[Peace-discuss] Abunimah on Palestinian Elections

[David Green]

Opinion/Editorial
Hamas Election Victory: A Vote for Clarity
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 26 January 2006

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Hamas' victory in the Palestinian Authority
legislative elections has everyone asking "what next"?
The answer, and whether the result should be seen as a
good or bad thing, depends very much on who is asking
the question.

Although a Hamas success was heavily trailed, the
scale of the victory has been widely termed a "shock."
Several factors explain the dramatic rise of Hamas,
including disillusionment and disgust with the
corruption, cynicism and lack of strategy of the Fatah
faction which has dominated the Palestinian movement
for decades and had arrogantly come to view itself as
the natural and indisputable leader.

The election result is not entirely surprising,
however, and has been foreshadowed by recent events.
Take for example the city of Qalqilya in the north of
the West Bank. Hemmed in by Israeli settlements and
now completely surrounded by a concrete wall, the
city's fifty thousand residents are prisoners in a
Israeli-controlled giant ghetto. For years Qalqilya's
city council was controlled by Fatah but after the
completion of the wall, voters in last years'
municipal elections awarded every single city council
seat to Hamas. The Qalqilya effect has now spread
across the occcupied territories, with Hamas
reportedly winning virtually all of the seats elected
on a geographic basis. Thus Hamas' success is as much
an expression of the determination of Palestinians to
resist Israel's efforts to force their surrender as it
is a rejection of Fatah. It reduces the conflict to
its most fundamental elements: there is occupation,
and there is resistance.

For Palestinians under occupation, it is not yet clear
what Hamas' win will mean. It is now common to speak
of a Palestinian "government" being formed out of the
election results, as though Palestine were already a
sovereign and independent state. But if the first duty
of a government is to protect its people's lives,
liberty and property, then the Palestinian Authority
has never deserved to be called a government. Since
its inception, it has not been able to protect
Palestinians from lethal daily attacks by the Israeli
army in the heart of their towns and refugee camps, or
to prevent a single dunum of land being seized for
settlements, nor to save a single sapling of the more
than one million trees uprooted by Israel in the past
ten years. Rather, in Israel's conception the
Palestinian Authority was supposed to crush
Palestinian resistance to make the occupied
territories safe for continued Israeli colonization.
Hamas will certainly not allow that to continue, but
whether it will be able to tranform the Authority into
an arm of the struggle against Israel is by no means
certain. Hamas, which has observed a unilateral truce
with Israel for a year, has signalled that it wants to
continue this if Israel "reciprocates." The movement
clearly believes it can make such an offer from a
position of strength and it is to its tactical
advantage to leave uncertainty about when and how it
might resume full-scale armed resistance.

Elements of the Palestinian Authority security
services run by Fatah figures may be unwilling to put
themselves under the control of a Hamas-led authority,
which could lead to the collapse of what is left of
the Authority's structure, or even its break-up into
personal militias. Israel and the United States which
refuses to accept the outcome of the election may see
an interest in encouraging such an internal conflict.
Israel is likely to use Hamas' win as a further
pretext to tighten repression and accelerate its
unilateral imposition of walls and settlements on the
West Bank designed to annex the maximum number of land
with the minimum number of Palestinians. Such
developments increase the risks of a dramatic
escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

As for the majority of Palestinians, who live as
refugees and exiles in the diaspora, they have been
progressively excluded and marginalized from efforts
to solve the conflict. Whereas the US and its allies,
with UN assistance, went to extraordinary lengths to
allow Iraqi "out of country voters" to participate in
that country's elections, the same powers have shown
no interest in giving Palestinian refugees a voice.
Fatah, which many Palestinian refugees suspect would
sell out their rights in a peace deal with Israel,
obviously had no incentive to demand such
participation. It remains to be seen if Hamas, born in
Gaza where ninety percent of the population are
refugees, will be able to articulate an agenda that
speaks to the concerns of the diaspora.

For the "international community" -- principally the
'Quartet' made up of the United States, the European
Union, Russia and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the
election result is a major embarassment. They, and the
coterie of well-funded NGOs and think tanks that
generate so much of their intellectual guff have built
their approach on the notion that Palestinian "reform"
rather than an end to the Israeli occupation, is the
way to resolve the conflict. While nominally
committing themselves to a two-state solution, these
powers dragged the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority
into an endless game where Palestinians have to jump
through hoops to prove their worthiness of basic
rights, while at the same time no pressure has been
applied to Israel to end the confiscation of land and
expansion of settlements. This peace process industry
chose to hail Israel's tactical withdrawal of eight
thousand settlers from Gaza last summer, while
ignoring the far larger number of settlers Israel has
continued to plant all over the West Bank effectively
rendering a two-state solution unachievable.

The principal purpose of this game is not to bring
about a just and lasting peace but merely to inoculate
the players from the charge that they are doing
nothing to resolve a conflict that remains an enduring
focus of regional and worldwide concern. A true peace
effort would require confronting Israel and holding it
accountable, something none of the Quartet members
have the political will to do. There is no doubt that
Fatah was entirely complicit in the game, to which it
had become both a prisoner and an indispensable
partner. Why else would the United States have
desperately tried to shore Fatah up by spending
millions of dollars on projects in recent months
designed to buy votes, and why else would the EU have
threatened to cut off aid if Palestinians voted for
Hamas? Most Palestinians could see clearly that after
years of negotiations and billions of dollars of
foreign aid that they are poorer and less free than
ever before as more of their land has been seized. It
is no wonder that this kind of bribery and blackmail
had no power over them and probably had the opposite
effect, increasing Hamas support.

Hamas' victory pulls the rug from under the project of
trying to deflect the blame for the conflict from
Israeli colonization to Palestinian internal
pathologies. The peace process industry will not give
up easily, however, and will now urge Hamas to act
"responsibly" and to "moderate" its positions -- which
means in effect to abandoning all forms of resistance
and assuming the docile and complicit role hitherto
played by Fatah. 

The instant US demand that Hamas "recognize Israel" is
like rewinding the clock twenty-five years to when
this same demand was the pretext to ignore and exclude
the PLO from peace negotiations. But as Hamas has
observed, all the PLO's submission to these demands
did not lead to any loosening of Israel's grip or any
lessening of US support for Israel. Hamas is unlikely
to do as the US demands, and even if it did, it would
probably only give rise to new resistance groups
responding to the worsening conditions on the ground
generated by the occupation.

Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of The Electronic
Intifada


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