QAlmost silent since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the start of the bombings on the Gaza Strip, Mahmoud Abbas, 87, ended up speaking on Sunday, October 15, during a telephone call with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: “Hamas’ policies and actions do not represent the Palestinian people,” said the disputed leader of the Palestinian Authority. Without legitimacy or power, the oldest leader in the Arab world illustrates fifty years of missed opportunities and disappointed hopes.
It is under his nom de guerre, Abu Mazen, that the current head of the Palestinian Authority appears for the first time in the columns of World, on January 29, 1977. The Franco-Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk evokes the declaration of this moderate of the central committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) authorizing contacts with the Israeli state and any organization which recognizes “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people”. During the last two decades of the 20th centurye century, the politician is first and foremost a man in the shadows.
In 1993, at the time of the Oslo Accords, which aimed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a first portrait written by AFP succinctly presented the ” discreet ” character: loyal to historic leader Yasser Arafat, he is not “especially popular” in his own camp, where the militants “don’t know him”. Despite his central role in the signing of these historic agreements, he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike the three other co-signatories, Yasser Arafat and the two Israeli statesmen, Shimon Pérès and Yitzhak Rabin, says Patrice Claude. For the newspaper’s correspondent in Israel, Mahmoud Abbas, who defends the idea of two states with Jerusalem as its capital, is above all “the man of secret contacts”, he wrote on 1er July 1997.
The impossible mission
Appointed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2003, Abu Mazen became a public figure late in life, at almost 70 years old, after the failure of the latest peace agreements and new deadly clashes. “Mahmoud Abbas is not intended to be a poster boy. The whole question is to know what freedom of action a Yasser Arafat will leave him weakened and who can fear the shadow of a powerful prime minister”, then writes The world in its March 13 editorial.
Very quickly, the minister reveals himself to be a “mediocre boatman”, according to Gilles Paris. The correspondent in Jerusalem underlines his “fragility” politics after a suicide attack committed in Tel Aviv a few hours after his inauguration.
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