[Peace-discuss] Election in Palestine

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The best thing I've seen on yesterday's election.  The NPR coverage
seemed particularly bad, as described below. --CGE]

	Yet another historic day
	Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 9 January 2005

Once again, the media and the international peace process industry have
declared that it is an "historic day" for the Palestinian people. The
occasion this time is the election of Mahmoud Abbas as head of the
Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories. Yet most of these
Palestinian people, for whom this day has been declared historic, do not
live in the occupied territories; the majority of Palestinians live in
diaspora or as refugees outside their homeland, a direct result of the
ethnic cleansing which created Israel in 1947-48, and of the occupation of
the remainder of Palestine in 1967.

For Palestinians in the diaspora, such historic days feel like everyone is
having a party that is supposed to be in your honor, except that no one
invited you, or perhaps it is like watching a television movie of your
life that bears little resemblance to reality. The feeling I have now is
exactly what I felt on that other big historic day, September 13, 1993,
when the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington by a beaming Yasir Arafat
and the recalcitrant Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, under the
beatific gaze of President Bill Clinton. I feel a mixture of exasperation,
hopelessness and determination.

For days now, I have done hours of talk radio about the elections, trying
to explain as best as I can why replacing Yasser Arafat with Mahmoud Abbas
will not lead to peace, why Palestinians aren't ecstatic, how the Israeli
occupation makes democracy impossible. But for the most part, the script
has been written and Palestinians are only called upon to read their
lines. So the TV and newspapers are full of happy Palestinian voters who
debate only whether Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) or Mustafa Barghouti is
right for them. Herds of international observers are on hand to certify
that a few irregularities notwithstanding, this was a model election of
which Palestinians can be proud.

U.S. Senator John Sununu, who was part of the US observer delegation read
from the official script: "It's a democratic election in the Arab world,
and that in itself is somewhat historic," the New York Times quoted him as
saying. Sununu added that the Palestinian leadership will now have "a new
level of credibility to talk to the Israelis and impose reform and
reorganization of the security forces, so there's a reason to be
optimistic."

The reports I heard directly from associates on the ground only add to the
disconnect between what Palestinians are experiencing and how the story is
being told. EI's Arjan El-Fassed, an accredited election monitor posted in
Gaza reported shortly before polls were scheduled to close that in the
Shaaf area of Gaza City, a little more than 1,000 of 20,000 registered
voters had voted -- a turnout of about seven percent. Chaos had broken
out, he said, after Palestinian election officials had changed the rules
at the last minute to allow voters to vote at any polling station in a
desperate bid to raise the turnout and perhaps to open the possibility of
a person casting multiple votes. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
immediately announced it was appealing what it called an illegal decision.

EI's Maureen Murphy, monitoring the elections in the Hebron area with the
Al-Haq human rights organization reported that many people who turned out
to vote did so despite feeling resigned to the fact that whoever wins will
have no power to improve their lives or change the reality Israel has
imposed on them.

In the ghost-written screenplay that the Palestinians are being forced to
act out, the election is "good news." This means that any information that
interferes with this agreed narrative -- that we are at the cusp of a new
era of peace, democracy and reform -- has to be carefully filtered out.

As I sift through the deluge of election news, I find I am still unable to
stop thinking about the murder by the Israeli army of seven Palestinian
children in Gaza, literally blown to pieces by a tank shell on 4 January.
This was barely reported in the US media. National Public Radio,
supposedly the paragon of in-depth and nuanced reporting, actually covered
up the story, reporting only that Mahmoud Abbas had called Israel the
"Zionist Enemy" without mentioning the killing of the children at all,
even though Abbas had made his statement in direct response to the
atrocity.

A few days earlier, I had emailed a New York Times reporter to ask why in
a lengthy article about the election campaign, the news that the Israeli
army had killed nine Palestinians in a single day, including two children
and a man living with Down's Syndrome, had been mentioned only in the
final paragraph. I pointed out that whenever the victims are Israelis, his
newspaper gives their deaths great prominence, and asked whether we should
therefore understand that Palestinian lives are viewed as less valuable.
The reporter wrote back: "Your point is very well taken ... the problem is
more with the nature of daily stories than with differential humanity, but
I will bear your good letter in mind. No life is worth less than any
other." At first I felt satisfied by this answer, but the more I thought
about it, the angrier I became.

Actually differential humanity is precisely the issue. The entire "peace
process" and the discourse about Palestine today is structured around the
absolutely inverted claim that Israelis are the principal victims of
violence and Palestinians the principal perpetrators and aggressors.

So it would appear that in the mind of this reporter, and many others, the
daily killing of Palestinians is not newsworthy because it is routine.
Whereas in any period where the killing of Israelis was routine, it was
that very fact which made the story newsworthy. It is the claim that the
killing of Israelis is routine or threatens to become routine which is
used to justify and provide context for all of Israel's actions, from
assasinations to the mass demolition of homes in Gaza's Jabaliya and Rafah
refugee camps to the construction of the apartheid wall inside the
occupied West Bank.

In order to maintain this fiction, other crucial facts must be routinely
screened from public view. While the peace process scriptwriters insist
that Mahmoud Abbas can bring peace where Arafat failed, the Israelis at
least know better.

The day before the election, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper published a
lengthy report by Aluf Benn headlined "Quietly carrying on building,"
about how Israel's settler colonies are growing apace across the West
Bank. Israel is drawing up construction plans in over 120 settlements
across the occupied West Bank with the full approval and knowledge of
incoming US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Benn says. According to an
Israeli government source quoted in the article, "If the U.S. recognizes
your claim that the [settlement] blocs will remain yours forever, why
should it make a fuss when you build on your own property?" Ha'aretz added
that according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that meticulously documents
settlement activity, "the main building effort in the Jewish settlements
in the West Bank is now focused on the area between the Green Line [1967
border] and the separation fence [apartheid wall], and it is aimed at
turning the fence into Israel's permanent border."

So in the long-running Palestine soap opera, Abbas, the understudy who has
been hired to replace the deceased lead actor Arafat, is being offered the
choice of two roles by the Israeli-American scriptwriters. He can play the
obedient native administrator of a defeated people who gets to wear a suit
and call himself president of a fictional state, or he can don Arafat's
kaffiyeh and assume the role of the Palestinians' unreformed "terrorist"
leader. If he chooses the former role, he may get the political equivalent
of an Oscar -- the Nobel Peace Prize.

But like in all soap operas, repetiveness and increasingly absurd plot
twists eventually wear out even the most faithful audience. And when this
episode is over, the Palestinian people will still be there, steadfastly,
patiently, determined to regain their usurped rights and see justice done,
come what may.


Ali Abunimah is a founder of The Electronic Intifada.

<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3499.shtml>