The Inheritance of Rot: Reading Abbas Through Kanafani
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas meets U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (not pictured) in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Jan. 31, 2023. AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
“The holder of power remains as long as possible at the head of the power structure,” wrote Ghassan Kanafani, “rather than exchange his position according to the dynamics of development.”[1] These words, written more than half a century ago, should reverberate across every inch of occupied Palestine today. Kanafani’s intent was to diagnose decay that goes beyond personal failures as he pointed to a structural disease, warning his audience in 1968 about the rot that festers when power outlives purpose. Today, that rot has metastasized. Mahmoud Abbas, the aging autocrat presiding over the hollow shell of a state he never built, stands as its most grotesque expression. For over two decades, Abbas has clung to his post, outlasting elections, regional uprisings, Israeli massacres, and even the relevance of the political institutions he claims to represent. In doing so, the Palestinian Authority President has come to embody precisely the patriarchal, bureaucratic, and anti-democratic inertia that Kanafani urged us to reject and dismantle. Its critical to highlight that Abbas’s rule is isn’t stickily a failure, but rather the inevitable outcome of a system built to suffocate change.
In late April, the PLO Central Council, a body long stripped of any legitimate representation of Palestinian society, is set to convene to create the position of “Vice President of the PLO,”[2] a prelude to Abbas’s quiet coronation of his successor. The man handpicked to inherit this decaying structure? Hussein al-Sheikh, the American and Israeli-backed loyalist poised to govern what little remains under the Palestinian Authority’s diminishing control.[3]
To study Mahmoud Abbas, and the authoritarian edifice he has built around himself, is to witness exactly what Kanafani warned against in 1968. For Kanafani, revolutions flatten when they are set up as slogans or seats at the table, rather he pushes us to view it as a living spirit that is dynamic and responsive, rooted in the capacity of the oppressed to generate new forms of struggle. Central to that spirit was the refusal to let language decay into empty ritual, or power calcify into permanent hierarchy. Abbas’s regime is the antithesis of that vision. And so, this essay begins with Kanafani as compass, because if we are to understand how to reclaim the revolutionary horizon, we must first understand how we lost it.
Kanafani warned of a dangerous phenomenon birthed in the wake of Arab defeat in 1967, what he called lugha 'amya' or “blind language.”[4] This language is emptied of meaning, where words like revolution, freedom, and democracy become detached from material conditions and repurposed as soundproof shields against accountability. In this semantic wasteland, rhetoric displaces vision, and slogans stand in for strategies. Under Mahmoud Abbas, blind language has spread and has become institutionalized. The very terms that once signaled resistance have been gutted, reheated, and served to mask collaboration, failure, and decay.
What does “statehood” mean when it is reduced to diplomatic theater in UN halls while Gaza burns? What is “unity” when the PA jails students and tortures dissidents in coordination with Israeli intelligence?[5] What is “liberation” when every speech by Abbas is choreographed not for the street, but for Gulf royalty, American diplomats, and European donors? The Abbas regime, and regime is generous here, speaks in keywords, that lack commitments. It mouths the language of struggle while policing its reality. It gestures toward sovereignty while subcontracting its security.
A chilling example of this contradiction unfolded in Jenin in December 2024, when journalist Shetha al-Sabbagh was shot in the head by PA security forces during a crackdown on resistance fighters.[6] Many have pointed to the timing of the raid, suggesting it was staged by PA leadership to reassure their Western patrons, particularly following Trump’s remarks accusing the PA of failing to “root out terror.”[7] This was the expected outcome as the system that the PA conjured up to maintain its relevance is one that rewards the repression of Palestinians as proof of “responsibility.”
Returning now to Kanafani, the PLFP spokesperson warned that this blind language where liberation, unity, and statehood hold no value does more than obscure, it pacifies. It keeps populations suspended in a fog, where the emotional residue of words is maintained, but their political content is erased. One can argue that this is a strategic sedation and Abbas, fluent in this vocabulary of inertia, has perfected the art of speaking without saying, of leading without moving.
When pacification fails, as new generations dares to pierce through the spell, the PA resorts to brute force. It raids universities, camps, neighborhoods, targeting the very people who refuse silence like Shetha al-Sabbagh. Al-Sabbagh’s killing was understood as a message that under Abbas, it is, and always has been, either obedience or obliteration. Yet words are one part of the project for the Abbas regime’s project of stagnation. Since the beginning of his rule, the PA president has manufactured a system of suffocation that targets Palestine’s most vital force: its youth.
Kanafani’s revolutionary vision centered on what he called a “youthful mentality”, a way of confronting the world with clarity, defiance, and a refusal to inherit defeat. In his view, youth is not a stage of life, but a political method that is irreverent, dynamic, and irreducible. That is precisely what threatens regimes like Abbas’s, which rely on hierarchy, obedience, and inertia to survive. As Michel Foucault recounts, “Where there is power, there is resistance… [and] these points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network.”[8] Resistance emerges from within the reach of power as it erupts inside to attack its core by the very bodies and communities that power seeks to discipline. And that is why the youth are feared: not for what they reject, but for what they reveal. Their presence alone exposes the hollowness of the structures meant to contain them.
Abbas has made it his mission to extinguish that possibility. Under his rule, the rising generation of Palestinians have been met with clubs, prisons, and bullets. Student organizers in Birzeit are arrested by Palestinian forces.[9] Families mourning their children killed by Israeli occupation forces are surveilled and harassed. Popular resistance in Jenin and Nablus is criminalized, by both the occupier and its subtracting collaborator. The PA’s greatest fear today is the emergence of a new Palestinian political force that does not recognize Oslo, does not beg for crumbs, and does not kneel.
Kanafani understood well the danger of aging regimes that refuse to cede ground. “What we are calling patriarchy,” he wrote, “extends beyond just the family structure... it serves to inhibit the emergence of young people into the ranks of leadership.”[10] In Abbas’s Palestine, that inhibition has become governance. To put it plainly, this governance is the system and so far, it has worked to a tee.
The PA’s suppression of youth should be seen as reactive and strategic. It is goal-oriented, aimed at preserving a structure that no longer governs, but merely persists. Under Mahmoud Abbas, the governing authority has devolved into a bureaucratic holding pattern, that lacks any veneer of a political project. It is now a managerial class tasked with administering fragmented enclaves in coordination with the very regime that colonizes them. As Hermez cautions, the national managerial class often cloaks itself in the language of sovereignty while treating the nation "like a fiefdom to divide the spoils and manage the poor."[11] In this light, the PA does not fail to govern, as it governs precisely as intended: through patronage, repression, and coordination with occupation.
Kanafani warned us that a people’s downfall is by the vacuum within, by the absence of vision, of strategy, of generational renewal. And so, stripped of ideological clarity, emptied of revolutionary energy, and barricaded against youth, the institutions of Palestinian political life have fossilized into an apparatus of survival, for those strictly in power.
What passes for “governance” under Abbas is the performance of sovereignty for foreign donors.[12] The PLO, once a revolutionary engine, has become a stage prop for international legitimacy, while the real decisions are made in closed rooms between Jerusalem and Washington. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t resist Israeli colonization, it manages its fallout. It is widely acknowledged that the PA does not organize its people, it regulates them. And all of this is done under the cover of dead slogans and diplomatic charades.
Kanafani foresaw this trajectory. He spoke of regimes that mistake the appearance of motion for actual change, that protect the status quo under the illusion of progress. Abbas has mastered that performance. He travels the globe in the name of Palestine, yet he cannot travel freely in and out of Palestine. Just last week, the 89-year-old was barred from traveling by helicopter to Jordan on his way to Damascus and instead was forced to drive through Israeli checkpoints to the Hashemite Kingdom.[13] Abbas speaks of statehood while presiding over a ghost state with no borders, no army, no unity, and no mandate. His only consistent political act has been the maintenance of his own power.
If Kanafani offered us a warning, he also offered us a way forward. His writings insist that revolutionary movements cannot survive on memory or sentiment, they must remain alive, adaptable, and deeply suspicious of power that speaks in the language of the enemy. Nowhere is that betrayal clearer than in the PA’s ongoing security coordination with Israel. For nearly two decades, Abbas has prioritized the “sacred” project of suppressing Palestinian resistance on behalf of the occupation. His police forces raid refugee camps while settlers torch olive groves.[14] His intelligence services surveil youth organizers while Israeli snipers gun them down. The PA collaborates with the very machinery that exiles, imprisons, and executes the people it claims to represent.
Kanafani taught us that language can either liberate or betray. Under Abbas, it has been weaponized to conceal betrayal and to describe submission as diplomacy, and collaboration as pragmatism. But language alone doesn’t change reality. And no amount of diplomatic theater can obscure the fact that the Palestinian Authority has become an outsourced warden for the Israeli regime, propped up by international funding and sealed off from the demands of its own people.
The Palestinian people are building alternative centers of power in the camps, in the streets, under siege, and as I currently write, in exile. And when the final reckoning comes, let no one say they were confused about what side Abbas and his cronies stood on. Let no one say they mistook rot for resistance, because when Palestine is free, we will write the final eulogy for who amongst us, stood against us.
[1] Kanafani, “Thoughts on Change and the "Blind Language.” Page142
[2] عريقات, “منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية: ما أبرز ما تبحثه دورة المجلس المركزي الفلسطيني الجديدة؟.”
[3] “Exclusive: Palestinian Authority Tells US It Is Ready to ‘clash’ With Hamas for Control of Gaza,” Jan 31st, 2025
[4] Kanafani, “Thoughts on Change and the "Blind Language.” Page 144
[5] Samidoun, “The Palestinian Authority’s Attack on the Student Movement: Security Coordination Targets the Resistance.”
[6] Nashed, “Palestinian Authority’s Raid on Jenin Appeals to Israeli, Western Interests.”
[7] Boxerman and Rasgon, “In Overture to Trump, Palestinian Leader Ends Payments for Prisoners.”
[8] Foucault, “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction.” Page 95
[9] Samidoun, “The Palestinian Authority’s Attack on the Student Movement: Security Coordination Targets the Resistance.”
[10] Kanafani, “Thoughts on Change and the "Blind Language.” Page 140
[11] Hermez, “The Levantine Warscape: Methodological Nationalism and the Politics of Normalization With the Israeli State.” Page 12
[12] Sneineh, “Financial Aid: How Dependency on Donors Leaves Palestinians Trapped.”
[13] Ganot, “Israel Struggles to Block Abbas’ Diplomatic Outreach to Damascus - the Media Line.”
[14] Nashed, “Palestinian Authority’s Raid on Jenin Appeals to Israeli, Western Interests.”