stateless Statesman

A year ago, he came home a hero.

But that was a year ago.

Then, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian National Authority President, stood at the green marble rostrum of the U.N. General Assembly and asked for something he knew he could not get–full membership in the U.N. for a country, Palestine, that did not yet exist–and the room went wild.

A year later, on Sept. 27, Abbas stood in the same place and asked for something he can quite easily get–not full membership but a status packing similar legal power. Yet in downtown Ramallah, the West Bank city where trucks mounted with loudspeakers implored Palestinians to gather in the central square to watch, it was hard to find a television tuned in. “I thought it sounded just like the speech he gave last year, with the exception that no one cares this time,” says a 38-year-old electrician named Abu Jala. Abu Jala is speaking on a street that 12 months earlier had been choked with people cheering Abbas so lustily that, for the first time, the unassuming antipolitician began to resemble a popular leader. But that moment is long gone, lost in the cloud of resentful disappointment that has descended on the Palestinians and further obscured the enigmatic man who reluctantly leads them.

Uncomfortable with crowds, more at home with books than with constituents, Abu Mazen, as Abbas is widely known, is that rare elected leader who does not want popularity. Which is convenient, because lately he hasn’t enjoyed much at all. In the long, trying year since he asked the U.N. for statehood, the Palestinian cause, once central to any discussion of the future shape of the Middle East, has been overtaken by events in Syria, Egypt and Iran, overwhelmed by the iron alliance of Washington and Israel and haunted by a misquoted clich: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

The dismaying truth for Palestinians is that Abbas could have seized the moment last year to ask for the U.N. status–to have Palestine recognized as a nonmember state–that he has only just now requested. That’s a lost year for a people who are less patient than their leader, a man of almost inertial calm.

Eight years after being elected, Abu Mazen is no closer to delivering on the central promise of his campaign: ending the 45-year Israeli occupation through negotiations. And so he went to the U.N. in September in search of something to shake things up–a measure of legal and moral leverage. Experts on international law say that because the designation “nonmember observer state” contains the word state, the new status would offer the Palestinians the potential power to ask the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate war crimes on Palestinian territory, which Israel has occupied since 1967.

The ICC is an uncomfortable issue for Israel, which voted against its creation in part because the court’s founding statute suggested that it would regard the establishment of West Bank settlements as a war crime. Individual Israeli officials could also face charges if Palestinians found both grounds and the political will to proceed. “I think the whole statehood agenda is in a way geared toward embarrassing Israel in international forums such as the ICC, especially in the area of settlements, where Israel doesn’t have good legal answers,” says Yuval Shany, dean of Hebrew University’s law school. “The ICC is a big issue.”

What’s more, nonmember-observer-state status can be bestowed by a simple majority vote of the General Assembly, thus avoiding the Security Council and the threat of a U.S. veto that torpedoed last year’s bid for full member status. This time, the Palestinians had what Abu Mazen could have had a year ago: a clear path to leverage their greatest asset–international sympathy–in hopes of leveling a playing field that has become badly tilted because of Israel’s military, economic and diplomatic advantages.

This year’s U.N. appearance also highlighted what stands as the signal accomplishment of Abbas, for all his many stumbles: the movement of the world’s most chronicled conflict from a low-intensity asymmetrical war–street fights laced with terror–to where we find it today, in the bloodless realm of diplomacy. In the five years before Abbas became Palestinian President, more than 5,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed. In the past three years, the numbers were 311 and 20.

Not that Abu Mazen is getting much credit from either side for such efforts. While Israelis may now board buses and sip lattes in cafs all but free from the threat of suicide bombers, Palestinians complain of seeing no reward for showing the restraint that Abbas vowed would put an end to the Israeli occupation through negotiations. And as Abbas prepared to return to New York City last month, Israel’s right-wing Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called Abbas a “diplomatic terrorist,” an Orwellian insult if ever there was one. “He would be the ideal leader–avuncular, grandfatherly, a modern man, free from violence–to head a Palestinian state if one already existed,” says Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. negotiator under three Presidents. “Unfortunately, charm and persuasion are not sufficient to bail him out of the fix he’s in.”

It’s a bad fix. Abbas’ decision to apply for full statehood at the U.N. last year set in motion forces that threaten to bring down his life’s work. At risk are the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 that laid out the principles at the heart of the world’s hoped-for solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the establishment of two states for two peoples. Abbas’ 2011 U.N. bid so irked Israel and Washington that each held back vital funding to Abbas’ Palestinian National Authority (PA), the Palestinian transitional government. The revenue shortfalls wreaked havoc on the Palestinian economy. By September, people were burning tires in the streets to protest not Israel’s 45-year military occupation but the PA itself.

The uproar left Abbas with even less room to maneuver. “His weapon is only negotiations,” says Abdul Jawad Saleh, a former PA Minister. “He doesn’t know how to confront.”

Silencing the Guns

It’s a painful paradox for the Palestinians, who watch the years pass without a peace deal and with ever growing numbers of Israeli homes appearing in the West Bank: Abu Mazen has done more in the past few years than any Palestinian ever has to keep Israelis safe. “I all the time go against the stream,” he tells Time, in what he calls “my broken English.” “I tried all the time to say exactly what I feel, what I think, without any propaganda, without any cover, without everything. When I ran to the elections, the first thing I said is I do not accept the armed struggle. No, I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I will prohibit it.”

And he did. Missiles still fly out of Hamas-controlled Gaza from time to time, but according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tallies every reported incident on occupied territory, most violence in the West Bank is now committed by Israeli settlers against their Palestinian neighbors rather than the other way around. There have been spectacular exceptions, including the March 2011 slaughter of five Jewish settlers in their West Bank home. But month by month, the Palestinians tend to be the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators. In Qusra, south of Nablus, a mosque was set afire in September 2010, its walls spray-painted with “Muhammad is a pig.” The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem this year videotaped Israeli soldiers standing by as settlers fired on Palestinians. Abbas takes each incident as a test of Palestinian forbearance. “They think we will respond with terror,” he says and raises his gaze. “We will disappoint them.”

Hesitant as Abbas may be to take on Washington–to spare President Obama any unpleasantness, Abbas will not ask for a General Assembly vote until after the Nov. 6 presidential election–the iron grip of his Palestinian Authority on would-be resistance fighters is unquestioned. This has remade the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank into the turf not of terrorist militias but of disciplined uniformed forces, adamant about keeping the peace. “We are living in our best, most convenient security conditions since–ever,” Amos Gilad, the No. 2 official in Israel’s Defense Ministry, said last year. “No terror.” Says a Palestinian teenager in Ramallah’s central market: “If you even dream about throwing a rock, they arrest you.”

The formula for this transformation is no secret, but neither do Palestinian Authority officials like to publicize it. One part is the U.S. investment in training Palestinian security forces (money for security accounted for some $147 million of the $384 million that congressional Republicans delayed over the first U.N. bid, contributing for a time to a $1 billion PA budget shortfall). Part two is even more sensitive: the Palestinian authorities coordinate daily with Israel’s domestic intelligence service, stalking militants as they plot attacks on Israel. The resulting security architecture has brought law and order (emphasis on the “order,” note human rights activists who compile complaints of mistreatment and even torture by the Palestinian security services) to a region controlled not long ago by militias and thugs.

The dramatic reduction in violence has many senior Israeli officials now speaking of the Palestinian issue as a conflict to be managed rather than solved. For many Palestinians, however, the cooperation with an occupying army can be tolerated for only so long. Consider the position of one of Abbas’ appointees, Qaddura Fares, who runs the PA’s prisoner-affairs office. Fares says his nephew was arrested by Israeli troops, released, then taken away a month later by Palestinian security and questioned about whether he had ties to the militant group Hamas. He was released last year. “What’s the difference?” Fares asks. “I will be ready to arrest my nephew–my son!–if in one year we achieve a state. But to arrest these people to appear beautiful to the Americans or to look professional?” The line between cooperation and collaboration is both thin and combustible, like a fuse.

“Exactly!” says Abbas. “Sometimes they are whispering, ‘Are we collaborators?’ We don’t want to be collaborators for anybody. We are working for our own benefit, for our own future.” But what future? In his latest U.N. address, Abbas declared, “There is still a chance–maybe the last–to save the two-state solution and salvage peace.” Yet privately, neither side believes the other is serious about making a deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu campaigned against the Oslo Accords. In 2009, Israel announced it was freezing construction of new homes in its West Bank settlements for 10 months, but Abbas complained that the moratorium contained exceptions that permitted certain construction to carry on. Amid disagreement over the freeze, talks foundered in 2010. The building continues. “Every way is closed to me,” Abbas told TIME last year.

If a new uprising, or intifadeh, erupts, Palestinians say it will come in the space between the death of hope for the Oslo Accords and whatever takes their place. One option is to abandon the PA and force Israel to once again administer the territories it occupies, as it did before 1994–a burden Israel doesn’t want and a situation that would almost certainly lead to more fighting. “We are at a crossroads,” says Bassam Salhi, head of the leftist Palestinian People’s Party. “The problem is more than a problem of Abu Mazen. It’s a problem of this process, which began 20 years ago and has brought nothing till now.” Palestinians also complain bitterly about corruption within the Authority, and some say Abbas uses its security forces to intimidate critics. But all complaints are aggravated by the limbo that Palestinians find intolerable. Says Mohammed Mahmoud, a protester in downtown Ramallah: “The people are upset about the economic situation because there are no solutions for the political situation.”

Militant Youth

Abu Mazen can empathize with the urge to pick up arms in the face of frustration and an enemy. “It was in myself when I was young,” he says. Born in Safed, a city in the Galilee region of present-day Israel, he was 13 when his family fled Jewish forces in 1948, along with 700,000 other Arabs. The family ended up in Damascus, where he laid pavement for two years, then taught primary school part of the day while attending high school. The young Abbas then studied law in Egypt and was working in Qatar as personnel director of the Education Ministry when he joined the party Yasser Arafat and a few others had formed to confront Israel.

“I decided to join Fatah and be active because at that time, the 1960s, nobody cares about us, nobody talks about us,” Abbas says. “How can we draw the attention of the public opinion around us to know that there is a problem that needs to be solved? So we found this the only way, military action, revolution.”

The plane hijackings, bombings and assassinations that followed in the late 1960s and ’70s would do much to define modern political terrorism, calculated to draw attention that could then be transformed into political power. “About two-thirds of the countries in the United Nations started that way,” says Ilan Halevi, a Jewish member of the PLO living during that period in Israel, which before independence had its own militants, even terrorists. “And because we took up arms, we were in a position to put them down with credibility.” Abbas was among the first to say so, calling in 1977 for talks with moderate Israelis. By then he understood not only the limits of violence but also of Palestinians’ knowledge about their enemy.

“So we are in a conflict, in a war, with somebody we don’t know exactly what he is,” says Abbas. “Is he an animal? Is he huge? Is he a giant? I don’t know. So I started reading.” What he came to eventually understand–after flirting with Holocaust denial in his Ph.D. thesis, a flirtation he later passionately disavowed–was that Israelis’ strength flowed from desperation: “They don’t have any other place to go.” He also concluded that Israelis are extremely well armed, resourceful and allied with the most powerful nation in the world. “How can we deal with them?” Abbas asks. “War? It’s impossible. Israel is a superpower.”

For all the despair on the West Bank–at the political stasis, the growing settlements and the economic challenges many Palestinians face–Abbas’ core belief is now something of an orthodoxy. As Salah Yasin, who sells plaster ceiling fixtures in Ramallah, puts it, “The military option is not possible.” The majority of ordinary Palestinians agree with what pollsters call “the Abu Mazen approach.”

Abu Mazen himself spends more and more time abroad, flying on a chartered jet provided by the United Arab Emirates, a statesman without a state, relentlessly grooming an image of a peaceful people denied a homeland in foreign capitals. People “mistake mildness for weakness, and they’re different things,” says Hussein J. Agha, a longtime PLO activist now at Oxford. “Unlike his image, he’s very, very decisive. His predecessor had a different image, but he was much more reluctant to make a decision and stick with it.”

His predecessor was, of course, Arafat, who showed up at the U.N. in fatigues. Arafat, then chairman of the PLO, told the General Assembly he came with a gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Abbas has a different style. When he spoke from the same stage, he was wearing a suit and tie and he held aloft a sheaf of papers: the U.N. application.

Unlikely Convert

If Abbas retires, as he frequently says he wants to, he will leave with no clear successor. Polls show Palestinians would elect Marwan Barghouti, a charismatic Fatah militant not currently available; he’s serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. In recent months, Palestinian business leaders have talked up Khaled Meshaal, a notion that speaks volumes about the changes roiling Palestinian politics. Since 1996, Meshaal had held the most senior position in Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, long the face of Palestinian terror. Its suicide bombings derailed Oslo, shattered Israel’s peace wing and justified the separation barrier, the fence and wall that Israel is building around the West Bank.

Earlier this year, however, Meshaal endorsed the Abu Mazen approach. While reserving the right to violent resistance and not renouncing the Hamas Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, Meshaal said the time has come for negotiations with Israel and nonviolent protest in the spirit of the Arab Spring. “Now we have a common ground that we can work on–the popular resistance, which represents the power of the people,” Meshaal said. He and Abbas sealed a deal for a unity government, ending (if only on paper) a rift that has seen the 1.6 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip governed by Hamas and the perhaps 2.3 million on the West Bank under Abbas.

But the deal has come undone. Meshaal stepped down in September after failing to bring more than half of Hamas’ leadership with him. East Jerusalem analyst Mahdi Abdul Hadi, who speaks with Meshaal regularly, said Egypt, which was midwifing the deal, asked Abbas to forgo his insistence on elections. Abbas refused, and the bargain collapsed.

To have a leader like Meshaal, whose organization dispatched numerous suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians, adopt the Abu Mazen approach was still a remarkable philosophical victory for Abbas, even if the political victory remains elusive. Because as a whole, Hamas remains resistant to the Abbas-Fatah worldview. “Meshaal said, ‘Let’s embrace him, be in the system, get legitimacy,'” Hadi says. “Others in Hamas say, ‘No, we don’t need his system. Look what’s happening in political Islam in the region. It’s a matter of time. They’ll have to deal with us.'”

That’s exactly what Israel should understand, and quickly, say Abbas loyalists. Whatever new governments emerge from the Arab Spring, they are unlikely to be more understanding toward Israel than the bookish moderate who, when asked last October why he was going to the U.N., replied with one word: “Hope. All the time we give them hope.” Supplies are running low. In April, 3 out of 4 Palestinians told pollsters they felt depressed.