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Why Palestinian Self-Government Is Unraveling under President Abbas
(Christian Science Monitor) Taylor Luck - Mohammed, a Chilean Palestinian, is the only visitor at the Yasser Arafat Museum and Mausoleum in Ramallah on a weekday afternoon. A few yards away, the Mukataa presidential compound is nearly just as empty. It's no coincidence. Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, whose elected mandate ended 14 years ago, has shut off the Mukataa and Palestinian Authority (PA), the institutional embodiments of Palestinian autonomy, to everyone but himself and his inner circle. Over the past 12 years, the president has ousted and exiled potential rivals, detained opposition figures, and quashed dissent, both within his Fatah movement that dominates the PA and across the West Bank. With the Palestinian parliament dissolved, judiciary sidelined, and his party hollowed out, Abbas and a handful of allies now rule the West Bank alone. The result, observers and Palestinians say, is a self-inflicted leadership crisis: The PA commands little popular support, and its control over territory is diminishing rapidly. Gaith al-Omari, an analyst and former PA official who worked with both Arafat and Abbas, says, "Today Palestinians are checking out; they feel they have no voice and that a small clique controls everything. There is a widespread sense of, 'This is not ours; why should we bother?'" The Palestinian Legislative Council has been shuttered since 2007. The PA has been unable to pay full salaries to its 130,000 employees for 20 months. With just 70-80% of their salaries, many disgruntled employees are sinking into debt or are abandoning their posts to work in Israel.