Most Palestinians have known only two leaders: Yasser Arafat, the stubble-chinned firebrand fond of chequered scarves and olive fatigues, and Mahmoud Abbas, a smooth-shaven father figure who favors Western suits and ties.
Arafat died in Paris in 2004, having led the Palestine Liberation Organization since 1969, and Abbas has been in the driving seat since, trying to forge a still-elusive peace deal with Israel.
Abbas, 79, shows no signs of ill health and continues to travel widely, visiting France this week before heading to New York for the UN General Assembly next week, the annual jamboree that provides Palestine with a global stage.
But he says he will not stand in future elections, so it is only a matter of time before he passes the baton to a new leader, one whom the vast majority of Palestinians - 4.4 million in the West Bank and Gaza and nearly 7 million elsewhere around the world - hope will lead to the foundation of an independent Palestinian state.
The problem is that Abbas has not named a successor and shows no inclination to do so, and no one has emerged as a natural heir. Even those closest to him are left guessing who is best placed to take on the leadership.
It is a strategy that may serve a short-term purpose, but it raises longer-term questions about democratic accountability, political vision and the sort of personality that will eventually take the helm in statehood negotiations with Israel, if and when they ever resume.
“He doesn’t have a protégé, he hasn’t facilitated a system in which people feel they can rise to the top,” said Grant Rumley, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.
What’s more, political analysts say, he has moved to sideline several potential rivals over the years, most recently Salam Fayyad, his former prime minister, who perhaps spoke too freely when he mentioned to a US newspaper in 2012 that he might try his hand at the presidency some day.
“It’s becoming an urgent matter,” Rumley said of the absence of a single leader-in-waiting.
Others are more blunt about what they see as the failure of the political class to plot a clear course.
“There’s really no strategy,” said Rami Khouri, a researcher at the American University of Beirut. “Abbas is acting like a typical Arab leader who is comfortable in his position and doesn’t quite know what to do about what may come next.”
Closer to home, one Palestinian diplomat who works in Ramallah, where Abbas is based, describes him as becoming “a bit like Samson in the temple, ready to bring the whole structure down” around him with little heed to the consequences.
Since Abbas formally took office as Palestinian Authority president in January 2005, the ground has shifted beneath him, complicating almost every political calculation he and his once-dominant party, Fatah, has had to make.
The Islamist movement Hamas, founded in Gaza in the 1980s, has risen to prominence, winning Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and shaking the foundations of Abbas’s power by opening people’s minds to an alternative to Fatah.
Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas served as prime minister under Abbas for a year before being dismissed in June 2007, when tensions between the two parties boiled over in Gaza, resulting in the Islamists seizing full control of the territory.