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Washington Report, April 2006, pages 72-73 Waging Peace Palestinian Elections Aftermath
THE Palestine Center in Washington, DC, was the site of a Feb. 6 panel briefing entitled “The 2006 Palestinian Elections: What Next?” Panelists included Dalal Hasan, a member of the election monitoring team at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; Edward Abington, a political consultant to the Palestinian Authority and a former U.S. diplomat; and Dr. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Hasan began by discussing her observations of the elections. Describing them as “free and peaceful,” she said they were conducted in a “competitive environment.” She was impressed, she added, with the “level of transparency and order under which the elections were conducted.” Hasan suggested two reasons for Hamas’ victory. “Hamas was much better organized than Fatah in terms of mobilizing…and educating their voters,” she noted. Secondly, she said, “there was also a significant portion of people who did vote for Hamas who were not part of the political party itself, who voted in protest to what they saw as a failure of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and PLO leadership.” Turning to the international media’s portrayal of the Hamas victory, Hasan pointed to “one particular perception that has been carried in the media, namely that…there was an ideological mandate for basically rejecting the two state solution, rejecting the renunciation of violence, and calling for the destruction of Israel. This was absolutely not the mandate the Palestinians gave to Hamas,” she emphasized. This mistaken perception, however, “could really hurt the positive outcome of [U.S., the international community, and Palestinian] interaction,” she warned. Abington compared these recent elections to the two previous ones, including those in 1996, which he also witnessed. “The level of enthusiasm in this election was higher than the previous two—much higher,” he said. “The degree of organization, particularly by Hamas, was noticeably higher.” In Abington’s opinion, Hamas’ victory was due mainly to the fact that Fatah “increasingly was seen as unable to defend fundamental Palestinian interests,” including “creating a Palestinian state, stopping Israeli settlement expansion and colonialism on the West Bank. “When you look at Hamas’ victory,” he added, “you have to understand the failure of the peace process and Israeli occupation that has deepened…for many Palestinians, their lives are much worse off today than they were 10 years ago.” The three conditions Washington has placed on Hamas in order for negotiations to resume—recognizing Israel, renouncing violence, and disarming—most likely would stall the peace process, Abington argued. “The dilemma that the international community has set up in putting forth these conditions is that these are precisely the same conditions Fatah had to accept to form the PA and to run the PA. If Fatah failed under these conditions,” he pointed out, “what incentive is there for Hamas to accept these conditions?” Abington concluded by criticizing the Bush administration’s current policy in dealing with the Palestinians. Calling it a “conceptual failure,” he described it as one in which “they emphasize democracy in elections thinking that can solve everything. It is an approach that has basically ignored 39 years of very repressive Israeli occupation.” Telhami characterized the elections as a “democratic revolution” because, he said, “you have not only a government being replaced by another government, but an overthrow of a regime, you might say.” A major question that needed to be figured out, he continued, was whether “Hamas is a nationalist party, and just another nationalist party, or if it is a religious party?” The argument could be made that it was “more nationalist than religious,” he said, because “it was set up as a resistance party.” Noting that “they have not linked themselves to broader Islamic groups,” Telhami added that al-Qaeda considered Hamas to be nationalists because they “never sent fighters to Chechnya and Afghanistan.” Nevertheless, Telhami was quick to point out that “Hamas has an Islamist agenda,” noting Hamas must decide whether to “become more nationalistic and therefore stick with its religious agenda as a mobilization agenda but not as a program” or whether to expand the religious agenda. “The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians becomes much more difficult to tackle if religion is…the primary issue,” he stated. “If it is the primary issue then it becomes a real problem to find compromise.” Telhami’s solution for some of the problems facing Hamas following its election victory includes creating a layer of separation. Hamas could leave all peace issues and all dealing with the international community to the Palestinian Authority and the president, he suggested, and instead focus on domestic issues. “They could have a government in which the foreign policy isn’t in their hands—they just have a veto power,” he explained. Regarding the international community, Telhami said that the U.S. reaction toward Hamas will affect the rest of the world. “I’ve always believed that the issue of Palestine is the prism through which Arabs look at the world, especially at the U.S., and I still believe that,” he said. “If the U.S. were to impose sanctions on a democratically elected Palestinian government, I think it would have far-reaching consequences across the Arab and Muslim countries,” he warned. —Banafsheh Saifollahi |
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