Mahmoud Abbas: Could this man bring peace to the Middle East?

Tony Blair rarely gives a speech or press conference these days without referring to Mahmoud Abbas – though he prefers to use the new Palestinian Prime Minister's Arabic nickname, Abu Mazen. After a lifetime quietly working behind the scenes, the 67-year-old Mr Abbas is suddenly at centre stage. With Yasser Arafat's capitulation this week in their row over the make-up of the Palestinian cabinet, Mr Abbas is about to take up power.

It will be Mr Abbas who will have to fight the Palestinians' corner when negotiations begin in earnest over the road-map peace plan, which calls for an independent Palestinian state within three years, and which President George Bush has promised to release once Mr Abbas's cabinet is approved by the Palestinian parliament.

It will be to Mr Abbas that the Israelis and the US will look to fulfil the demand of the road-map that the Palestinian Authority stops the suicide bombings and other militant attacks – after all, in a speech carefully leaked to the press, Mr Abbas said recently that turning to violence had been a disastrous mistake for the Palestinians.

But that demand could thrust him into a dangerous confrontation with groups such as Hamas that have no intention of hanging up their guns. And it will be Mr Abbas whom the Palestinians, and probably the Israelis as well, will blame if this latest attempt at peace fails, as so many have before. For all the fanfare with which his appointment has been greeted by Israel, the US and Mr Blair, on the Palestinian street Mr Abbas is unpopular, and viewed with suspicion.

A few months ago, few outside Israel and the occupied territories had heard of Mr Abbas. But, in fact, he has been involved in the peace process from the start. Flick back through the photo album of failed initiatives to 1993, and there Mr Abbas is on the White House lawn with President Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, for the signing of the Oslo accords. Together with the Israeli peace negotiator Yossi Beilin, Mr Abbas drew up a plan to solve the vexed question of Jerusalem, which both Israel and the Palestinians want as a capital.

A few years ago, at a gathering with Palestinian journalists in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Mr Abbas dropped a bombshell. He was, he claimed, behind Issam Sartawi's dramatic speech to the Palestinian National Congress, in which Mr Sartawi became the first Palestinian politician ever to propose publicly that the Palestinians should recognise Israel, back in the 1970s when there was no peace process. Mr Abbas said he prompted Mr Sartawi, and that he was pushing Palestinian intellectuals to start a dialogue with the Israeli left.

According to journalists who were there at the time, Mr Abbas spoke with pride. But it was an episode that left a bad taste in some Palestinians' mouths: Mr Sartawi was killed for his speech by the Palestinian mercenary Abu Nidal. Mr Abbas at that time remained in the shadows, and safe.

To Israeli eyes, Mr Abbas's credentials are excellent. Not only is there his track record in the peace process, but there is also that carefully leaked attack on the use of violence in the current intifada. Israeli foreign ministry officials have been busy briefing journalists that not only is Mr Abbas a man they can do business with, but that they are under orders not to be too effusive about him, for fear that their support will alienate him on the Palestinian street.

The fact that Mr Abbas once wrote a book, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and the Zionist Movement, in which he claimed that the number of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust was not six million but fewer than one million, has been quietly brushed aside. References to the book have recently disappeared from an Israeli government website.

Mr Abbas's reported defence when asked about the book was telling. "When I wrote The Other Side, we were at war with Israel," he said. "Today I would not have made such remarks."

Mr Abbas's biggest problem may be that he has little support among Palestinians. An uncharismatic, greying figure who never turns up at political rallies or makes speeches in public, he is viewed with suspicion in the occupied territories. Many Palestinians are wary of Mr Abbas's good connections in Israel, and say they fear he is being set up as a dupe to sign up to a peace deal dictated by Israel and its ally, the US, in which they will get nothing.

"The new Palestinian cabinet is a security cabinet to oppress Palestinian people," said Abdel Sattar Qassem, professor of political science at al-Najah University, in Nablus.

But it remains to be seen whether Mr Abbas, who once said "Israel is a state created to defeat all the Arab world in one second", will turn out to be so compliant to Israeli wishes as Palestinians fear. Unlike Mr Arafat, who was born in Egypt, Mr Abbas was born into the crucible of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His birthplace, the hilltop town of Safed, is today a completely Israeli town, a quiet place favoured by artists. But in 1948 it was the site of a bloody battle for the control of British-mandate Palestine.

In 1935, when Mr Abbas was born, Safed had a majority Arab Palestinian population. There was a history of violence between the Arabs and the town's small Jewish community. In the confrontation in 1948, Jewish militia captured the town. Thousands of Palestinians fled the area under harassment from the Jewish militia. Those who didn't were forced to leave. Mr Abbas and his family ended up in Syria as refugees.

Despite his middle-class, intellectual image today, his early years in Syria appear to have been hard. At the age of 13 he left school and worked for two years to help to support the family. After that he went back to school, and went on to study law in Damascus and Cairo. His path back to the occupied territories lay through 13 years spent working at a ministry Qatar, during which time he was involved in setting up a political leadership-in-exile for the Palestinians. In 1965, he was one of the founders of Fatah, the Arafat-led faction that still dominates Palestinian society.

One of the consistent features of Mr Abbas's career has been his insistence that he will not give up on pursuing the "right to return" for refugees who were forced to flee from British-mandate Palestine in 1948 when Israel was founded – probably the Palestinian demand which the Israelis are least prepared to agree to, because of their fears an influx of Palestinians would tilt the demography of Israel against them.

Yossi Beilin, the Israeli peace negotiator who got to know Mr Abbas well over the years, has said of him: "Abu Mazen has remained a Palestinian secular nationalist. He says everywhere that he will not abandon his dream to return to Safed where he was born. He is trying to get recognition of what he considers a Palestinian right."

A test is looming for Mr Abbas here. For only recently, while world attention was fixed on Iraq, Ariel Sharon announced that the Palestinians would have to abandon the "right of return" as a precondition for Israel accepting the road-map.

It is not the only possible pitfall that awaits him. Mr Sharon's government has talked of wanting to make more than 100 changes to the road-map. And the Israelis are demanding that Mr Abbas stop the suicide bombs and other violence before they are prepared to put into practice any of what the road-map calls on Israel to do – including for the Israeli army to withdraw from Palestinian towns and cities it has reoccupied.

But Mr Abbas has consistently argued that stopping the violence is a tactic that will, in fact, favour the Palestinians. To go back to his leaked attack on the use of violence in the intifada, if you look at what he actually said, characteristically he was condemning the violence for tactical and not moral reasons. "Many people diverted the uprising from its natural path and embarked on a path we can't handle, with the use of weapons," he said. "What happened in these two years, as we see it now, is a destruction of everything we built."

Mr Abbas has told Fatah leaders that he believes Ariel Sharon would be out of power in three to six months if the Palestinians pursued a non-violent policy. He has said he does not believe Mr Sharon is sincere about making peace with the Palestinians, and that the best tactic is to expose this. "We should not allow [Mr Sharon] to take us to where he wants, which is military confrontation, but we should impose our agenda on him and take to the position that he dislikes, which is negotiation," he told Fatah leaders.

But Mr Abbas will have to deal not only with Mr Sharon, but also with Mr Sharon's old enemy, Mr Arafat. Already Mr Abbas almost resigned before even taking up his job as Prime Minister in the face of Mr Arafat's attempts to stop him from appointing the cabinet of his choice, particularly Mohammed Dahlan, the man Mr Abbas wanted as interior minister to lead the crackdown on the militants.

Mr Arafat backed down, it is rumoured, in the face of some nasty threats from Western diplomats, and agreed to a compromise with Mr Dahlan as junior minister at the Interior Ministry. But, Palestinian observers say, that is by no means the end of the power struggle between the two men. "Arafat can create trouble for Abu Mazen," said Professor Qassem from al-Najah University. "He can make the PLC [Palestinian parliament] pass a vote of no confidence against him. He can pressure Fatah to turn against him. Abu Mazen has no popularity in the street. He is not strong in the PLC. Arafat can stop his decisions, with a no-confidence vote."

On top of that, Mr Abbas's health is not good; he was recently treated abroad for prostate cancer. "The only way to win over Israel is to tell the world. It is enough. We have been slaughtered. We have been destroyed. This is a crime. We should stop. We want peace," he has said. But it remains to be seen if he will be able to put his ideas to the test.

LIFE STORY

Born: Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen is Arabic honorific because his eldest son was called Mazen). Born 1935 in Safed, in British-mandate Palestine.

Family: Married, three children; the eldest, Mazen, died of a heart attack last year aged 42.

Education: Left school at 13 to work to support his family; returned to school two years later; 1958 BA in law from Damascus University (though completed his studies in Cairo); 1982 PhD in history from Orientalism Institute in Moscow.

Political career: 1957-1970 director of human resources at the Ministry of Education in Qatar; 1950s involved in underground Palestinian politics; 1965 Fatah launched, Abbas was one of the founders; 1984-2000 president of PLO's international relations department; 1993 represented PLO at Oslo accords; 1994 president of PLO's negotiations department; 1996 secretary general of PLO's executive committee (number two after Yasser Arafat, with whom he is pictured, left); 2003 appointed Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.

He says: "We should ask ourselves, not by beating ourselves up, but by reviewing the mistakes we made, where we are headed."

They say: "The real question is if he will get the authority" – Silvan Shalom, Israeli foreign minister.