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The Palestinian leader who survived the death of Palestine
What would it mean for Hussein al-Sheikh to lead a people whose dream of
independence is no longer alive?
By ADAM RASGON and AARON BOXERMAN
25 August 2023, 9:01 am
5 Hussein al-Sheikh (C), secretary general of the Executive Committee of
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), attends the funeral of
prime minister Ahmad Qurei in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank on
February 22, 2023. (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
Hussein al-Sheikh (C), secretary general of the Executive Committee of
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), attends the funeral of
prime minister Ahmad Qurei in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank on
February 22, 2023. (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)

FP FOREIGN POLICY — Palestinian politician Hussein al-Sheikh strode into
a fortified conference room in the towering Tel Aviv headquarters of
Israel’s Defense Ministry in February 2022. Few Palestinians enter the
inner sanctum of Israel’s military, but, as Sheikh recalled, he was
greeted by the top army brass and the leadership of the secretive Shin
Bet intelligence apparatus.

The tall, affable Sheikh — whose salt-and-pepper hair is slicked back
with gel — serves as the Palestinian Authority’s main go-between with
Israel in the occupied West Bank. He speaks fluent Hebrew, wears finely
tailored suits, and urges cooperating, not clashing, with Israel. Once a
teenage activist jailed by Israel, the Rolex-sporting, globe-trotting
official now works behind the scenes to prevent the collapse of the PA,
led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israeli power brokers admire Sheikh as a pragmatic partner with an
uncanny ability to find common ground. “He’s our man in Ramallah,” said
one retired senior Israeli security official who requested anonymity
due to an ongoing role in Israeli intelligence as a reservist. Many
Palestinians, however, argue his approach has only reinforced the
conflict’s status quo — a seemingly endless military occupation now in
its sixth decade.

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Sitting with Israel’s generals, Sheikh recounted an emotional visit with
his grandmother to the ruins of their hometown of Deir Tarif in central
Israel. She spotted a cluster of orange trees she had planted before she
was uprooted and her village destroyed in the 1948 war. She embraced
them and wept, he said.

With negotiations to end Israeli rule over the Palestinians long
moribund, Sheikh told the generals that even he had found himself
looking into the mirror, wondering whether he was making a mistake by
continuing to cooperate with Israel. “If there’s no partner on the
Israeli side who believes in peace and two states for two peoples, am I
betraying my grandmother’s tears?” Sheikh told them. “Can you imagine
what an ordinary Palestinian, living in a refugee camp, feels?”

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Three decades after Israeli-Palestinian peace talks created the PA, many
Palestinians no longer believe it will become an independent state. An
increasingly right-wing Israel doesn’t intend to end its occupation
anytime soon. The international community has checked out. And
Palestinians remain divided between Abbas’s secular Fatah party, which
controls the West Bank, and the Islamist Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.

A Palestinian man argues with an Israeli soldier in the centre of Hebron
in the West Bank on July 4, 2023. (MOSAB SHAWER / AFP)
Palestinians in the West Bank wait at checkpoints during the day and
witness Israeli troops raid their neighborhoods at night. They
increasingly say the PA — which administers Palestinian cities and
arrests militants who plan attacks on Israelis — exists to do the dirty
work of Israel’s occupation.

A member of the Israeli security forces directs Palestinians at an
Israeli checkpoint in Bethlehem in the West Bank on April 14, 2023,
awaiting to be allowed to cross to attend prayers during the Muslim holy
fasting month of Ramadan at al-Asqa mosque compound atop the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem. (HAZEM BADER / AFP)
For many, Sheikh is the man doing that dirty work. He is the face of the
PA’s elite, who experience what one former Palestinian official living
in the West Bank labeled a “VIP occupation.” Senior Palestinian
officials are waved through Israeli roadblocks and rake in hefty
salaries that fund palm tree-lined villas in the desert city of Jericho
and extravagant escapades in Europe. Their children party in Haifa and
Jaffa, Israeli cities most Palestinians are barred from reaching.

“The Palestinian elite are the true beneficiaries of the peace process,”
said Ghandi al-Rabi, a prominent Ramallah-based lawyer.

The battle to succeed the 87-year-old Abbas has many contenders, none of
whom are a shoo-in. But Sheikh stands a chance of becoming the next
leader of the PA, despite his unpopularity, thanks to his close ties to
Israel and the United States.

Over nine months, Foreign Policy interviewed 75 Palestinians, Israelis,
Americans, and Europeans, including officials, diplomats,
businesspeople, and rights advocates, who painted a picture of Sheikh’s
rise to the highest echelons of Palestinian decision-making.

In a rare, two-hour interview in his penthouse office in Ramallah,
Sheikh acknowledged the chasm between the Palestinian leadership and
public. “The Authority isn’t able to deliver a political horizon for the
people. The Authority isn’t able to resolve the people’s financial and
economic problems from the occupation,” he said. “But what’s the
alternative to the PA? Chaos and violence.”

***

US officials contrast Sheikh favorably with other Palestinian
politicians, whom they call long-winded and obstinate. During his last
meeting with US President Joe Biden, Abbas droned on “ad nauseam for 25
minutes before he let Biden utter a word,” said one senior
administration official who was not authorized to speak about the
meeting. PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh often subjects visiting
dignitaries to 40-minute lectures on history and international law, US
and European diplomats said. As for Sheikh, “when you go into a room
with him, you can tell he’s really, truly eager for solutions,” the
administration official said. One European diplomat in the region
described him as “a fixer who wants to solve problems, not theorize
about them.”

But “he is about as popular with the Palestinian people as the Shah was
in January 1979,” the administration official said, referring to the
corrupt and authoritarian leader of Iran before a revolution brought
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

Sheikh’s life story traces the Palestinian national movement’s
decades-long march toward the current impasse. He was 7 when Israel
occupied the West Bank in 1967, imprisoned at 17, and released as a
popular uprising swept the West Bank in the late 1980s.

After the PA’s establishment in the 1990s, Sheikh slowly rose through
its ranks. He served in the nascent Palestinian security forces before
assuming his current role — the head of the General Authority of Civil
Affairs — in 2007. His ministry handles ties with Israel, including the
Israeli permits that allow Palestinians to circumvent restrictions on
their movement.

His journey from leather jacket-wearing street activist to detested
official has paralleled an ever-widening gap between the Palestinian
government and its people, who no longer believe their leaders will free
them from occupation, let alone build a democratic state.

Sheikh works closely with Israel to prevent Palestinian attacks on
Israelis. He negotiates with Israeli officials to upgrade outdated
Palestinian infrastructure. The 62-year-old leader says it’s all
necessary to preserve an increasingly distant hope that Palestinians
will one day achieve freedom.

“We need to narrow the wide gap between us,” said Sheikh, comparing his
approach to seizing one apple instead of an unreachable bundle of four.
“So, however small the accomplishment is, it is important.”

Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah (C) and Palestinian
Authorities civil affairs minister Hussein al-Sheikh (R) are surrounded
by security following their arrival at the Erez border crossing in Beit
Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip on October 2, 2017. (MAHMUD HAMS / AFP)
The fragile edifice of the PA rests on the shoulders of Abbas, who was
first elected to a four-year term in 2005 and now rules by autocratic
fiat. But Sheikh has hardly concealed his desire to succeed Abbas,
drawing ire from opponents who accuse him of acting as if he has already
become president. He has ramped up his online presence and transformed
himself into the PA’s public face, crisscrossing Ramallah in a
Mercedes-Benz flanked by a large security detail.

But few say he could be viewed as a legitimate leader. Like others in
Abbas’s inner circle, Sheikh “began as part of the people but has become
totally isolated. For large portions of the public, he represents
everything that has gone wrong with the Palestinian Authority: out of
touch, corrupt, and tied to Israel,” said Tamir Hayman, who led Israeli
military intelligence until 2021. “You can’t impose a Karzai” on the
Palestinians, said former Palestinian diplomat Mohammed Odeh, referring
to the US-backed Afghan president from 2002 to 2014.

During his February 2022 meeting with the Israeli generals, Sheikh said
the decision to move toward a better future rested with them. It was a
stark admission of the vast power differential between the decorated
security chiefs and the PA, one that Sheikh had operated in for years.
But it was also a refusal to consider what Palestinian leaders could do
to change their people’s painful present. The gathering eventually
brought Palestinians a few small concessions — but nowhere nearer to
independence.

***

This picture taken on August 4, 2023 from the Palestinian city of
Jericho in the West Bank shows the waning gibbous moon rising across the
border in the east over Jordan. (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
Sheikh’s childhood was spent in a middle-class home in a West Bank
unrecognizable to Palestinians today. There were almost no Israeli
settlements in the first post-occupation years, no suit-clad Palestinian
ambassadors and ministers bearing the emblazoned sigil of their
stillborn PA, no gray separation wall snaking over the rugged hills.

For decades after 1967, Israel ruled the territory directly. Israeli
military governors presided over Palestinian cities, assuming
responsibility for keeping the streets clean and managing hospitals.
Palestinians opened accounts at Israeli banks in Khan Yunis and Nablus.
The beating heart of the Palestinian struggle was abroad — in Jordan,
Lebanon, anywhere but Palestine.

Some Palestinians look back at those days with nostalgia. One could hop
into a car and drive from Gaza to the border with Lebanon without
stopping at a checkpoint, many recall, or fly easily out of Israel’s
airport. Today, such simple privileges are out of reach for most
Palestinians.

Ramallah, now swollen by an influx of international aid to the PA, was
still a modest collection of homes and businesses when Sheikh was a
child. His father, Shehada, ran a wholesale food shop tucked into the
rolling hillsides near the old town’s limestone churches. His extended
family — the Tarifis — had a history of close ties with the Israelis.
His relative Jamil, a wealthy businessman who owned quarries, leveraged
his relationship with Israeli officials to get permits and privileges
for Palestinians he knew. In a sense, Sheikh inherited the family
business: liaising between Israeli authorities and Palestinians.

But Sheikh first joined the struggle against Israeli rule as a teenager.
In 1978, he was sentenced to eleven years in prison after he joined a
cell involved in attacks against Israelis, although he said he didn’t
commit acts of violence. (Israel’s military says it has lost its records
of his trial.) He later recounted to visiting Israeli officials how his
sentence broke his father’s heart. “I never saw him tell the story
without tearing up,” recalled a second retired senior Israeli official
who met with him frequently.

The monotony of incarceration inspired Sheikh to educate himself about
Israel. He spent hours daily poring over books and newspapers in Hebrew
and practicing speaking with guards, eventually becoming fluent. (During
our interview, Sheikh mainly spoke in Arabic, but he seemed at his most
expressive when sharing stories in Hebrew.) He later taught the language
to other prisoners. “I didn’t know anything about Israel,” he said. “I
would see Israeli soldiers in my town, near my home’s front door. But
what is Israel? I studied all of that in prison.”

Sheikh was not a top leader among Palestinian prisoners, who spearheaded
hunger strikes and protests while behind bars, said fellow inmates. But
his drive to make a name for himself in Palestinian politics was
evident. “Hussein has an idea that the person who isn’t ambitious is
dead. Only the dead don’t have goals,” said Jihad Tummaleh, a Fatah
activist who did time with him.

By the time Sheikh left prison, the First Intifada, or uprising, was in
full swing. A few years later, Israel and the PLO negotiated the Oslo
Accords, which saw Israel withdraw from some parts of the West Bank and
Gaza and hand some responsibility to the newly created PA. The
semi-autonomous body began overseeing basic services to Palestinians
such as education and health care. But it was largely confined to
Palestinian cities, and most of the West Bank and Gaza remained under
direct Israeli control.

Sheikh spent a few years searching for his place in the new order
created by the rapprochement between Israel and the Palestinians. He did
stints as a colonel in an intelligence service known for rooting out
opponents such as Hamas and in the police. He eventually wound up as a
minor activist in Fatah’s grassroots cadres.

Sheikh’s fluency in Hebrew gave him an edge in building close ties with
Israeli officials. As a young officer in the security forces between
1994 and 1997, Sheikh translated between Palestinian and Israeli
officials at joint meetings. In a move unthinkable nearly 30 years
later, he even traveled to an Israeli high school in the wealthy Tel
Aviv suburb of Ramat HaSharon to lecture Israeli teenagers about
Israeli-Palestinian cooperation and the possibility of peace.

“He put it to them in perfect Hebrew,” said Yoni Fighel, a former
military governor of Ramallah, who taught at the school and invited Sheikh.

The halcyon days of Oslo didn’t last. The collapse of peace talks at
Camp David in 2000 was followed by protests at Al-Aqsa Mosque. Clashes
soon erupted across Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, setting the stage
for the violence of the Second Intifada. But even Israeli security
officials agree Sheikh assiduously avoided taking part. “Hussein was in
the Fatah leadership and did all sorts of bullshit but wasn’t a fighter
or a commander on the ground,” said Shalom Ben-Hanan, a retired senior
officer in the Shin Bet.

The Second Intifada shattered the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
which never fully recovered, and emboldened the country’s hawkish right
wing. The deadlock has empowered officials like Sheikh, whose job is
more about permits than peace talks.

File: Then-coordinator of government activities in the territories
(COGAT) Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, left, and the Palestinian Authority’s
Civil Affairs Minister Hussein al-Sheikh sign an agreement to revitalize
the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee, January 15, 2017.
(Courtesy COGAT)
By 2017, Sheikh had become the gatekeeper to Abbas, alongside the
saturnine intelligence chief Majed Faraj. The duo have formed what some
Palestinian officials call a closed circle around Abbas, who has grown
intolerant of criticism.

Officials in Abbas’s office say Sheikh sits beside the president on
flights, taking notes in a small notebook of what he tells him and then
later reiterating them in meetings with foreign dignitaries. He has
become close to members of Abbas’s family, appearing in a photo with a
grandson of the president last August who described him as a “national
leader.” (“It is a particular ability to kiss ass, lie, brown-nose, and
bullshit,” said Nasser al-Kidwa, a former member of the Fatah
leadership-turned-Abbas critic. “And always to convince Abu Mazen that
he’s God — ‘Your points are amazing, Mr. President.’”)

Abu Mazen, or Abbas, has enabled Sheikh’s rise because he favors advisers
incapable of challenging his authority, Palestinian analysts said. The
president could easily dispose of him should he fall out of favor, Kidwa
said. “He is a little bug beside him,” he said. “If Abu Mazen changes
his position tomorrow, Sheikh will be over.”

In December, Sheikh was heard berating Abbas as the “son of 66 whores”
in a recording leaked to Palestinian media. The choice to leak the tape
was a telling indication that Sheikh’s rivals regard Abbas as his main
source of strength. Sheikh dismissed the tapes as fabrications aimed at
“undermining national unity.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas (L) and Hussein al-Sheikh,
secretary general of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO), attend the funeral of prime minister Ahmad Qurei in
Ramallah in the West Bank on February 22, 2023. (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
Personal ties aside, Abbas and Sheikh share a commitment to a negotiated
solution with Israel and a suspicion of their Hamas rivals, who wrested
control of Gaza in a 2007 coup. In a 2017 meeting with US officials,
Sheikh shouted that advancing a deal to reconcile Fatah and Hamas would
end in the Islamist group’s rockets flying over his head, the senior
Biden administration official said.

“I’m a total believer in Abu Mazen’s plan and approach,” Sheikh told
Foreign Policy. “He trusts me. I thank him for this trust.”

Even today Sheikh reiterates his opposition to attacks on Israelis,
which he says play into Israel’s hands. “I’m for resisting the
occupation. I’m totally against harming civilians,” he said. “I support
resisting the Israeli occupation, and I still believe in that. But how?”

Sheikh functions in a “schizophrenic situation” while “sitting on the
knife’s edge and trying to operate in all worlds at the same time,” said
Nickolay Mladenov, a former top Middle East peace envoy for the United
Nations.

“You have to deliver services to your people, knowing very well that
people are going to oppose you because you’re not taking them toward the
two-state solution that you have promised them for such a long time,”
Mladenov said.

***

Palestinians with national flags confront Israeli troops in the West
Bank village of Kfar Qaddum, near the Jewish settlement of Kedumim, on
June 9, 2023. (Jaafar ASHTIYEH / AFP)
In recent months, Sheikh has focused on restoring calm amid the
bloodiest armed clashes since the Second Intifada. Israeli forces have
killed more than 140 Palestinians, militants and civilians, this year;
Palestinian assailants have killed at least 29 Israelis, mostly civilians.

The rising violence reflects widespread despair among Palestinians.
Young Palestinians have never voted in a national election, yet the
political elite seems more focused on who will replace the aging Abbas
than reforming the broken system. Meanwhile, the militants confronting
Israeli soldiers in Nablus’s old city or the Jenin refugee camp enjoy a
popularity that PA leaders such as Sheikh can only fantasize about.

While Palestinian officials boast of having built a “State of
Palestine,” what actually exists is a thin veneer of statehood —
government ministries that mostly serve as platforms for officials to
distribute cushy positions, coveted contracts, and permits that sidestep
Israel’s military rule. “What we have today is the remnants of the
national project,” said political analyst Jehad Harb.

The misery of the occupation permeates Palestinian life, but the
hypocrisy of the Palestinian leadership — calling for justice on the
world stage while corruption and autocracy proliferate at home — adds
another layer of frustration. And Palestinians who criticize their
leaders online or organize protests are often arrested — or worse.

Angry demonstrators carry pictures of Nizar Banat, an outspoken critic
of the Palestinian Authority, and chant anti-PA slogans during a rally
protesting his death, allegedly at the hands of PA security personnel,
in the West Bank city of Ramallah, June 24, 2021. (AP/Nasser Nasser)
In June 2021, Palestinian security officers allegedly beat critic Nizar
Banat to death. The killing sparked rare demonstrations that were
dispersed by plainclothes thugs who viciously attacked journalists and
protesters. The PA has called Banat’s death a mistake and put a number
of security officers on trial, but critics contend that it has dragged on.

“The occupation has played the first and foremost role in our suffering,
but, little by little, the Authority has become a parallel burden
through its repression of political activists and civil society,
widespread corruption, and anti-democratic legal decrees,” said Muhannad
Karaja, a human rights lawyer who has represented dissidents jailed for
criticizing the government. In March, the PA froze his legal practice’s
license in what Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human
Rights Watch, called “the latest in its systematic efforts to muzzle
dissent.”

Palestinian leaders struggle to respond to the public’s discontent.
“We’re not angels,” said Fatah official Sabri Saidam, adding that
attempts to discuss the failings of Palestinian governance were a
distraction from the struggle against Israel’s occupation. Others
refrain from blasting the government but offer some introspection. “I
sometimes defend the Authority and its leaders, and I know I’m wrong,”
said Azzam al-Ahmad, a longtime top Fatah member, acknowledging that he
has advocated for things he “doesn’t believe in.”

Sheikh said instances of repression and graft were aberrations. “Look, I
don’t say our performance is 100 percent,” he said. But for many
Palestinians, these supposed aberrations are bound up with the very
system over which Sheikh presides.

***

Israel tightly regulates Palestinian movement. Anyone who wants to
travel to Jerusalem to pray at Al-Aqsa or eat at fish restaurants in
Jaffa needs a permit issued by the Israeli military. But Israel allows a
privileged slice of the Palestinian elite to move freely through its
territory, bypassing restrictions that embitter the broader public.

So-called VIP permits allow high-ranking Palestinian officials to cross
through checkpoints normally reserved for Israelis. Wealthy
businesspeople can apply for a “businessman card,” or BMC, a pass that
provides nearly unfettered access to Israel and its international
airport near Tel Aviv.

On the Palestinian side, Sheikh’s Civil Affairs office is responsible
for doling out the exclusive Israeli permits — and many Palestinians in
Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Tulkarem tell stories about a friend or a
neighbor paying for them. “When you talk to Palestinians, they’ll tell
you: corrupt, corrupt, corrupt,” Ben-Hanan said, referring to Sheikh.
(Our reporting didn’t indicate Sheikh’s direct involvement in alleged
instances of corruption.)

When merchants approach officials in Sheikh’s ministry about obtaining a
BMC, they might be asked to provide favors or cash, according to several
leading businesspeople. “With increased demand, some people offer things
to sweeten the deal,” said Samir Hazboun, the secretary-general of the
union of chambers of commerce.

Some government officials, Hazboun added, have told applicants: “Fix up
our offices, set up air-condition units for us, and you’ll get your
BMC.” Other officials have taken $10,000 bribes, he said. In a 2022
survey by the Ramallah-based Coalition for Accountability and Integrity,
nearly a quarter of Palestinians reported having paid a bribe or offered
a gift, or a relative having done so, in exchange for receiving a public
service.

“People use their connections to get away with a lot,” said Samir
Abuznaid, a former chairman of the PA’s government accountability office.

Palestinian Social Development Minister Ahmad Majdalani dismissed
allegations of rampant government corruption. “These stories that you’re
sharing with me are trivial,” he said. Sheikh contended that he had
sought to address the problem and denied that corruption was widespread.
When confronted with specific claims of graft in his ministry, he issued
a full-throated denial. “Do you have any idea how many people I sent to
the prosecutor’s office?” Sheikh said regarding corruption claims. He
did not answer questions about how many people he had referred to
justice officials but asserted he has followed each case closely and
even attended hearings.

For their part, Israeli officials described receiving reams of
complaints about corruption in Civil Affairs from Palestinians and
nonprofit workers. But as long as the PA cracks down on Palestinian
militants, many in Israel see little reason to intervene, said Kobi
Lavy, a former Palestinian affairs adviser to the Civil Administration,
the Israeli occupation’s bureaucratic arm.

“The Palestinians tell us: ‘If the situation wasn’t comfortable for
Israel, you would put a stop to it,’” said Lavy, adding that he had
raised reports of corruption with disinterested superiors. “At the end
of the day, it doesn’t sound nice to say, but they’re right. If there’s
no terrorism from them, who cares.”

The crooked practices, businesspeople said, extend to the government’s
distribution of lucrative licenses, often given to friends and relatives
of senior officials. The licenses, used to operate gas stations, import
cigarettes, and run other businesses, enrich the well-connected.

A Palestinian entrepreneur described how he brought two members of
Sheikh’s family into his business as “fictional partners” — a practice
business leaders said was a commonplace tool to overcome red tape. One
partner made a minor contribution to the company, the other none at all,
the businessman said, as he flicked through registration documents
bearing one of their names and WhatsApp conversations.

Using their association with Sheikh, the family members helped the
businessman acquire a permit and evade regulatory hurdles. In exchange,
they took a share of the business’s proceeds. “Without them, the
business wouldn’t have moved forward,” he said. “His family are a
government body all to themselves.” (The businessman requested that
details related to his business be withheld in order to shield him from
retribution by the PA.) Sheikh didn’t respond to a request for comment,
sent to his chief of staff, about his family members’ business activities.

Business leaders say the schemes reflect how the Palestinian ruling
class dominates almost every aspect of life. “Unfortunately, Palestine
has become a playground for criminals,” said Hisham Massad, a former
head of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “Everywhere else,
corruption is under the table. Here, it’s in plain view.”

Palestinian demonstrators lift placards during a rally in Ramallah city
in the West Bank on July 11, 2021, denouncing the Palestinian Authority
in the aftermath of the death of activist Nizar Banat while in the
custody of PA security forces. The placard bears the Arabic hashtag
#enough_corruption (ABBAS MOMANI / AFP)
The perceived favoritism in Sheikh’s ministry breeds resentment,
especially among Palestinians in the West Bank living in fear of
deportation to Gaza because their identity cards say they live in the
enclave. For years, Israel mostly didn’t authorize residency changes
between the West Bank and Gaza, leaving them at risk of deportation.
Sheikh told US officials that Israel only granted exceptions to
officials “as favors to the PA leadership,” according to a 2009 US
diplomatic cable. (Israel and Egypt’s long-lasting blockade of Gaza
makes life there harder for most Palestinians than in the West Bank.)

In 2021, the previous Israeli government announced that it would update
the addresses of thousands of Palestinians, lifting them out of years of
limbo. Throngs crowded into Civil Affairs offices to update their
documents, but the process was marred by accusations of nepotism.

Senior official Mahmoud al-Habbash changed his address to the West Bank
along with 17 family members, data from ministry records showed. His
assistant and brother-in-law, Khaled Baroud, and at least 10 of his
family members also received the update. Habbash said his family had
applied for address changes through Civil Affairs since 2009 and didn’t
exploit his connections. Baroud didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“Israel is the primary address in denying Palestinians their basic
rights, but it’s frustrating and infuriating that people can’t rely on
the Authority to look out for their interests appropriately,” said
Jessica Montell, the executive director of HaMoked, an Israeli
organization that supports Palestinian residency rights. “It seems
obvious that they are making these decisions in a nepotistic way.”

Yet it is Sheikh’s alleged mistreatment of women that may pose the most
significant challenge to his desire to succeed Abbas. Most scandals go
back several years but have nonetheless sullied his image. Some are
unsubstantiated rumors, but at least one appears to reveal the impunity
enjoyed by senior officials. Sheikh’s purported treatment of an employee
in his office in 2012 led to a formal complaint, an investigation that
drew in Abbas, and ended with a previously unreported hush payment of
$100,000, according to a Palestinian official, a person close to the
complainant at the time, and others familiar with the case.

According to those familiar with the case and media reports from the
time, when he summoned a young IT officer in his ministry to his office
to fix a computer error in 2012, he verbally harassed her, commenting on
her looks. She told interlocutors that she rebuffed Sheikh. Undeterred,
he proceeded to touch her, the officials said. She described quickly
rejecting the move and crying out in protest before storming out of the
room, they said.

In a rare move, the IT officer’s husband, a member of an influential
militia affiliated with the ruling Fatah party, decided to challenge
Sheikh by filing an official complaint. Suddenly, the senior Palestinian
official’s political future seemed to be hanging in the balance.

That scandal alarmed Sheikh’s allies in Israel’s security establishment.
Avi Issacharoff, a Palestinian affairs reporter, recalled receiving an
unusual appeal from a senior Israeli officer to kill the publication of
his stories on the issue at the time so as to protect Sheikh’s
reputation. Issacharoff published the stories anyway.

During his interview with Foreign Policy, Sheikh declined to respond to
the allegations in detail, declaring he wouldn’t waste time on
“insignificant talk.”

Seemingly aware he would face questions about the accusations, he said
at the beginning of the meeting that he wouldn’t answer questions he
“doesn’t like.” And before we departed his office, he said in Hebrew
that he had a proposal: “Forget about that stuff. It’s negative
propaganda against me.” Sheikh declined to answer specific follow-up
questions about the incident. In an email, his chief of staff called all
of Foreign Policy’s questions “void” and said Sheikh “doesn’t have the
time to respond to such void claims.”

***

In public, the Israeli government and the PA spar constantly over
politics. But officials on both sides maintain what one diplomat called
a “Catholic marriage” to stave off the collapse of the status quo, which
both prefer for the time being.

But as the Palestinian public’s frustration mounted in the spring of
2022 amid deadly clashes between militants and Israeli security forces,
Abbas privately threatened to freeze “security coordination,” an
unpopular policy that sees Palestinian and Israeli authorities share
intelligence to crack down on Palestinian militants. If implemented, the
threat could have led to snowballing violence.

US and Israeli officials turned to Sheikh to persuade the president to
back down. Sheikh’s close ties with Abbas, combined with his willingness
to compromise, have long made him the go-to person for diplomats. “When
things are getting really tense,” he is the point of contact for calming
the situation, said a US official, who called him an Abbas “whisperer.”

Sheikh held quiet talks with top State Department official Barbara Leaf,
who informed him that Israel had pledged to halt home demolitions until
Biden’s visit last July, according to the senior Biden administration
official. Sheikh leveraged the proposal to talk Abbas out of going
through with the move. His Israeli counterparts also stay in constant
contact, calling him a reliable partner on improving Palestinian
cellular networks, which require Israeli approval; carrying Israeli
leaders’ messages to Abbas; and more. Samer Sinijlawi, a Fatah activist,
said Israeli officials were ringing Sheikh incessantly during a trip
through the Jordanian desert a decade and a half ago. “The amount of
calls between him and the Israeli military liaison was not normal,” he
said. “Best friends don’t talk to each other like that.”

“He gives you the impression: ‘I hold the keys. If I close a deal with
you on an electrical substation in Jenin or something related to
security coordination, count on it happening,’” said Michael Milshtein,
a retired Israeli intelligence officer who met with Sheikh.

But for many Palestinians, Sheikh plays on terms that Israel prefers —
incremental concessions that improve daily life but don’t bring the
Palestinians closer to independence. “He’s pragmatic, but he lacks
pragmatism that achieves results,” Sinijlawi said.

In late 2022, Sheikh agreed to a move that would leave many Palestinians
reeling — paying rent to Israel for West Bank land Palestinians consider
occupied. The idea was to establish a Palestinian customs facility in
the West Bank town of Tarqumiya, which would grant the Palestinians a
modicum of greater sovereignty, by leasing the land from Israel. “I was
flabbergasted — we are talking about occupied land through and through,”
said an official in Sheikh’s office who requested anonymity to avoid
retribution. “I thought if this deal materializes, it would set an
extremely dangerous precedent.”

(Sheikh said he consented to leasing the tracts under a 99-year
agreement, calling that part of the proposal “unproblematic.” But he
said the deal fell through because Israel refused to allow tobacco and
alcohol, whose imports bring considerable revenues into the PA’s
coffers, to be processed at the center.)

Palestinians who criticize the decisions of senior officials like Sheikh
have faced threats and intimidation. In November 2020, Sheikh announced
that the government was officially resuming coordination with Israel,
including the widely loathed strategy of working with Israel to clamp
down on militants. Aseel Suleiman, a radio host on Raya FM — a
Ramallah-based station — delivered a monologue against Sheikh, who had
just taken to the airwaves to call the decision to resume coordinating
with Israel “a great victory for our Palestinian people.”

“May God make this evening hell for he who sold out, betrayed and
coordinated, and then declared that to be a victory,” Suleiman said, her
voice choked with rage. “What gullibility is this?”

In response, Sheikh called the station’s owner and furiously demanded
that he “fix the situation,” a Palestinian official familiar with the
incident said. He also insisted the news outlet post an article backing
the restored ties, the official said. The outlet complied and published
an editorial defending the decision. Sheikh denies knowledge of the
incident.

***

US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman meets with Hussein al-Sheikh
at the US. State Department in Washington on Oct. 4, 2022. (State
Department / FREDDIE EVERETT)
Sheikh’s American admirers understand that he has a domestic image
problem. Last October, US officials invited Sheikh — rather than the
Palestinian prime minister — to visit Washington to meet with US
officials, including National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. “He wanted
to come, obviously, to bolster his own credibility inside the PA, and
our desire was to let him come and give him some street cred,” the
administration official said.

As long as US policy aims to maintain the hope of a two-state solution
in the face of years of deadlock, Washington will need people like
Sheikh. “He’s trying to keep this whole crumbling tower standing,” the
administration official said. “He understands our limits and the
Israelis’ limits.”

But it’s fair to wonder how well he still understands Palestinian
limits. Whoever assumes the reins of power from the octogenarian
president, one certainty is they will lead a deeply problematic PA.
Former senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi said the next president
will inherit a situation in which Israel “continues to kill people,
demolish homes, expand settlements, and annex land” while dealing with
the legacy of a government that has used its limited power “to oppress
and commit injustices against its own people.”

Mahzouz Shalaldeh, a 39-year-old teacher from a hillside village near
Hebron in the southern West Bank, said his 10th grade students’ hopes
for a better future recede yearly, feeling squeezed between “the hammer
of the occupation and the anvil of the Authority.” “The occupation is
suffocating us, and the Authority is practicing every type of corruption
there is,” he said. “The gates of hope have been slammed shut for us.”

Sheikh concedes that many Palestinians no longer believe that his
government will liberate them from Israel’s occupation. It’s less clear
whether he believes that should lead him to change course. “The people
lost hope, of course,” he added. “But me, as an official and leader, I
can’t.”

—

Adam Rasgon is a member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker. Aaron
Boxerman is a reporter for the New York Times in London.