Hamas victories, Gaza municipals

Another round of important Middle Eastern elections was held Thursday– the municipal elections in Gaza’s 25 cities, towns, and villages.
The Palestinian population of Gaza is about 1.3 million, with 80% of those people being refugees from inside Israel (or, the descendants of those original refugees from 1948, who also have refugee status and burning but still unaddressed claims against Israel basedon that. They did get to vote on Thursday.)
Hamas won 78 of the 118 seats being contested, according to this story in yesterday’s WaPo, which also spelled out that Hamas won control of seven of the ten “towns” (for which, read “towns or cities”) being contested.
The movement’s victories in Gaza follow the ones they registered in a few West Bank jurisdictions on December 23, as I posted about here.
That WaPo piece, by John Ward Anderson, is worth reading because it gives a broad but fairly well informed assessment of the meaning of the elections. The New York Times did not mention them until today, when their reporter Steven Erlanger did so in a very dismissive and classically “orientalist” way.
First of all, Erlanger only writes about the Strip having “towns and villages”, though Gaza City is very evidently a city. (Okay, Anderson did that, too.) But it’s a sort of typically orientalist/colonialist thing to do to down-grade the designators used for population centers. Many of what the Israelis call “villages” in the occupied territories or Lebanon have far greater populations than what the Israelis call “towns” inside Israel.
But instead of making his own independent assessment of the importance of the vote, or quoting one of the many very well informed Palestinian commentators on it, Erlanger’s first comment on the vote came from– you guessed it,

a senior Israeli military official [who] said the results were not especially important, given the influence of local clans that supported slates of candidates. The vote had more to do with local issues than national policy, the official said.

And then, Erlanger did nothing to challenge, balance, or even qualify that assessment, leaving it standing as the most authoritative “analysis” he provided. All he did was add a little “local color” in the form of a quote from a Palestinian “housewife”.
Lazy journalism, or bias? Most likely, a bit of both.
The idea that in any analogous conflict, one would present the “analysis” of “a senior military official” of one of the contending powers on the internal politics of the other power to be in any way objective or authorittative would be outrageous. (Oops, it happens all the time in US reporting on Iraq. But in all cases, it’s more significant for what it tells us about the way the quoted official is trying to “spin” the situation than for what is actually happening inside the community being commented on.)
Note the reference to “clans”, which is a way of downgrading and dismissing the importance of the Palestinians’ internal political processes that the Israelis have used non-stop since 1948…
Regardless of all that spin, the internal politics really are interesting. Hamas is emerging more and more as a smart and well organized political force.
I am really glad that I have my big article on Lebanon’s Hizbullah in the works at Boston Review, since one of the reasons I wrote it was to look at Hizbullah’s political strategy as a possible predictor for what either Hamas and the Shiite parties in Iraq might do.
At this point, Hizbullah’s record seems a much better predictor for Hamas than for the Shiite parties.
Alert readers may say, “Yes, Helena, but isn’t Hamas Sunni?” Yes, indeed it is. But the coordination between it and Hizbullah has been notably strong ever since, in December 1992, Yitzhak Rabin unwittingly sent about 400 cadres from Hamas to study at “Hizbullah University” in the bare hills of South Lebanon.
That has to be one of the great ironies of history. Rabin had recently been elected PM, and he was determined– five years into the first intifada– to “teach the Palestinian militants a lesson”. (Have we heard that before?) So what he did, in a midnight raid, was round up more than 400 Palestinian militants, including many Hamas cadres, from their homes and seek to deport them all summarily to Lebanon…

Well, the Israelis had been summarily deporting Palestinian community leaders to Lebanon– in small numbers– for as long as anyone could remember. This time, he would surely teach an even bigger lesson! Right?
Indeed not. The weather gods conspired against him. He couldn’t have his military people bundle all the detainees, as planned, onto helicopters as per normal operating practice and fly them to be dumped in the no-mans-land just north of the Israeli-held positions inside South Lebanon… He had to put them all into buses instead, which trundled northwards through the fog and blizzards…
Meanwhile, Avigdor Feldman, a really wonderful Israeli human-rights lawyer, had been alerted to the plan. He rushed to the Supreme Court in the middle of the night, and tried to get an order to stay the expulsions. I forget the exact legal outcome, but his action did slow the expulsion process sufficiently that the Palestinians and their friends around the world were able to start a huge diplomatic-political mobilization.
You have to understand that for Palestinians, any mass expulsions from the homeland revive terrible memories of the ethnic cleansings of 1948.
So Lebanon, where Hizbullah by then had some seats in parliament, categorically refused to take in the expellees. The United States and other western powers were forced to act to prtess Israel to reverse what is a crystal-clear breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention– that is, the expulsion of any indigenous residents from occupied territories. (The previous string of much smaller-scale expulsions had never gotten so much high-level diplomatic attention.)
The expellees were left stranded in the no-man’s-land, while the world powers tried to work out a resolution of the issue.
That was also the precise period in which Rabin and Peres were deciding to push forward with their “Oslo” discussions with Arafat and Abu Mazen. The expulsion attempt also seriously upset those negotiations.
The resolution that was eventually reached was that the Israelis would take the expellees back in stages, over a number of months.
Meanwhile, they stayed there in tents in the no-man’s-land… for months.
You have to remember that in Lebanon, it was not only the government that didn’t want 400 extra Palestinians offloaded into the country. A broad majority of Lebanese was still, at that point, very anti-Palestinian in their sentiment. Most precisely, most Lebanese deeply don’t want Palestinians to be resettled inside Lebanon.
The main people among the Lebanese who took a real interest in the welfare of the Palestinian expellees stuck out there on the hills were– Hizbullah. Soon, the whole encampment had reportedly been turned into a series of seminars and experience-sharing on all aspects of their parallel struggles.
Both parties had a lot of very valuable experience to share by that point: Hamas, which had come into existence right after the start of the first intifada in late 1987, and Hizbullah, which came into existence after Israel’s large-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
… And so, in the municipal elections held in Lebanon last May and June, Hizbullah made a strong showing, winning control over even more municipalities than they won back in 1998. They did so based on three things:

(1) their proven record of being able to provide services in an atmosphere remarkably free of the corruption that has generally plagued municipal administrations in Lebanon for decades;
(2) their ability to be a part of, understand, and “play” effectively in all the local political power games; and
(3) their party’s pursuit of a national political program that many, many of their constituents support.

Not surprising that, in Palestine right now, Hamas should be showing many of the same abilities.
Btw, if you missed the little preview I gave of my Hizbullah project here on December 22, 2004, you might want to check it out.