Abd Rabbo, Yasir (Muhammad Abu Bashir; 1944–)

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ABD RABBO, YASIR (Muhammad Abu Bashir; 1944–)

Palestinian political figure. Yasir Abd Rabbo was born in 1944 at Hebron. After the War of 1967, he went to Cairo, where he pursued literary studies. As president of the General Union of Palestinian Students in Egypt, he was part of the team guiding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), along with George Habash and Nayif Hawatma. On 21 February 1969, following the congress of Amman, along with Hawatma, he quit the PFLP to found the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP), which was transformed later into the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). As head of the cultural department of this movement and its assistant secretary general, in February 1973 he accompanied Yasir Arafat to Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In 1974 he was elected to the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in charge of the department of information.

In 1988 Abd Rabbo participated in the dialogue between the PLO and the U.S. State Department, during which, according to the Americans, he showed himself to be an "open and constructive" interlocutor. In October 1989 he was in Cairo to attempt, by the intermediary of Egyptian authorities, to open a channel of negotiations with the Israelis. In 1990, favoring the policies of rapprochement with Israel recommended by Yasir Arafat, he found himself at loggerheads with Nayif Hawatma, who opposed this approach. In September 1991, with his two assistants, Salih Raʾfat and Muhammad al-Labadi, he quit the DFLP to found his own movement, the Palestinian Democratic Union (PDU), which supported the peace process started at the Madrid Conference in 1991. In May 1994 he became minister of information and culture in the newly formed Palestinian Authority (PA), presided over by Arafat.

In addition to his ministerial duties, Abd Rabbo remained one of the principal figures of the Palestinian delegations that were negotiating with Israel. In October 1998 he participated in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that were taking place at Wye Plantation in the United States. In November 1999 he served as head of the delegation responsible for negotiations on the final status of the Palestinian autonomous territories. In March 2000 he met with the U.S. mediator, Dennis Ross, and the head of the Israeli delegation, Oded Eran, in Washington, but in May of that year resigned from the negotiating team when he learned that Arafat had authorized secret Palestinian-Israeli negotiations in Sweden without informing him. When Arafat reorganized the Palestinian Authority administration in 2002, Abd Rabbo refused an invitation to join, but he did accept the position of cabinet affairs minister in the government of Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas in April 2003.

In 2001 Abd Rabbo was a signatory, along with Hanan Ashrawi, Yossi Beilin, Amos Oz, and a number of other prominent Palestinians and Israelis, to the Cairo Declaration of 2001, which called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and an end to bloodshed. He was the chief Palestinian participant in the unofficial Palestinian-Israeli talks that produced the Geneva Peace Initiative, proposed in 2003 to replace the Oslo Accords as the basis for Palestinian-Israeli peace.