I see that my friend Marc Lynch— and perhaps some other people– have gotten a little excited over the new statement by PA/Fateh/PLO head Mahmoud Abbas that he is “ready” to have elections and even to hand over executive and legislative power to Hamas, if it should win.
I think this is a bad way forward.
For anyone who wants to be able to pull a “two state solution” out of the present demographic morass in the West Bank, the top priority now is not the holding of elections to the body whose proper full name– as Mustafa Barghouthi consistently reminds us– is the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PISGA). It is, rather, the speedy and effective conclusion of a final-status peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
The PISGA, commonly called the “PA”, has been in existence for 15 years now. Its lifespan was originally only meant to be five years.
The 15 years since Yasser Araft and his PLO cronies returned to the West Bank and Gaza, and the 16 years since the conclusion of the Oslo Accord that allowed them to do so, have all seen the pouring of considerable additional concrete into Israel’s settlement-building project in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
That cement continues to be poured. And it will continue to be poured so long as the Palestinians can be fooled into thinking that the petty politics of who controls this interim self-governing authority has any lasting importance.
We Americans have seen in Iraq, in 2004-2005, how an occupying power can use the promise of an imminent “election” to postpone dealing with much more important and far-reaching demands of those who call for liberation from foreign rule.
We have also seen in Iraq how the the occupying power can use “the election gambit” to foment and deepen divisions within the ranks of the occupied people.
Elections are necessarily divisive. The last thing the Palestinian people need right now is for further divisions to be sowed among them.
Yes, there should be a Palestinian vote at some point, hopefully soon. But that vote should be, first and foremost, the referendum over whether to accept or reject the final peace agreement that the Palestinian leadership has negotiated with Israel.
That is the only vote that counts. If the negotiations are speedily concluded it could be held sometime before the end of 2010.
That is certainly what we should all be aiming for– rather than wasting time with planning for and holding yet another round of elections for the interim authority.
Votes for the “legislative” or the “executive” branch of the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority are, after all, only ever as meaningful as Israel allows.
Which, as we saw with the result of the January 2006 vote, was not at all.
So why go through that whole charade again? For what? For that fragile, largely impotent, and always Israel-dependent body called the PISGA/PA?
So if the priority is to conclude the negotiations over the final peace agreement, then who can do that?
Hamas has already said they’re happy for Mahmoud Abbas to go ahead and do the negotiating– provided the final result is submitted to a nation-wide referendum, whose results they say they are quite prepared to abide by.
Personally, I don’t think Abbas has the energy, the spine, or the imagination to conclude the final peace negotiation on his own. He needs a negotiating team that is considerably stronger and more results-focused than the coterie of second-rate (and largely discredited) figures who have done the negotiations with him over the past 16 years. As I suggested here, he could bring in a new team of well-regarded independents who could do the job with and for him.
People who are as well-regarded in the general Palestinian street as Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafei was back at the time of Madrid. I am not going to name names (though gosh, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi’s name does keep popping into my mind…. Along with a couple of others.)
Get the peace deal! That has to be the priority.
Then, hold the vote on the results. Not the other way round…. We’ve all seen, too tragically, where that other path has led over the past 15 years.
8 thoughts on “Palestinian elections? Not the first priority”
Comments are closed.
There was an election. Hamas won. Deal with it.
Deal with them!
Helena,
What makes you think that a “Final-status peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians” would be final? or would actually produce any sense of peace? Haven’t you come to the conclusion yet that the positions of the Palestinian PEOPLE and the Israeli PEOPLE are irreconcilable. Everyone else realizes that now. Maybe you are too much of an obama fan to see the writing on the wall.
I know you are sympathetic to the one-state solution, so i am not saying this in opposition to you, but the TWO-STATE SOLUTION IS DEAD. It is dead, over, done. it cant happen. and even if it could (which is impossible), it would not be a solution.
OSLO was the two-state solution. we have been there, done that. it’s over. time to move on.
Sorry, Helena. I agree that the two state solution is dead. New elections are needed to bring in a new Palestinian team that realizes that the struggle is now a civil rights struggle within all of de-facto Israel. The only two state solution that is now possible is an attempt to legalize apartheid. Abbas and his cronies may be willing to accept that in order to keep their personal perks, but I do not believe that Palestinians will. Neither solution will bring complete peace for a long time; Israeli actions over the last 40 years have insured that (and Palestinian reaction too). The civil rights struggle is now the only feasible way forward. And not just for the 50% of Palestinians in de-facto Israel, but for all Palestinians.
“OSLO was the two-state solution.”
Not really. Oslo was a mechanism that gave the Israelis time to create enough facts on the ground to obviate a two-state solution.
“OSLO was the two-state solution.”
My point was more subtle than you seem to have understood. I realize that Oslo was intended as a mechanism. But it ended up being an institutionalization of the occupation, and a formalizing israeli outsourcing of the occupation to the “Fatah”, funded by the Europeans.
Moral of the story, what happened to Oslo is what will happen to any “two-state solution”. We have seen it before, it is done, no one should be so stupid to accept this any longer.
The leaders of the Palestinian Authority do not want the international community to hear anything about massive abuse of human rights and intimidation of journalists that its security forces are practicing almost on a daily basis in the West Bank.
They do not want the world to see that, with the help of the Americans and some Europeans, they are building more prisons and security forces than hospitals and housing projects for the needy.
They want the US and the rest of the world to continue believing that peace will prevail tomorrow morning only if Israel stops construction in the settlements and removes a number of empty caravans from remote and isolated hilltops in the West Bank.
The Palestinians do not need a dictatorship that harasses and terrorizes journalists, and that is responsible for the death of detainees in its prisons. In the Arab world we already have enough dictatorships.
The Palestinians do not need additional security forces, militias and armed gangs. In fact, there are too many of them, both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
American and European taxpayers’ money should be invested in building hospitals, schools and housing projects. Investing billions of dollars in training thousands of policemen and establishing new security forces and prisons will not advance the cause of peace and coexistence.
There is no doubt that many Palestinians would love to abandon the culture of uniform and weapons in favor of improved infrastructure and medical care.
As for the international media, it’s time to abandon the policy of double standards in covering the Israeli-Arab conflict. For many years, the mainstream media in the US and Europe turned a blind eye to stories about financial corruption under Yasser Arafat. The result was that Arafat and his cronies got away with stealing billions of dollars that had been donated to the Palestinians by the Americans and Europeans.
Back then, many foreign journalists said they believed that the stories about financial corruption in the Palestinian areas were “Zionist propaganda.” Other journalists said they would rather file an anti-Israel story because this way they would become more popular with their editors and publishers.
Recently, a Palestinian TV crew was stopped at a checkpoint in the West Bank, where soldiers confiscated a tape and erased its content.
This incident, hardly received any coverage in the mainstream media in the US and Europe.
The reason? The perpetrators were not IDF soldiers, but Palestinian Authority security officers. And the checkpoint did not belong to the IDF; it was, in fact, a Palestinian checkpoint.
The story of the detention of the TV crew — which, by the way, belonged to Al-Jazeera and the erasure of the footage did not make it to the mainstream media even after Reporters Without Borders, an organization that defends journalists worldwide, issued a statement strongly condemning the assault on the freedom of the media.
“Journalists must be able to work freely,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The erasure of this video footage proves that the Palestinian security forces try to cover up their human rights violations. This incident should be the subject of an enquiry by the Palestinian Authority.”
Walid Omari, the head of the Qatar-based satellite TV station’s operations in the West Bank, told Reporters Without Borders that his crew was preparing a report on the death of a detainee at the Palestinian Authority detention center in Hebron that might have been the result of torture.
“We were the only ones to investigate this case and we did it despite strong pressure from the Palestinian Authority,” Omari said.
Al Jazeera’s Hebron correspondent went with a cameraman to the victim’s home in the village of Dura, where they interviewed the family and filmed the body.
As they were returning to Hebron in a vehicle displaying the word “Press,” they were detained by Palestinian Authority security forces at a checkpoint and taken to a police station, where the video footage they had just recorded was erased. They were allowed to go after an hour.
One can only imagine the international media’s reaction had the TV crew been detained by Israeli security forces. Anti-Israel groups and individuals would have cited the incident as further proof of the “occupation’s brutal measures” against the freedom of the media.
Moreover, it is highly likely that Israeli human rights organizations like Betselem would have dispatched researchers to the field to investigate the incident had IDF soldiers been involved.
Yet foreign journalists and human rights activists working in Israel and the Palestinian territories either chose to ignore the story or never heard about it simply because it was lacking in an anti-Israel angle.
One can also imagine how the media and human rights organizations would have reacted had a Palestinian died in Israeli prison after allegedly being tortured.
Haitham Amr, a male nurse, was detained by the Palestinian Authority’s US-backed and trained General Intelligence Force on suspicion of being affiliated with Hamas. He was one of more than 700 Palestinians who are being held without trial in West Bank prisons that are run by security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
These security forces, which are being referred to by many Palestinians as the Dayton Forces [a reference to ret. US general and security coordinator Keith Dayton], claimed that Amr was killed after he jumped from the second floor of a building where he was being held in Hebron. The family and human rights organizations insist that Amr died as a result of severe torture.
If the Palestinian Authority really had nothing to fear, why did it send its police officers to detain the TV crew and confiscate the tape? Is the Palestinian Authority trying to hide something?
True, Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayad hold more moderate views than Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal.
But Abbas and Fayad do not enjoy enough credibility among their own people, largely due to their open ties with Israel and the West. The security and financial support that the Americans and Europeans are giving to the Palestinian Authority is nothing but a bear hug.
That is perhaps why they chose to ignore the story about the male nurse whose family says was tortured to death by security officers who receive their salaries from US and European taxpayers’ money.
i’m also of the opinion, like several of the above commenters (and increasing numbers of palestinian and solidarity organizers and activists) that the two-state model has been dead for years – precisely as shirin says, as a result of the oslo process. so i’m still rather confused at why helena continues to present it as a reasonable or desirable aim.
but i think i do agree with helena that P.I.S-G[sic].A. elections don’t make much sense. what makes even less sense, however, is the current PISGA as the source of any negotiating team, as helena seems to propose. the current PISGA is dubiously legitimate, deeply ethically compromised, actively collaborating in the maintenance of the Occupation, and most importantly is the representative of only a minority of palestinians (those from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem). the only way that negotiations can have any chance of succeeding is for them to involve all portions of the palestinian people: those living under Occupation; those living in refugee camps (including those also under Occupation); those in the diaspora; and those living as fourth-class citizens of israel.
if you’re looking for a meaningful negotiating team – one that can have a snowball’s chance in the negev of coming up with something that can win a referendum in which the refugee majority of palestinians get to vote – it’s got to come from a larger source than the PISGA. whether that means new elections for the PLO, or something entirely new, i don’t presume to know. but to rely on the current PISGA for anything useful is to live in the same fantasyland as the folks who claim that Gaza is no longer occupied.
These comments indicate that Helena supports a two state solution, which means Israel would remain intact in some borders. Most progressives acknowledge that the existence of a Jewish state means the acquiescence of Jewish theft of Palestine. Helena, can you please clarify your position? Hopefully, it is ALL of Palestine to the Palestinians and Jews to be resettled elsewhere