Mahmoud Abbas summary

Learn about the life of Mahmoud Abbas and his role in the Mideast peace talks

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Mahmoud Abbas, also called Abu Mazen, (born 1935, Zefat, Palestine [now in Israel]), Palestinian leader. Abbas earned a law degree from the University of Damascus and a doctorate in history from Moscow State University. In the late 1950s he was one of the founders of Fatah, which spearheaded the Palestinian armed struggle and dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the 1990s Abbas shaped Palestinian negotiating strategy in peace talks that led in 1993 to the Oslo Accords, in which Israel and the Palestinians extended to each other mutual recognition and which called for Israel to cede some authority over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. He briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2003 and was elected its president in 2005.

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President, in government, the officer in whom the chief executive power of a nation is vested. The president of a republic is the head of state, but the actual power of the president varies from country to country; in the United States, Africa, and Latin America the presidential office is charged

prime minister Summary

Prime minister, the head of government in a country with a parliamentary or semipresidential political system. In such systems, the prime minister—literally the “first,” or most important, minister—must be able to command a continuous majority in the legislature (usually the lower house in a

Fatah Summary

Fatah, political and military organization of Arab Palestinians, founded in the late 1950s by Yassir Arafat and Khalīl al-Wazīr (Abū Jihād) with the aim of wresting Palestine from Israeli control by waging low-intensity guerrilla warfare. In the late 1980s it began seeking a two-state solution

Palestine Liberation Organization Summary

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), umbrella political organization claiming to represent the world’s Palestinians—those Arabs, and their descendants, who lived in mandated Palestine before the creation there of the State of Israel in 1948. It was formed in 1964 to centralize the leadership of