Palestinian municipal elections

AP’s Ali Daraghmeh is reporting that Hamas did pretty well in the small-scale municipal elections held in the occupied Palestinian territories yesterday. Indeed, Hamas did better than I’d expected in those elections, which were held in just 26 of the OPT’s more than 600 local jurisdictions.
Those elections were an important “test” of the good faith– in the run-up to the January 9 OPT-wide “presidential” race– of all the parties concerned: not only Fateh and Hamas, but also, crucially, the Israelis. Indeed, can the Palestinians or anyone else have trust in the January 9 vote if it is held while Israel still holds unchallenged control over all major aspects of the security situation within the OPTs?
The jury is still definitely out on that, given Israel’s arrests of numerous candidates in the municipals and the steps it’s already taken to obstruct free campaigning in the presidential race.
Daraghmeh writes that, according to early results he’d seen, Hamas won nine of yesterday’s 26 contests, and Fateh 14, with two of the races won by a joint Hamas-Fateh list and one– Ya’bed– still unreported. (He notes that in some cases interpreting the results requires a lot of local knowledge.)
For their part, Hamas claimed to have won 17 of the contests, so evidently both the major parties were claiming victory in some places.
Why was I surprised?

I admit haven’t been following the story as closely as it deserved. But the 26 widely scattered communities, where just 150,000 registered voters live, are all in the West Bank, where Fateh and the other more secular parties are much stronger relative to the Islamic parties than in Gaza. (This foretells some interesting times for Gaza in the event of an Israeli withdrawal from there.)

[Also, in a later AP wire story, the respected Palestinian analyst Dr. Ali Jerbawi, a former head of the Palestinian Election Commission, was quoted as saying: “This is an outstanding result for Hamas… The 26 localities were selected from the beginning (as) strongholds of Fatah. So the results should have been more for Fatah than Hamas.”]

On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. We already learned yesterday that turnout was unexpectedly high in the polls. A high turnout probably meant a strong mobilization from the pro-Hamas voters.
Khalid Amayreh had a good, detailed report on Al-Jazeera (and Electronic Intifada) yesterday, writing about how the election campaign had proceeded in the small town of Dahiriya, near Hebron. He noted that for many years, the Israeli occupation authorities had simply handpicked the town’s mayor. Back in 1976, the Israelis experimented with holding a municipal election there (as elsewhere in the West Bank). But when pro-PLO people won, they froze that whole approach and reverted to a system of appointments. They also summarily deported a number of the mayors elected on that occasion. (“Israel, the great democracy!”)
Then, after the PLO/PA got some limited governance rights after the 1993 Oslo Accord, they simply continued the Israeli practice of appointing municipal leaders… Amayreh writes that they did this,

mainly because the Palestinian leadership, along with Israel and the US, feared that supporters of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, would win if truly democratic elections were held.

So altogether, holding elections for the municipalities is a good step toward democratization of life for the Palestinians. But the PA evidently decided to do it v-e-r-y—s-l-o-w-l-y indeed.
Amayreh also reports:

Earlier this month, the Israeli army arrested four Islamist candidates in Dahiriya, apparently in order to undermine their list’s chances of winning.
However, Rakad Abu Allan, an Islamist candidate, predicts that the midnight arrest would boomerang and make more people vote for the bloc. “I think many people are viewing the arrests as a certificate of good conduct for us. I am sure more people will give us their votes on the election day,” he said.

Israel, arresting candidates in a democratic Palestinian election? What kind of behavior is that? Where’s the outrage in the US? (Silly question, Helena.)
Actually, y’all should go read the whole of Amayreh’s piece. It does not bode well for all those pinning their hopes on Abu Mazen being an ultra-submissive peace negotiator. He writes:

During Aljazeera.net’s tour [that is, his own] of three Palestinian towns in the Hebron region where elections will take place on Thursday, it saw little infatuation with Abu Mazin. There was not a single portrait of him anywhere.
Fatah leaders sought to dodge this observation, arguing that Abbas [Abu Mazen] was not yet a leader but that when and if he was elected, his picture would be everywhere. However, the unspoken words of many Fatah activists indicated that support for Abbas is lukewarm at best. One young man apparently could not keep his feelings suppressed.
He called Abu Mazin America’s candidate, adding that he would not vote for him on 9 January. The fact that the activist was not rebuked by the Fatah multitude is telling.
A middle-aged Fatah activist sought to explain what seemed to be a widespread ambivalence toward Abu Mazin, especially among the movement’s grassroots supporters and its younger generations. “Look, many people here are worried that Abu Mazin might deviate from our national constants.
“But I assure you that any Palestinian leader, even if elected, who chooses to compromise on these paramount issues will not live to regret his folly.”

I just note, since it’s time I got back to writing about Hizbullah, that the political strategy being followed by Hamas in Palestine bears many parallels with that that Hizbullah has pursued with great success in Lebanon over the past 14 years. Hizbullah has not so far sought national-level leadership– including, it has never been part of the really corrupt horse-trading process by which Lebanese ministerial posts are filled. But it has meanwhile steadily built up its political base by competing in parliamentary and municipal-level elections.
In parliament, it has striven to hold the national government to some degree of popular account. (A tough job!) And at the municipal level it has been quite happy to take over actual governance, striving to persuade additional voters through its performance there that it will one day be quite qualified to run an efficient and politically accountable administration at the national level.
In Palestine, Hamas is not fielding its own candidate in the “presidential” race on January 9. But it– like Marwan Barghouthi and many of the other younger activists in Fateh– layes great stress on the speedy holding of demonstrably fair elections for the Palestinians’ (rump) parliament and the remaining 600 municipalities.
… Well, not long now till January 9. The Israelis have promised that they will “stay out of the Palestinian towns for 72 hours” during and around the time of that election. This is meant to sound like a sign of their “generosity”, “good faith”, and “support for democratic practice”?
But why only 72 hours? Why on earth not make it open-ended? And– in order to have the Palestinians actually enjoying freedom of association and freedom of movement for a meaningful period of time in the lead-up to the elections– why not have it start now, as well as be open-ended?
After all, if it is not “fatal” to the security of Israelis to have the IDF stay out of the Palestinian towns for those designated 72 hours, why should it be “fatal” if the stay-out is for longer than 72 hours???
Unless, of course, the reason the IDF is in so many Palestinian towns in the first place has little to do with security inside Israel, but is much more about maintaining a punishing level of pressure on the Palestinians, as per Moshe Ya’alon’s infamous remarks of August 2002.