[continued from previous message]

“doesn’t like.” And before we departed his office, he said in Hebrew
that he had a proposal: “Forget about that stuff. It’s negative
propaganda against me.” Sheikh declined to answer specific follow-up questions about the incident. In an email, his chief of staff called all
of Foreign Policy’s questions “void” and said Sheikh “doesn’t have the
time to respond to such void claims.”

***

In public, the Israeli government and the PA spar constantly over
politics. But officials on both sides maintain what one diplomat called
a “Catholic marriage” to stave off the collapse of the status quo, which both prefer for the time being.

But as the Palestinian public’s frustration mounted in the spring of
2022 amid deadly clashes between militants and Israeli security forces,
Abbas privately threatened to freeze “security coordination,” an
unpopular policy that sees Palestinian and Israeli authorities share intelligence to crack down on Palestinian militants. If implemented, the
threat could have led to snowballing violence.

US and Israeli officials turned to Sheikh to persuade the president to
back down. Sheikh’s close ties with Abbas, combined with his willingness
to compromise, have long made him the go-to person for diplomats. “When things are getting really tense,” he is the point of contact for calming
the situation, said a US official, who called him an Abbas “whisperer.”

Sheikh held quiet talks with top State Department official Barbara Leaf,
who informed him that Israel had pledged to halt home demolitions until Biden’s visit last July, according to the senior Biden administration official. Sheikh leveraged the proposal to talk Abbas out of going
through with the move. His Israeli counterparts also stay in constant
contact, calling him a reliable partner on improving Palestinian
cellular networks, which require Israeli approval; carrying Israeli
leaders’ messages to Abbas; and more. Samer Sinijlawi, a Fatah activist,
said Israeli officials were ringing Sheikh incessantly during a trip
through the Jordanian desert a decade and a half ago. “The amount of
calls between him and the Israeli military liaison was not normal,” he
said. “Best friends don’t talk to each other like that.”

“He gives you the impression: ‘I hold the keys. If I close a deal with
you on an electrical substation in Jenin or something related to
security coordination, count on it happening,’” said Michael Milshtein,
a retired Israeli intelligence officer who met with Sheikh.

But for many Palestinians, Sheikh plays on terms that Israel prefers — incremental concessions that improve daily life but don’t bring the Palestinians closer to independence. “He’s pragmatic, but he lacks pragmatism that achieves results,” Sinijlawi said.

In late 2022, Sheikh agreed to a move that would leave many Palestinians reeling — paying rent to Israel for West Bank land Palestinians consider occupied. The idea was to establish a Palestinian customs facility in
the West Bank town of Tarqumiya, which would grant the Palestinians a
modicum of greater sovereignty, by leasing the land from Israel. “I was flabbergasted — we are talking about occupied land through and through,” said an official in Sheikh’s office who requested anonymity to avoid retribution. “I thought if this deal materializes, it would set an
extremely dangerous precedent.”

(Sheikh said he consented to leasing the tracts under a 99-year
agreement, calling that part of the proposal “unproblematic.” But he
said the deal fell through because Israel refused to allow tobacco and
alcohol, whose imports bring considerable revenues into the PA’s
coffers, to be processed at the center.)

Palestinians who criticize the decisions of senior officials like Sheikh
have faced threats and intimidation. In November 2020, Sheikh announced
that the government was officially resuming coordination with Israel,
including the widely loathed strategy of working with Israel to clamp
down on militants. Aseel Suleiman, a radio host on Raya FM — a
Ramallah-based station — delivered a monologue against Sheikh, who had
just taken to the airwaves to call the decision to resume coordinating
with Israel “a great victory for our Palestinian people.”

“May God make this evening hell for he who sold out, betrayed and coordinated, and then declared that to be a victory,” Suleiman said, her voice choked with rage. “What gullibility is this?”

In response, Sheikh called the station’s owner and furiously demanded
that he “fix the situation,” a Palestinian official familiar with the incident said. He also insisted the news outlet post an article backing
the restored ties, the official said. The outlet complied and published
an editorial defending the decision. Sheikh denies knowledge of the
incident.

***


US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman meets with Hussein al-Sheikh
at the US. State Department in Washington on Oct. 4, 2022. (State
Department / FREDDIE EVERETT)
Sheikh’s American admirers understand that he has a domestic image
problem. Last October, US officials invited Sheikh — rather than the Palestinian prime minister — to visit Washington to meet with US
officials, including National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. “He wanted
to come, obviously, to bolster his own credibility inside the PA, and
our desire was to let him come and give him some street cred,” the administration official said.

As long as US policy aims to maintain the hope of a two-state solution
in the face of years of deadlock, Washington will need people like
Sheikh. “He’s trying to keep this whole crumbling tower standing,” the administration official said. “He understands our limits and the
Israelis’ limits.”

But it’s fair to wonder how well he still understands Palestinian
limits. Whoever assumes the reins of power from the octogenarian
president, one certainty is they will lead a deeply problematic PA.
Former senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi said the next president
will inherit a situation in which Israel “continues to kill people,
demolish homes, expand settlements, and annex land” while dealing with
the legacy of a government that has used its limited power “to oppress
and commit injustices against its own people.”

Mahzouz Shalaldeh, a 39-year-old teacher from a hillside village near
Hebron in the southern West Bank, said his 10th grade students’ hopes
for a better future recede yearly, feeling squeezed between “the hammer
of the occupation and the anvil of the Authority.” “The occupation is suffocating us, and the Authority is practicing every type of corruption
there is,” he said. “The gates of hope have been slammed shut for us.”

Sheikh concedes that many Palestinians no longer believe that his
government will liberate them from Israel’s occupation. It’s less clear whether he believes that should lead him to change course. “The people
lost hope, of course,” he added. “But me, as an official and leader, I can’t.”

—

Adam Rasgon is a member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker. Aaron Boxerman is a reporter for the New York Times in London.

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