Hard to Take Palestinian Election Plan Seriously

Jonathan S.Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
13 February '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/02/13/hard-to-take-palestinian-election-plan-seriously/

Hard on the heels of the fall of Egypt’s Mubarak, another Arab authoritarian is trying to pretend to be a democratic leader. The Palestinian Authority announced on Saturday that it planned to hold presidential and parliamentary elections by September. That sounds nice, but those expecting a flowering of Palestinian democracy shouldn’t hold their collective breath.

After all, it is the Palestinians who have proved as much as anyone that there is more to democracy than holding an election. Palestinian Authority elections in the past never meant much since the candidates — and the results — were controlled by the ruling Fatah Party. But when Hamas, a terrorist group that is just as anti-democratic and even more violent than Fatah, contested the 2006 parliamentary ballot, the result was a Hamas victory. For the next year, the two sides co-existed uneasily until Hamas seized control of Gaza in a bloody coup. The reaction of Hamas to the PA’s announcement yesterday was a declaration that such a vote was illegitimate, since the PA government has been holding onto power for years after Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential term expired. They’re right about that, but the PA’s rule in the West Bank is no more illegitimate than that of Hamas in Gaza.

It is anybody’s guess as to which of these two groups of terrorists is more popular in the West Bank, but the idea that any race that pitted them against each other would be in any way democratic is a joke.

But whatever the outcome of such a vote (assuming one ever happens), a push for more voting is not what is needed if the long-term goal is the creation of a democratic and peaceful Palestinian Arab government. As hard as it will be to create space for genuine democrats in Egypt between the military on the one side and the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood on the other, there is even less room for a Facebook/Twitter revolution among the Palestinians. Palestinian political culture remains stuck in an endless loop of anti-Israel hate and lust for terrorist violence. The only players that offer something really different, such as the economic development plans put forward by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, are, like Fayyad, popular in the West but have no real following of their own. It is only the people with the guns who count in Palestinian politics.

Both the United States and Israel ought to encourage and, where possible, support the creation of democratic institutions in Palestinian society so as to lay the groundwork for a theoretical sea change in which peace could become possible. But yet another Palestinian election contested by terrorist gunmen and their fronts won’t bring them any closer to democracy.


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