The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas, by Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon (Prometheus Books )

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is the debilitated and authoritarian leader of the Palestinian Authority ruling by decree 11 years into a four-year term. On his watch, the Palestinian movement has fractured into feuding segments and stands at its lowest ebb since the 1967 war. It was not always this way. For many decades, Abbas was one of the shrewdest Palestinian officials who recognized before most of his peers in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that a guerrilla war to liberate historic Palestine was never realistic given Israel’s formidable military superiority and the realities of global politics. The Palestinians, Abu Mazen knew, would have to settle for less than their historic and moral right: a two-state solution. Long before the much heralded “peace process,” Abu Mazen was reaching out via surrogates to test the possibility of an agreement with Israel. In October 1993, shortly after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Abu Mazen established a back channel with Israeli statesman Yossi Beilin that ended up producing a draft of a final peace agreement that Yasser Abed Rabbo, PLO Executive Committee member, called “the most balanced proposal for peace.” Abu Mazen conveyed the draft to his superior PLO Chairman Yasser ‘Arafat, and both men waited to hear what Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would say. Days before Beilin could present the draft to Rabin, Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Jewish zealot. Abu Mazen might have never come closer to clinching a reasonably fair deal for his people, which was born out of his pragmatism. That pragmatism is no longer visionary and has morphed into nothing loftier than holding onto power. Abbas has lost the trust of his people and offers no vision of liberation. How that came to be — the arc from potential peacemaker to despot — is traced in this unfortunately titled book, which should be read by all those interested to learn how that came to be and why the recent record of the Palestinian movement has fallen so short of its promise