Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited Kuwait on Monday to raise the Palestinian flag over the Palestinian embassy in Kuwait City for the first time in 22 years. The move was long overdue -- the embassy had been closed as punishment for former Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's decision to side with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein after he invaded Kuwait in 1990. But even as Abbas buried the hatchet with the Kuwaitis, he was dragging Palestinian politics back to the Arafat era.
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Abbas's visit to Kuwait came two days after Abbas pushed out his reformist prime minister, Salaam Fayyad. Fayyad's departure came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the dysfunction inside the Palestinian Authority (PA): His reform agenda had been a constant irritant to Abbas. The two Palestinian leaders have barely been on speaking terms for more than a year, according to a former advisor to the Palestinian Authority. (Fayyad, for instance, opposed Abbas's push at the United Nations last year for non-member observer state status, insisting that Palestinians would be better served by continuing to build viable institutions.) The tension between the two was arguably the closest thing one could get to a system of checks and balances in the PA.
With Fayyad's departure, Abbas seems to have overcome any institutional restraints on his power: He heads both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Fatah, the dominant faction within it, and is also now four years past the end of his term as president of the PA, with no new elections in sight. After a two-decade experiment in Palestinian democracy and state building that began just after the U.S. liberation of Kuwait, it's now hard to deny that Abbas looks an awful lot like the autocratic Arafat -- minus the signature keffiyeh and fatigues, of course.
Abbas wasn't always an autocrat, however. When he was elected in 2005, he positioned himself as the counterweight to Arafat's corrupt and manipulative leadership style. But things went south after Hamas's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007. The United States and Israel sought to bolster the wobbly Abbas in the West Bank, plying him with weapons, training, intelligence and cash to insulate him from Hamas encroachment. Over time, the Palestinian leader not only found his footing, he tightened his grip on the West Bank.
Media freedom in the West Bank, for example, has been increasingly under threat. The Palestinian Authority has arrested numerous journalists and blocked several websites critical of its administration of the West Bank. Recently, 26-year-old Anas Awwad was thrown in jail -- though he was later pardoned -- for a Facebook post that poked fun at Abbas. Remarkably, the Abbas government invoked Article 195 of Jordan's penal code, which criminalizes criticism of the Jordanian king, in the case.
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