Palestinians Clear the Election Hurdle With Room to Spare

By Richard H. Curtiss

"I tell people: 'It's up to you. If you elect a rubber-stamp council, that's what you'll get. We get what we deserve.'"—Successful Palestinian Council candidate Hanan Ashrawi, quoted in New York Times, Jan. 19, 1996.

"This is a new era. This is the foundation of our Palestinian state."—Successful presidential candidate Yasser Arafat, Jan. 21, 1996.

As the Palestinians race the calendar to national sovereignty, the barriers in their path are getting higher. But on Jan. 20 they soared over the highest hurdle to date, conducting honest elections to choose a president and an 88-member Palestinian Council, with room to spare.

Those erecting the obstacles were not just Israel's Likud and other right wing-parties and Jewish religious fanatics and rampaging settlers. Within the West Bank and Gaza, leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the right and Marxist parties on the left boycotted the elections. Outside Palestine, from the battered refugee camps of Lebanon to university campuses in Western Europe and the United States, members of the huge Palestinian diaspora saw the elections as another step away from their chances of returning to the homes and orchards lost 48 years ago inside Israel's Green Line.

Even many of the actions of the Israeli military and governmental apparatus supposedly under the control of Prime Minister Shimon Peres' Labor Party seemed aimed at weakening the Palestinian showing. Under the Oslo II agreement signed at the White House by the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shortly before his assassination by a Jewish-nationalist extremist, the Israelis were to withdraw totally from the six largest West Bank towns and partially from some 400 villages by the end of the year. They did, but five of the towns were not evacuated until December and the withdrawal from Ramallah was not until Dec. 30.

By mutual agreement, Israeli withdrawal from Hebron, where some 400 Jewish settlers have seized buildings in the center of the city from which they carry out daily provocations against Hebron's 100,000 Palestinian inhabitants, was postponed until March, when a separate road for use by Jewish settlers and Israeli troops housed just outside the city will be completed.

Following the 1995 withdrawals, the Palestinians had to promulgate election rules, set up voting places, designate poll officials, register candidates and provide a period for them to campaign, all before the Jan. 20 elections. They did, even in just-liberated Ramallah, by reducing the campaign period from a planned three weeks to two.

For their part, the Israelis were to release 1,200 more Palestinian political prisoners from Israeli jails in time to participate in the campaign. They didn't, freeing only 812 on Jan. 10, most of them from the Islamic and leftist groups opposed to the elections, and another 220 the following day, most of them from Yasser Arafat's Fatah. There was no Israeli explanation for the shortfall. Palestinians say 5,500 Palestinians remain in Israeli prisons. The Israelis say the number is 4,000.

The most disruptive event, however, was the Jan. 5 assassination by a remote-controlled bomb triggered by Israel's Shin Bet internal security service of Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas extremist charged by Israeli officials with master-minding suicide bombings over a long period which killed up to 80 Israeli soldiers and civilians. The assassination took place in Gaza while Hamas and Islamic Jihad were observing, by agreement with Arafat, a moratorium on "armed struggle" against Israel. Ayyash's funeral set off the largest protests since Yasser Arafat's Palestinian National Authority took control of the area more than two years earlier.

This was followed by the Jan. 10 killing of two Israeli military personnel in their vehicle and the Jan. 16 fatal shooting by Israeli soldiers of three Palestinians in another vehicle in Israeli-occupied portions of the West Bank. Whether these were retaliatory killings, attempts to disrupt the impending elections, or both was not clear. Although there were temporary closures by Israeli authorities of the areas where the killings took place, election preparations continued on schedule.

Disruptive Preparations

So did preparations to disrupt them. Israelis from nearby settlements were granted permission by their rabbis to violate Jewish sabbath restrictions to assemble in Hebron and participate in mass "educational" tours to disrupt the Palestinian voting throughout the city. Because individual voters had to be escorted by Israeli soldiers to the polling places, participation was lower than in liberated West Bank towns, but it was not halted.

Similarly, in East Jerusalem thousands of Jewish nationalists planned to jam the six post offices designated as Palestinian polling places. Their instructions were to line up at the entrances on the pretext of buying stamps and mailing letters to block access to the Palestinian voters. Massed Israeli troops prevented most of the Jewish nationalists from crossing into East Jerusalem, however.

Palestinian voters in East Jerusalem had other problems of Israeli government making. Only post offices could be used as polling places and the ballot boxes were designed to look like letter boxes, with the slots on the side rather than on the top, so that the Israeli government could claim that the votes were not really being cast in Jerusalem but were being mailed for counting in the West Bank. To get to the six designated post offices, potential voters had to get through the massed Israeli troops, who videotaped them as they tried to pass.

The charade was designed by Israeli authorities to keep the voter turnout as low as possible. This, in turn, would be offered during final-status negotiations as evidence that Palestinians in East Jerusalem wanted to be part of Israel rather than of any Palestinian entity.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had arrived with a delegation of people from the Carter Center in Atlanta to be among 600 blue-vested international observers, including 300 from the European Union and some from the United States. Carter complained vigorously about the Israeli obstructions in East Jerusalem. "I don't think there is any doubt they are doing everything they can to intimidate the voter," he said. "I have no doubt that the aim is to reduce the size of the vote in East Jerusalem." As a result of his and other complaints, Israeli authorities gave permission to extend the closing time at the polls from 7 to 10 p.m. In East Jerusalem as in Hebron, however, voter turnout was far lower than elsewhere because of the harassment.

Prior to the elections, journalists had said that because of the boycotts planned by Islamist and leftist opponents of the elections, a turnout of 65 percent or more would represent a major victory for Yasser Arafat. In fact the turnout was above 85 percent in Gaza, where the Palestinians have had much longer to organize a civil administration, contributing to an overall participation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem of 70 percent of the 1,013,235 registered voters. This is far higher participation than in the United States or Western Europe, except in places where voter participation is mandatory.

What Palestinian voters accomplished was the election of Yasser Arafat, with 88.1 percent of the vote, as "president of the interim self-government" over his only competitor, Samiha Khalil, a 72-year-old grandmother and social activist who opposed the Oslo agreement. She received 9.3 percent of the vote, and 2.6 percent of the ballots cast were blank.

Voters also chose 88 members of the Palestinian Council from 672 candidates who had qualified for the campaign by filing nominating petitions containing 500 signatures and paying a $1,000 registration fee. The seats were allocated by population so that voters in Hebron, the largest West Bank city, had 10 seats to fill, while voters from smaller towns such as Jericho, Safit and Tubas had one seat each. Of the 88 seats, 6 were reserved for Christian candidates and 1 for a Samaritan candidate, representing the tiny 400-member sect centered near Nablus and dating back to biblical times.

The seats for religious minorities were allocated by location so that both Muslims and Christians in East Jerusalem, for example, voted for candidates to fill 7 seats, of which two were reserved for Christians. The winners of those two seats were Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, former spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks who now is a human rights activist who frequently is critical of actions by Arafat's Palestinian National Authority, and prominent attorney Jonathan Kuttab.

Predictably, there was much criticism of the manner in which Arafat and his interim cabinet prepared for the elections. Because of initial administrative delays, he shortened the actual campaign period from three weeks to two. Also, Palestinian television gave little initial coverage to Mrs. Khalil's candidacy, although this was rectified toward the end of the campaign. More controversial were Arafat's decisions concerning the 70 candidates who would run on the lists of his Fatah party in the various districts. He had been expected to choose the candidates who received the most votes in preliminary voting. Instead, in many cases he ignored the results of those polls and choose candidates he favored over those who had garnered the most votes.

Arafat's selections reflected the tensions between the candidates from "inside" and "outside" the former occupied territories.

The "insiders" feel they earned their places on the ticket by the hardships they endured under Israeli occupation and their services during the Palestinian intifada. The "outsiders" feel they earned Arafat's loyalty by danger and hardships endured in the guerrilla war against Israel and in civil wars in Jordan and Lebanon as they followed him between his selection as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968 and his return to Palestine from Tunis in 1994.

There was nothing to prevent candidates from running as independents, however, and nothing to prevent those Fatah supporters Arafat did not approve for the Fatah list from running as independents also. Many did. Among independent candidates was Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi, a physician who for a time headed the Palestinian delegation at U.S.-brokered peace talks He was elected from Gaza. Another independent was Salah Al Ta'amari, a long-time Palestinian guerrilla fighter who was captured by the Israelis in Lebanon in 1982. After his release in a 1983 prisoner exchange, he lived for several years in the Washington, DC area. Now married to King Hussein of Jordan's divorced first wife, Princess Dina, he was elected from Bethlehem.

Among Arafat loyalists elected were Ahmad Qurei (Abu Alaa), who negotiated the Oslo agreement; Nabil Shaath, who along with Ahmad Qurei is a senior negotiator with Israel; and Intissar al-Wazir, widow of former PLO military commander Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), who was killed by an Israeli assassination team in Tunis. Imad Falouji, a Hamas activist who defied his party's boycott of the elections to run as an independent, was not elected.

The size of the Palestine Council was a bone of contention between Yasser Arafat and the Israeli government. The latter sought to keep it small so that it would function more as an executive body than a national parliament. Arafat defied the Israelis and at the last moment added five more seats to the 83 planned, putting them into districts where his support is strongest.

The Council will have the authority to ratify legislation and submit a national budget. Like a parliament, it can bring down Arafat's cabinet, which will include both members and non-members of the Council. The speaker of the Council would assume authority in case of the death or incapacity of President Arafat. Arafat supporters are believed to constitute about 75 percent of the members of the Council, which presumably will have to ratify final implementation agreements reached during Oslo accord third-stage negotiations with the Israelis.

Members of the newly elected Palestinian Council will play the key role in jumping the next hurdle on the road to independence. Under the Oslo accords Arafat is committed within 60 days after completion of the elections to rescinding passages in the Palestinian National Covenant calling for abolishing the state of Israel. Although Arafat personally has declared such passages "null and void," the Peres government insists that the Covenant be formally amended by the Palestinian National Council before the third-stage negotiations, presently scheduled for May, can begin.

Until now it has been clear that Arafat could not muster a majority for this action within the Palestinian National Council, which is made up largely of diaspora Palestinians opposed to the Oslo agreement. It includes such implacable foes of any settlement as George Habash, Damascus-based leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Israeli government has said it will permit all PNC members to enter Palestine for such a vote. Although Habash has refused, another prominent foe of the peace agreement, Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has said he is prepared not only to enter the West Bank to participate in the vote, but also to move there permanently from Damascus.

All 88 newly elected Palestinian Council members now will be added to the Palestinian National Council, which until now has functioned as a Palestinian parliament in exile. There is no doubt that, with this addition, Arafat will focus as intently on revising the Palestinian National Covenant as he did on the elections.

While he is doing this, the Peres government has decisions of its own to make over whether to give up its campaign for a quick agreement with Syria and instead hold Israeli primary party elections in the next few weeks to clear the way for Israeli national elections in May or June rather than in the last week of October as presently scheduled.

Then, either in May or after a delay occasioned by early Israeli elections, final-stage negotiations are scheduled to begin between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The issues are water sharing (deferred from the second stage because the parties could not agree), final borders, Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlers, Jerusalem, and sovereignty for Palestine. Without international pressure on both parties, not just the Palestinians, none of these will be solved. However, as the popularly elected Palestinian president, subject to a popularly elected Palestinian parliament, President Yasser Arafat's hand is immeasurably strengthened as he approaches the highest hurdles of all.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.