Do we like Mahmoud Abbas?
Our score: 3 out of 10. Real condemnation from Western governments for his Holocaust remarks and a long, unelected run in office, with a few genuine steps on the other side of the ledger.
Abbas is 90 and has run the Palestinian Authority since he was elected in 2005. His presidential mandate expired in 2009, and Reuters says he has governed by decree ever since. He leads Fatah, and talk about who comes next has been loud all year.
The Holocaust remarks are what Western governments hold against him. In August 2023 he told senior Fatah members that Hitler's targeting of European Jews was about their “social functions”, such as money lending, not antisemitism. The US, Germany and the EU condemned it, and Yad Vashem's chairman accused him of Holocaust denial. Abbas's spokesman said it was a “rabid campaign” and that Abbas fully condemns the Holocaust.
It wasn't the first time. In 2018 he apologised to people of the Jewish faith offended by a similar claim about money lending. In 2022, standing beside Germany's chancellor in Berlin, he accused Israel of “50 Holocausts” and drew outrage. Three incidents in five years is a pattern, even if he walked some of it back each time.
Now the recent news. Abbas promised 2026 would be a year of Palestinian democracy after the EU threatened to cut funding unless he reformed. On 10 October he postponed the November legislative vote by decree and set 11 September 2027 for both presidential and legislative elections. His decree blamed Israeli attacks, settlement expansion and Gaza's conditions, and critics note there has been no Palestinian election since 2006.
On the harm check: in 2019 Palestinian police banned all activity by the LGBTQ group Al-Qaws in the West Bank, and a PA spokesperson said it was “harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society”. The report we read doesn't name Abbas, so we can't put that on him personally. We found nothing sourced from him on women's rights or the planet, so the picture is thin on those two.
The good-person test is murkier. In 2021 the activist Nizar Banat, a vocal critic of Abbas and the PA, died after security forces arrested him, and an autopsy found he had been beaten. The UN rights office and the EU then criticised the arrests of activists, and the PA wasn't available to respond at the time. Abbas isn't named as doing any of this in that report, but it happened on his watch.