THE RISE OF MAHMOUD ABBAS

On the morning of September 28, 2016, Mahmoud Abbas awoke to upsetting news. Overnight, Shimon Peres, Israel's former president and a man with whom Abbas had a long history of trying to negotiate a peace agreement, had died at the age of ninety-three. His death marked the end of an era in Israel, as Peres was the last member of the Jewish state's founding generation. For Abbas — a member of the same generation but on the Palestinian side — this was more than the passing of a neighboring leader. Abbas had long seen Peres as his natural negotiating partner.

Abbas and Peres met two decades earlier in Washington, DC, when they signed a historic agreement of mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on the White House lawn. They had remained in close contact ever since that day, even when the conflict between their two peoples descended into its darkest hours. In 2005, Abbas became the president of the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous body that was born as a result of the agreement he had signed with Peres. Two years later, the Israeli negotiator became the president of his own country, a mostly symbolic post that he nevertheless used to tirelessly advocate for peace with Israel's neighbors. Just months before his death, Peres was insisting that Abbas was, in his opinion, "an outstanding man who really does want to commit to peace."

As more and more world leaders announced they would attend Peres's funeral in Jerusalem, Abbas consulted with his advisors: should he also take part in the ceremony? While he had been close to Peres, the Israeli leader was still a vastly unpopular figure on the Palestinian street. If Abbas attended the funeral, he would be exposing himself to an onslaught of criticism. This dilemma grew more difficult with each passing moment. On the one hand, the arrival of leading figures like Barack Obama and Charles, Prince of Wales, meant that the funeral could be a chance for Abbas to show his support for the peace process on a global stage. On the other hand, it was becoming clear that no Arab country was going to be represented by its leader at the event — which would make Abbas even more vulnerable to criticism from the Palestinian street if he attended.

"Why do you need this now?" a number of his advisers asked him. Abbas was already unpopular at home — a recent poll showed nearly two-thirds of his people wanted him to resign — and it wasn't as if there were peace talks on the horizon. Why couldn't he just send one of his deputies? Abbas saw the logic of this approach. In his view, there was nothing bad about playing it safe. But the next morning, he surprised his staff by telling them that he was going.

One factor in his decision was a phone call he received from Peres's daughter, who told him that her father would have appreciated him coming to the funeral. Abbas was touched by her plea. Furthermore, some among his staff thought that in showing up he could "disprove Israeli claims that Palestinians only believe in violence." So, twenty-four hours before the funeral began, his office called the Israeli military to inform them that the Palestinian president would pay his last respects to his counterpart in Jerusalem.

On Friday the 29th, just before noon, Abbas's bulletproof motorcade arrived at the Mount Herzl cemetery on Jerusalem's western side. Soon after arriving, he bumped into Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his wife, Sara. The two leaders, who had met only once in the five years prior to the funeral, briefly shook hands and exchanged some polite niceties. Mrs. Netanyahu told Abbas that she and her husband would be happy to welcome him to their official residence in Jerusalem. Abbas smiled and simply mumbled, "long time, long time," a reference to the years that had passed since he had last visited the place.

The antipathy between the two leaders was evident when Netanyahu, during his eulogy of Peres, mentioned many of the dignitaries who had gathered at the cemetery but said nothing of Abbas. In the weeks and months prior to Peres's death, the Israeli premier had publicly accused Abbas of inciting violence and failing to condemn terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens. Netanyahu's frustration with Abbas, whom he saw as partly responsible for the deaths of innocent Israelis, wasn't going to go away simply because he had made a gesture toward the Peres family.

By the time the dust had settled, Abbas was back in a familiar position. His symbolic gesture had garnered him a chorus of condemnation from all walks of Palestinian life and did little in easing the tensions with Israel. His only comfort was the sentence in Obama's eulogy that praised him for making the trip from Ramallah. As ever, Abbas was more popular in Washington than in Ramallah, Gaza, or Jerusalem.

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Mahmoud Abbas was born in 1935 to a modest family in the northern Galilee town of Safed, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Together with his parents and siblings, he fled Safed during the 1948 war and settled in Damascus, Syria. He taught elementary school during the day, while finishing his studies at night, before moving to the oil-rich Qatar to work for the government. There he married his wife, Amina, raised their children, and got involved in the burgeoning arena of Palestinian politics. Before long he had made a name for himself and had joined up with other young Palestinian refugees, including a young man from Gaza named Yasser Arafat, who was the leader of a new Palestinian political organization: Fatah.

Abbas would spend the rest of his life among Fatah's leadership. His military prowess low — he admits in his own memoirs that he was flushed out of a Syrian military academy as a teenager — he viewed the "armed resistance" not as an end but a means. While Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian leadership was fighting Israel out of Beirut, Abbas was with his family in Damascus. He positioned himself as the Palestinian fundraiser and ambassador in residence: he fostered ties with the broader region and world, working especially closely with Soviet Russia (where he completed a controversial doctoral thesis in 1982, which disputed the number of Jewish victims in the Holocaust). By the 1970s and 1980s, he was openly advocating dialogue with Israelis, and a decade later he began to openly support the concept of a "two-state solution," in which a Palestinian state would be established next to Israel in the territories of Gaza...