Mahmoud Abbas’ Visit to Lebanon: A Display of Dominance over the Camps
Political Analysis | Beirut
Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement
The upcoming visit of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to Beirut raises numerous questions about its timing and true objectives, particularly amid the intensifying Zionist aggression against the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the growing Palestinian popular movement in the diaspora, and the increasing pressure on the resistance in the region—especially in Lebanon, which hosts hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
At a time when the so-called “Palestinian leadership” is supposed to express the rights of its people, this visit comes in a completely contrary context. It appears to be part of a frenzied effort to revive the Oslo project and tighten the grip on the refugee camps, especially following the Authority’s failure to eliminate the resistance’s weapons in the northern West Bank and its increasing loss of national and popular legitimacy. From here emerges its dangerous function within the framework of the official Arab system, led by Saudi Arabia, which—with the media it sponsors—has no concern but to please Washington and to disarm the resistance!
This visit cannot be addressed without recalling a fundamental truth: Mahmoud Abbas possesses no constitutional or national legitimacy. He was not elected by anyone (not even within the PA bodies in Ramallah!), let alone by our people in the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the diaspora. His official “term” ended in 2009, yet he rules by individual decrees and monopolizes all executive, legislative, and judicial powers, in total disregard for the Palestinian people’s will. Furthermore, the PA’s security forces target the resistance and the prisoners’ movement, and confiscate the rights of the families of martyrs and prisoners. All this happens, along with other crimes, while corruption runs rampant within the PA apparatus and its embassies abroad.
Mahmoud Abbas has transformed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from a unifying representative framework into an empty structure subjugated to his decisions, excluding all national forces that challenge his approach. The “organization’s” institutions have thus become tools in the hands of a financial-security elite linked to the occupation, seeking to secure their class privileges and influence, and to remain in power for as long as possible.
It is true that this corrupt approach predates the departure of Yasser Arafat from the scene and the appointment of Mahmoud Abbas in 2005. It is also true that the state of ruin and unilateralism in political decision-making and PLO institutions dates back nearly 50 years, reaching its peak with the erasure of the Palestinian National Charter. However, under Abbas’s leadership, the greatest process of corruption and erosion has taken place, affecting both the institution and the cause simultaneously—including the participation of the “organization” in imposing sanctions on the Gaza Strip and targeting resistance forces with iron and fire, whether those movements are formally part of the “organization,” barred from joining it, or standing outside it. Thus, the “organization” has become closer to a private company than to a national front expressing its official slogan: national unity, national mobilization, liberation!
This visit cannot be separated from the pressing regional and international context, in which Arab and Western actors are working to reposition the Palestinian Authority as the “sole legitimate representative” in an attempt to bypass the Palestinian people and revive the so-called illusory and liquidationist “two-state solution”—a slogan sanctified by the “Palestinian leadership” based on the so-called “Arab Initiative” (in reality, a Saudi initiative), which even its proponents no longer remember!
Hence, Abbas’s visit to Lebanon comes to bolster his symbolic presence in the diaspora—not to defend the right of return or support the refugees and their usurped rights (God forbid!)—but to assert dominance and control over the refugee camps, and to prevent any Palestinian popular movement in the diaspora outside the Oslo umbrella. He brandishes the usual scarecrows: “disarmament” and “respect for Lebanese state laws,” which themselves do not respect the rights of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon!
Leaks indicate the Authority’s intention to push for enhanced “security coordination with the Lebanese state” under the guise of “preventing chaos,” “combating terrorism,” and “disarmament”—the same language long used by the Zionist entity to justify its crimes. Let no one think that Palestinians in Lebanon oppose the organization of arms in the camps, for example—but the chaos was not created by the resistance; its source lies in forces and gangs outside the national ranks. The talk about “security in the camps” is a truth used to serve a larger falsehood. The real aim here is to turn the camps—and the entire Palestinian presence—into nothing more than a security file!
This visit comes at a time when Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (470,000–480,000 in 12 camps) are suffering from extremely harsh economic and social conditions, entrenched by discriminatory laws that prevent them from owning property or working in dozens of professions. The Palestinian refugee is deprived of the most basic civil and human rights and lives in deteriorating housing and health conditions inside overcrowded and neglected camps and areas.
The reduction of UNRWA services, the absence of Arab support, the incapacity of the factions, the weakness of unified national bodies, and other reasons have exacerbated the Palestinian crises—making the camps fertile ground for poverty, unemployment, misery—and even the drug trade. Instead of this visit being an opportunity to rally Palestinian efforts to confront these injustices, it comes to entrench guardianship over the camps, ignoring the suffering of their residents and their demands for dignity, civil rights, and social services—and, before and after all, their legitimate right to continue the struggle for liberation and return.
The popular mood in Lebanon’s camps does not welcome this visit. The camps, which have paid a high price in the blood of their children and their rights, suffer daily traumas and are fully aware that Mahmoud Abbas carries no comprehensive national project. Rather, he seeks to reproduce his threadbare, illegitimate claims to leadership through the Lebanese gateway—perhaps in preparation for the “post-Gaza” phase in an attempt to seize Palestinian representation in any coming settlement.
The past period, especially after October 7, 2023, has witnessed a noticeable rise in political, mass, and military activities in the diaspora. This indicates that Abbas’s team’s control over the Palestinian decision is no longer absolute and that a new generation is growing in the womb of exile, actively engaging with the Al-Aqsa Flood battle and the cause of their people, witnessing the daily Zionist crimes, and beginning to train itself in rejection and resistance.
Conclusion:
Mahmoud Abbas’s visit to Lebanon is not merely a protocol visit but a calculated step within a project to contain and politically tame the Palestinian diaspora. It falls within a strategy to revive a collapsed authority devoid of legitimacy through regional and international begging—not through a genuine national project of salvation and national unity.
It is the duty of Palestinian national forces and personalities in Lebanon and abroad, along with youth, student, and feminist movements in the diaspora, to raise their voices loudly, reject this visit, expose its objectives, and propose a national alternative that restores the final word to the people. Participating in the reception of the “Palestinian president” is legitimizing an authority that is annexed to the economy and security/intelligence apparatus of the Zionist enemy, rejects national solutions, and bargains over the rights of the Palestinian people.