Who's the No. 1 Palestinian Now?

By Matt Rees/Jerusalem reporting by Jamil Hamad/Nablus and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem

Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Arafat are two sulky guys. When Arafat wanted to bring his wife Suha to the White House for the signing of the 1993 peace agreement with Israel, Abbas, one of the main Palestinian negotiators, objected to the presence of the Palestinian first lady, widely regarded within Arafat's circle as an interloper. If she was going, Abbas said, he was not. In the event, Suha stayed home and Abbas attended the Rose Garden ceremony with President Bill Clinton, but on the plane to Washington, according to two top officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.), Arafat fumed all the way. The incident, says an Arafat aide, broke the three-decade bond between the Palestinian leader and his No. 2 at the P.L.O.; they haven't trusted one another since, says the aide.

As Abbas, now the Palestinian Prime Minister, prepares for another meeting with a U.S. President, Arafat has entered what may prove to be his most portentous sulk yet. George W. Bush is scheduled to arrive in the Red Sea port of Aqaba, Jordan, this week for a summit with Abbas and his Israeli counterpart, Ariel Sharon. Bush wants more than a reaffirmation of their commitment to his road map for peace in the Middle East; he is expected to demand a real timetable for progress and genuine action on the ground. Sharon last week signaled that he is willing, though some of his Cabinet members think he is just playing along for the sake of good relations with Washington. But Abbas, more commonly known as Abu Mazen, may emerge as the weak link. If so, blame Arafat. Said to be bitter that Abbas has ended his decades-long run as the unrivaled leader of the Palestinians, Arafat is working behind the scenes--with some success--to undermine the new Prime Minister.

Abbas doesn't have the deep roots in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that count for so much in Palestinian politics, where loyalties are often based on clan. Arafat, 73, brags of his descent from a Jerusalem family, whereas Abbas, 68, was born in the ancient Galilean town of Safed, now part of Israel. In 1948 his family fled to Damascus to escape the fighting of the first Arab-Israeli war. Abbas' best connections are in the Persian Gulf, where he was long the P.L.O.'s main man. In peace talks before and after the 1993 agreement, Abbas gained a reputation as one of the Palestinian leaders most open to compromise with Israel, making him relatively popular with Israelis and Americans but less so with Palestinians.

With the onset of Palestinian self-rule in 1994, relations between Arafat, chairman of the P.L.O., and Abbas, secretary-general of its executive committee, became further strained. After a dispute that year about the terms of a second peace agreement, Abbas headed to his Qatar home, refused to talk to Arafat and didn't return to the West Bank for months. Tension between the two rose again this past year, say senior officials in the Fatah faction of the P.L.O. to which Abbas and Arafat belong. Abbas, they say, lost faith in Arafat when he didn't respond to Abbas' urgings to end the violence of the intifadeh. Abbas believes the uprising against Israel, now in its 32nd month, has produced only suffering for the Palestinians, costing lives and livelihoods and goodwill abroad. Last summer, according to the same Fatah officials, Abbas told Arafat that he should disband the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a murderous group of gunmen loosely supported by Fatah. "We should dissociate ourselves from them and put an end to the armed intifadeh," he told a stony-faced Arafat, say the sources. Arafat declined. Taking comfort from U.S. support for his assuming a greater leadership role, Abbas went behind Arafat's back to hold secret meetings with Sharon at his Sycamores Farm in the Negev Desert in February, according to senior Palestinian officials.

The emergence of Abbas as Prime Minister has put even greater distance between the two old allies. The idea of creating the new post arose out of U.S. and Israeli demands that Arafat's power be diminished. Arafat tried to block it but ultimately could not face down the power of the U.S. At one point, according to officials both in Fatah and in the Palestinian Authority (Arafat's government), Arafat instructed his head of special forces, Bashir Nafa, to send someone to fire warning shots at the house of a prominent pro-Abbas cadre. Afterward, Abbas went off again to sulk at his home in Qatar and told friends he had no intention of returning.

In time, he did go back. When the Fatah central committee voted on whether to nominate Abbas for Prime Minister, the tally was 16 to 1. The only vote against was cast by Arafat, who was so angry at the result that, according to senior Fatah officials, he refused to speak to anyone--even his bodyguards--for two days. Once he did start talking, Arafat made sure to bad-mouth both Abbas, who was confirmed in office by the elected Palestinian Legislative Council on April 29, and his chosen security chief, Mohammed Dahlan. Confined by Israeli troops to his headquarters in Ramallah, Arafat also let his money do the talking; senior Fatah and Palestinian Authority officials say he has doled out cash to buy the loyalty of many of the Fatah people who supported Abbas. Last week special-forces head Nafa went to Arafat's office. Dahlan had been considering Nafa for the key job of preventive-security chief in the West Bank. According to two senior Palestinian sources, Nafa told Arafat, "I want to be close to you." Arafat pulled a wad of bank notes out of a briefcase he keeps by his desk. Handing the money to Nafa, he thanked him "for his loyalty." Justifiably, Dahlan wasn't so sure of Nafa's faithfulness and passed on him. Abbas doesn't have the kind of walking-around money Arafat can access with his secret P.L.O. accounts around the world.

To succeed as Prime Minister, Abbas must not only survive Arafat's subversions but also win concessions from Sharon. He hopes to achieve the latter goal by reducing the violence against Israelis. To do that, he's working to persuade Hamas, the militant Islamic group, to observe a truce with Israel. Some of the group's political leaders in Gaza have shown signs that they might go along. Hamas military leaders in the West Bank, however, tell TIME they have warned the Gaza leaders not to cut such a deal. Otherwise, they say, they will start working for the Lebanese fundamentalist group Hizballah, Hamas' main competitor for the title of Israel's enemy No. 1.

Though the U.S. and Israel are urging Abbas to crack down on Hamas, he seems to believe a truce can work. Senior Palestinian police officers tell TIME they are not aware of any plans to arrest Hamas agents. A senior Israeli intelligence official says that so far, Dahlan and Abbas have offered "nice talk [but] nothing on the ground."

From the Palestinian point of view, Sharon offered his own nice talk last week. In a meeting of his Likud Party's parliamentary faction, he said the Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip couldn't continue indefinitely. Israeli right-wingers were outraged that Sharon should be the first Prime Minister to refer to the country's presence in those areas as an "occupation." The attorney general advised that the official terminology should be "disputed territories." But Palestinians welcomed Sharon's candor. In a meeting last week with Abbas, Sharon promised to allow more Palestinians to work inside Israel and to release some of the 1,300 Palestinian detainees Israel holds without charge. That's a move Israeli intelligence agencies strongly oppose. "Every prisoner release will reinforce the terrorists' power," says a senior intelligence source.

For Sharon, the main advantage of meeting Abbas in Aqaba is that he's not Arafat. While the two leaders meet in the sun with Bush and with Jordan's King Abdullah, Arafat will be stuck in his shell-scarred Ramallah office. He'll have missed an Arab summit with Bush in Egypt as well, a meeting Abbas is scheduled to attend. According to Fatah leaders, Arafat is furious that the Arab world seems ready to pass him by and start working with Abbas. As for Abbas, he's handling his foxy former boss carefully. After his three-hour meeting with Sharon last week, he went straight to Ramallah to report the details to Arafat. The next day, Arafat asserted his relevance by calling a meeting of the P.L.O.'s executive committee to discuss the Abbas-Sharon parley. Abbas usually attends such functions. This time, in the tradition of sulks and boycotts, he did not. --With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Nablus and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem