Mahmoud Abbas summary

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, 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, political and military organization of Arab Palestinians, founded in the late 1950s by Yassir Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) 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 (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