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News Analysis Palestinian elections: seeking less of the same
January 6th, 2005 --
Bobbing on the shoulders of Zakariya Zubaydi, Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the Palestinian Authority’s president-in-waiting, kicked off his election campaign amid a packed, sceptical, armed and dangerous Jenin Refugee Camp. The irony was as thick as the gunfire that greeted them. Abbas’ signal contribution to the Palestinian Intifada has been to denounce its militarization, not least in places like Jenin, where militias have long replaced the police as the embodiment of his “one authority, one weapon” injunction. Zubaydi’s has been to emerge as one of the most prominent leaders of Fatah’s West Bank Aqsa Martyrs Brigade militia, having survived four Israeli assassination attempts and the killing of his mother, brother and other comrades-in-arms in a score of more “successful” attempts. But times and men change. Zubaydi and his men have become a vital political cog for Abbas, as all wheel gingerly into the post-Arafat era. In return, the young fighters seek amnesty from the Israelis and (in the not so distant future) “a role in the next Palestinian leadership, where I will continue to fight for the Palestinians,” Zubaydi hopes. But they also represent one of the many constraints that will bind Abbas’ leadership. “Let us be clear,” Zubaydi said in Jenin. “I do not support the political path of Abu Mazen. I support him because I support the Fatah candidate. But if Abu Mazen starts to mess with our unalterable positions – on Jerusalem, the right of return, a Palestinian state, the release of prisoners — we will not recognize his leadership.” There seems little chance of that, at least on the campaign trail. In every public utterance Abbas has sworn fealty to the legacy of Yaser Arafat, the “eternal leader”, and the Palestinian political consensus he embodied. In other words: no peace without Israel’s full withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967, Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian refugees to “return home”. “Facilitating” the election Prodded by the recent challenge of his leader-in-waiting, Marwan Barghuthi (MEI 740), Abbas has also vowed to “protect” fighters like Zubaydi and sign no peace agreement unless accompanied by the release of the 8,000 Palestinian political prisoners, half of whom are Fatah activists. On these and other issues, such as reform and opposition to Israel’s settlement drive and the West Bank Wall, Abbas is at one with the six other presidential candidates. But there are differences. One is the unprecedented freedom of movement the Israeli occupation has granted Abbas, enabling him to move from Ramallah to Jenin to Gaza with barely a pause at a checkpoint. It stands in contrast to the treatment the army has meted out to the other contenders, chief among them the independent Mustafa Barghuthi, now running a distant but respectable second to Abbas in the opinion polls. Since campaigning began in December, Barghuthi has been arrested on three occasions (including in occupied East Jerusalem and Hebron), roughed up twice and (he alleges) had one of his campaign workers shot dead by army snipers in Gaza. Lesser but similar harassment has fallen on the Palestine People’s (formerly Communist) Party candidate, Bassam Salhi, and the Democratic Front’s Taysir Khaled, usually when they canvas in East Jerusalem. As for the two Gaza-based candidates — Abd al-Karim Shubir and Sayyed Baraka — these have yet to receive permission to take their campaign to the West Bank. The other challenger, Abd al-Halim al-Ashqar, is under house arrest in the US, allegedly for his ties to Islamist groups. “If these violations continue, it would be a joke to talk about democratic and fair elections,” railed Salhi at a press conference in Ramallah on 3 January. Abuses are also common among the Palestinian population. According to the Palestine Centre for Human Rights, up to 3% of the Gaza electorate may be denied their vote on 9 January because they were on the other side of Egyptian border on 12 December, when the army closed Gaza’s sole Palestinian civilian crossing point as punishment after a guerrilla ambush that left five Israeli soldiers dead (MEI 740). Nor will Palestinian prisoners be allowed to vote, despite the fact that there is no Israeli or Palestinian law which prevents them from doing so. The reason, according to Israel’s minister for public security, Gideon Ezra, is that Israel has already “done enough” for Palestinian democracy by allowing the Palestinian electorate in East Jerusalem, over 100,000-strong, the right to vote. In fact, Israel will allow 5,376 Palestinians to vote in five post offices in their occupied capital. The rest will have to travel outside the municipal borders to polling stations in the West Bank, amid fears that they may be penalized by the Israeli authorities should they have the temerity to do so. Unsurprisingly, Palestinian voter registration in East Jerusalem remains “low and slow”, a PA election official told MEI. Abbas’ immunity derives not only from his stature as the preferred Israeli, American, European and Arab choice as president of the Palestinian Authority, but also from his message. Addressing a rally in Gaza’s Jabaliya Refugee Camp on 2 January, Abbas decried the firing of home-made mortars by Palestinians as a “useless” weapon against the occupation that earned only “very grave Israeli escalation”. He was speaking during a surge in violence in Gaza during which mortars have been fired on settlements within the Strip and at Israeli towns beyond it, causing a handful of Israeli injuries. In ruthless and excessive punishment, the Israeli military has killed 24 Palestinians since Christmas, including seven unarmed youths (three of them brothers) aged between 10-17 as they worked in their fields in northern Gaza on 4 January. For Abbas, the disproportionate carnage was proof of his judgment, though even he felt compelled to pay homage to “the souls of the martyrs who fell today to the shells of the Zionist enemy”. For Hamas and the other Palestinian militias behind the mortar fire, the judgment was proof of the poverty of his “negotiations alone” strategy. “The Palestinian leadership reflects an astonishing contradiction: at a time when it admits negotiations are conducted on the basis of an imbalance of power and American bias, it insists on taking away from the Palestinians their only means of self-defence,” said Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar. It was “the resistance that forced Likud to declare its escape from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank”, he added. Opinion polls showed Palestinians evenly split on the debate, with 49% in support of Abbas’ farewell to arms plea and 49% against. Democratic nationalism It was not the only challenge Hamas has thrown down to the next president. On 23 December Palestinians held their first wave of municipal elections in 28 years. Some 878 individual candidates contested 306 seats on 26 West Bank local councils, the first in a series of three staggered votes that should see new elected councils in another 100 or so localities in the West Bank and Gaza some time during the course of this year. On the surface, the suffrage was apolitical, with candidates running on individual rather than party lists and on local rather than national issues. Beneath the surface it was intensely political, with Hamas supporters going head-to-head with Fatah “for the first time in a public contest in which tens of thousands participated”, noted Palestinian analyst Khalil Shiqaqi. It was also political in the sense that, for the first time in eight years, Palestinians had the opportunity to influence and change those who have some governance over their lives. They responded in droves, registering an 81% turn-out of all those eligible to vote. The scale of participation was a measure of just how hungry Palestinians are for democracy after four years of direct martial rule and unaccountable armed revolt. It also expressed the enormous resentment felt at Arafat’s preference for appointing councils based on loyalty rather than having them elected on the basis of service. All sides took something from the contest. The “main winners” were the large Palestinian families, tribes and clans, said Shiqaqi, demonstrating their enduring power in what remains a socially conservative society, particularly at the local level. Based mostly on these allegiances, list affiliated with Fatah won control of 12 councils while Hamas lists won nine. Fatah was helped by the newfound unity of purpose and a cautious public optimism born of Arafat’s death and Abbas’ smooth accession, the presidential elections and the reprieve from war these and renewed negotiations might bring. It also championed women candidates, who won 51 seats either singly or as part of a list, some 32 more than the quota allocated them. Hamas, on the other hand, drew reward from years of grassroots service provision and the sound reputation of many of its candidates. But the true victory was that polling took place with barely a skirmish or single serious violation, other than Israel’s arrest of some ten Hamas candidates in the Hebron district. It also drew the main factions closer to a new politics based on alliances and coalition-building rather than dogma and rejection. “The coming stage is one of development and rebuilding our society, and we will cooperate with everyone to strengthen our society,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zubri. Fatah leaders expressed similar sentiments. Should that new democratic nationalism emerge from the parliamentary elections scheduled for later this year — and should Hamas contest them as vigorously as it did the local ones — then Palestinians may at last emerge from the sterile debates aired between Abbas and Zahar. Instead, they could become participants in national, collectively agreed and democratically decided policies to which all leaders, factions and militias will be party and must be bound. |
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