For more than a decade one name keeps surfacing as a possible future Palestinian leader that could be acceptable not only to the Arab world but also to the US and Israel – Mohammed Yusuf Shakir Dahlan.

Dahlan’s career to date is best described as checkered. There have been ups and downs in his relations with the Palestinian world and also with the West and Israel. Because his standing with both has varied from friend to foe and back again, he has, curiously enough, acquired a sort of across-the-board status and a certain credence.

His credibility as a player on the contemporary Israel-Palestine scene is boosted by the fact that he is a native Gazan, born in 1961 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp. As a teenager Dahlan helped set up the Fatah Youth Movement, known as the Fatah Hawks. In his twenties he was arrested more than once by the Israeli authorities for political activism, but never for terrorist activities. He put his time in Israeli prisons to good use by learning Hebrew, which he speaks fluently.

In the early 1990s Dahlan was reliably reported to have helped in the negotiations leading to the Oslo Accords. The first Accord, signed in 1993, was violently opposed by Hamas, which severed relations with Yasser Arafat as a result. Arafat chose Dahlan to head the Preventive Security Force in Gaza​, while Israel and the US​ supported and closely cooperated with ​him in his new role​ – particularly in countering Hamas. Building up a force of 20,000 men, he became so powerful that the Strip was nicknamed “Dahlanistan”. Now, a quarter of a century later, is the wheel coming full circle, and could Dahlan find himself once again........

© Eurasia Review