There is a recording making its way around Arab intelligence services this month. In it, Mahmoud Abbas, the 89-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority, serving twenty years into a four-year term, expresses quiet satisfaction that Saudi Arabia was struck by Iranian regime missiles during the war. He says, in the coded language Palestinian politicians use when they think nobody is listening, that the Saudis had it coming.
He did not know he was being recorded.
He knows now.
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When Israel and the United States opened the war on the regime in Iran this spring, the Palestinian factions discovered something they had spent decades insulating themselves from. They were irrelevant to their own war. The biggest Middle East war in a generation was unfolding, and nobody in any serious capital was asking Ramallah or Gaza what they thought.
The Palestinian commentator Ahmad al- Attawna put words to it on Arab television:
"The Palestinian people clearly have no leadership, and I'm not speaking metaphorically; even in reality, there is no true leadership capable of presenting the Palestinian people with a vision or a sense of where they are headed."
That is a Palestinian, in Arabic, to an Arab audience, saying the thing Palestinian intellectuals have been whispering in private from Amman to Ramallah for years.
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On paper, Mahmoud Abbas should have welcomed this war. The regime in Iran is the patron of his worst enemies; the force that expelled his government from Gaza in the 2007 coup and has been agitating against his rule in the West Bank ever since. The humbling of Tehran should have been the best month
Abbas had in twenty years.
Instead, he spent it nursing a grievance.
Saudi Arabia has spent the last several years reducing its financial support to the Palestinian Authority, the slow drawdown Gulf royals use to send a message. Abbas has never forgiven them.
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So when Iranian missiles started landing in Riyadh, Abbas, if the recording is authentic, which every official I have spoken to about it believes it is, expressed joy in what he thought were private conversations. Open pleasure that the Saudis were getting what he felt they had coming.
The Saudis found out, as the Saudis always do.
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What this month exposed is a truth the Palestinian national movement has spent fifty years concealing from the world and from itself.
It does not have principles. It has patrons. Hamas's loyalty to Iran lasted exactly as long as Iran was the strongest player in the room. Abbas's commitment to Arab solidarity lasted exactly as long as the Saudis were signing the checks.
Call this what it is. A franchise operation. Loyalty runs in one direction only: downward from the top, and evaporates the moment the royalty payments stop.
I have spent years being told, in every Western capital where I am invited to speak, that the Palestinian cause is the conscience of the Arab world. This month, the Arab world watched Hamas refuse to lift a finger for the regime that armed it for twenty years, and watched the president of the Palestinian Authority laugh at the destruction of the country that has paid his civil servants’ salaries for most of his presidency.
Therein lies the conscience of the Arab world.
Iran will punish Hamas quietly, the way Tehran punishes proxies who disappoint it: a late transfer, a missed shipment, a Quds Force contact who stops returning calls. The Saudis will decide what to do with Abbas, and my guess is that Mohammed bin Salman is already running the arithmetic on whether it is easier to replace the old man than to reform him. Saudi-Israeli normalization is back on the table, and MBS is not the kind of ruler who lets a man with a recording problem sit across the table of the deal that reshapes the region.
The Palestinian people, the actual people, the ones nobody in Ramallah or Doha or Tehran has consulted in decades, will be handed whatever arrangement the leaders decide to hand them.
That is the consequence of a leadership that spent a war performing for three audiences at once, and forgot the oldest rule of politics in the Arab world:
Someone in the room is always recording.
If this gave you a sharper picture of what just happened in the Arab world, forward it to one person who is still operating on 2023 assumptions.
He thought nobody was listening. The Saudis heard everything. And the Palestinian Authority will never recover.
While Canada is not joining France in recognizing a Palestinian state, it is funding the Palestinian Authority's preparations to lead a glob
While Canada is not joining France in recognizing a Palestinian state, it is funding the Palestinian Authority's preparations to lead a globally recognized country that includes Gaza and the West Bank.
Ottawa is also adding $30 million to its humanitarian funding for desperate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
"The Palestinian question is at the heart of any hope for long-term stability in the Middle East," Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand told a major United Nations conference on Monday in New York.
