Helena – Page 222 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Iran, Israel, Palestine

So the Iranian authorities have said they will help the incoming Palestinian ‘government’ to meet the budget shortfall created by Israel’s decision not to hand over the customs revenues that they’ve been collecting on the Palestinians’ behalf (less a 3.5% ‘collection fee’) for several years now.
Why should anyone be surprised that the Hamas leadership, having already learned of the intention of the US and the EU to cut off governmental aid, would be looking for alternative sources of funding?
Of course, the very best thing of all would be if the dead hand of the Israeli occupation could be lifted from the lives of the Palestinians and they could get back to running their own economy free of the movement controls and the many other Israeli-imposed regulations that today stifle all their attempts to do so. But I guess that ain’t about to happen?
I was at a seminar today where Maher Masri, a recent Palestinian Economy Minister, and Alon Liel, the former director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry, were discussing some of these economic issues. Liel appeared to be generally quite level-headed. But he seemed to lose his rationality completely as soon as there was mention of Iran… In one breath he moved from referring to the possibility of Iranian economic aid reaching the Palestinians to the idea that there would be “Iranian tanks and bullets on our border.”
How’s that again? Money=money. Tanks= well, something very different indeed, I’d say.
Actually, since Israel sits completely astride all financial streams going into the Palestinian areas it will, I’m sure, stop any aid that it disapproves of from getting in… Which gives them, ultimately, the primary responsibility for what happens regarding the provision or non-provision of vitally needed economic aid. Anyway, as is spelled out in the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power really does bear the responsibility for the welfare of the residents of the occupied areas, and this is a very concrete example of that. So the decision is quite clearly going to be Israel’s…
Who knows what that decision will be after the Israeli election of March 28? I see that Acting PM Ehud Olmert today said that he does not see Hamas as a strategic threat... Which given that he’s in the middle of an election campaign seems like a gutsily moderate and non-escalatory thing to say.
But still, actions speak louder than words. And no action that continues to starve Palestinians of vital funds (including, of funds that are theirs anyway!) can be seen as helping the movement toward a just peace.

Helpful statement from Muslim thinkers on the ‘cartoons’

I saw the NYT linked to this statement today, jointly issued by around three dozen eminent Muslim thinkers and religious leaders from around the world. It explained the Muslim position on the sense of violation many or most observant Muslims felt in reaction to the cartoons:

The events in Denmark concerning the Messenger of God represent an entirely unacceptable crime of aggression that has violated the highest sanctities of the Muslim people.

It also called on,

However, it also issued a crucial call for restraint:

We appeal to all Muslims to exercise self-restraint in accordance with the teachings of Islam and we reject countering an act of aggression by acts not sanctioned in Islam, such as breaking treaties and breaching timehonoured agreements by attacking foreign embassies or innocent people and other targets. Such violent reactions can lead to a distortion of the just and balanced nature of our request or even to our isolation from the global dialogue. The support that we give to our Prophet will not be given by flouting his teachings.

The signatories include Sunnis and Shiites, and people from Indonesia, India, Morocco, the US, as well as the Muslim heartland. They include the present Mufti of Jerusalem, the Grand Mufti of Lebanon, and Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, the spiritual mentor of Hizbullah, in Lebanon. I see no signatories from Iran. There are at least two from Syria.
Regarding people’s arguments that some of the anti-cartoon violence has been stirred up by “authoritarian” regimes, I would say that there has been as much anti-cartoon activism by pro-US as by anti-US regimes, and that in nearly all these cases the popular response was far stronger than any of the regimes had expected. The cartoons issue has touched a point of very deep grievance and hurt inside many Muslim societies. Of course it has been “used” by many different kinds of political forces for their own reasons. But their agitation on the issue would not have been met with such a strong popular response if the deep hurt weren’t there in the first place.
The response that has sickened me the most so far has been when Muslim mobs in Nigeria torched churches and killed a reported 25 members of the Christian community in the north of the country. And now, most recently, there have been anti-Muslim reprisals in the south of the country.
What do Nigerian Christians have to do with one self-important Danish journalist’s decision to knowingly break a Muslim taboo on publishing pictures of the Prophet? Nothing whatever.
Let’s hope as many Muslims as possible heed the religious leaders’ call for self-restraint. Personally, I wish it had been more strongly worded and called explicitly for a ban on all forms of violence and hate-mongering in response to the cartoons. But still, it’s a good start.

In Jerusalem

JWN readers might like to know that I arrived in Jerusalem
yesterday. I’m staying in a very calm hotel in East
Jerusalem… Listening to a tinny church bell as I write this,
having earlier heard the noon-time call to prayer from the minaret of
the Sheikh Jarrah Mosque.

I’ll be in Israel and Palestine for the next 18 days, reporting on the
political developments in both communities– I ‘ll be writing a couple of pieces for
Salon.com as well as my usual print outlets: the CSM and Boston Review. So it’ll
probably be hard work, as well as really interesting. The
logistics have been just a touch challenging. The hotel here has
the funkiest electric sockets, and I’ve been figuring whether any
combination of my plug-adapters can be rammed into them. (Yes–
but it also involves poking a pen into the socket at the same time…
Don’t ask.) The SIM card in my phone had timed out, and I had to
buy a new one. And the zipper on my suitcase got shot. Grrr.

But those are minor inconveniences. Mainly, it’s just good to be
back. I think this is my 10th visit to Israel and
Palestine. Back in 1989, Bill and our then-4-year-old and I spent
most of the summer here in Jerusalem– I was doing some research on
Palestinians and Israelis and nonviolence.

Jerusalem is still the most amazing place. In itself it’s a
microcosm of almost the entire Israeli-Arab conflict. I wrote a
couple of times about the immense potential of this city– once the
Palestinians and Israelis make a sustainable peace– to become a real
center of world culture and cultural exchange. It’s an
enthusiastically bilingual city — though there is very rigid
segregation between the Hebrew-speaking areas and the Arabic-speaking
areas as well as huge amounts of discrimination against the city’s
Palestinian residents and their neighborhoods. And it’s certainly a
place where the three Abrahamic religions are all well represented and
have have many institutions.

… Once I got through passport control and customs yesterday at
Ben-Gurion airport I got into a “Nesher” ride-share van posted for
Jerusalem. The ten seats filled up pretty fast and up we
came. There is always this strong sense of coming “up” to
Jerusalem, which really is perched on top of the craggy ridge
of the Judean Hills. As always, the van trundled around
several neighborhoods to let out other riders before getting to my
destination. One rider went to a very new part of Mevasseret
Zion, a small town just east of the city– an extremely well-funded and
well-appointed series of neighborhoods there, with spectacular views
across a ravine towards the receding hills of the West Bank, to the
north. Another went to Bayt Zayit, an older Jewish village also
just east of Jerusalem. Then the driver, a Jewish guy who spent
most of the ride swearing under his breath in extremely colorful
Arabic, took us into the center of the city through some fairly heavy
rush-hour traffic. He dropped an orthodox Jewish family (father,
mother, 13-year-old son with long peyot)
off at the city-center Supersol… along with about seven truly
enormous bags they had flown in with. It looked like they
were planning a long stay. Then he threaded through some of the
tight streets of old West Jerusalem into the equally tight streets of
East Jerusalem, where he dropped another passenger and me at our
respective hotels.

I love to walk around these older neighborhoods– Jewish and Arab. Each
definitely has its own flavor. I also love to walk around the
walled Old City. I haven’t been there yet. Anyway, I’ve got
some interesting things set up here for the next couple of days, and a
bunch more phone calls to make. I’ll check in and post some
things here from time to time… But mainly, I’ll be in “receive”
mode for the next few days.

Dinner with George and Laura

… That would be George Packer, the author of the best book to date on US follies (and worse) in Iraq: The Assassins’ Gate, and Laura Secor, a writer and editor who had an intriguing piece in The New Yorker last fall about the lives of some of the reformist younger generation in Teheran. But I couldn’t resist putting “George and Laura” like that into the heading for y’all.
Bill the spouse and I had a great conversation with G&L at the dinner there last night. George is recently back from his latest reporting trip to Iraq. But I can’t write a word about what he told us because his own account of it won’t be in The New Yorker till “late March.”
What I can write about, I think, was Laura’s observation– based on the reporting she did in Serbia during the campaign for the election that toppled Milosevic, as well as her more recent two trips to Iran– about the distinct difference in the US-funded and -supported activities that helped the Serbian student movement ‘Otpor’ to become well organized, and the more recently announced $75 million that the Bushies will be giving to support opposition movements in Iran…. Her main observation was that the US never publicly announced the aid it was giving to Otpor-– “I was there, talking with them a lot, and I never got an inkling about US government funding”… Whereas of course, the aid to the Iranian “opposition” (identity of recipients not yet clear) has been trumpeted upfront.
Otpor went on to win its anti-Milosevic campaign.
And as for this latest Bushite initiative???

Iraq: political developments

Juan Cole has a good post today which is his digest of a long interview that Moqtada Sadr gave to al-Jazeera last night. There’s a huge amount of interesting material there that I would love to analyze at greater length but I’m afraid I don’t have time… I’m working on a special project that JWN readers will most likely be able to profit from from about next Wednesday on. I’ll just note I found these portions particularly interesting:

I think Moqtada is continuing his “powerful politico’s’ regional tour”. He’s in Jordan where I think today he was due to meet with King Abdullah II, having met with the PM there yesterday. H’mm, and to think that just a year or so ago he was one of the US forces’ “Most Wanted criminals” in Iraq… What on earth is happening to US influence in the region? (A question asked in irony.)
Oh well, back there in Baghdad, the US interveners are working desperately hard, it seems, trying to prevent the coming to power of an elected government that is dedicated to seeking a speedy withdrawal of the US forces. That at least is my first reading of this piece of reporting, by nelson Hernandez, in today’s WaPo.
Hernandez writes,

I guess Zal Khalilzad, Iyad Allawi, and a bunch of other US collaborators and opportunists are kind of annoyed that their favorite character inside the UIA, SCIRI’s Adel Abdul-Mahdi, didn’t get the UIA’s nomination for the PM post.
But the idea that all the non-UIA parties might be able to come together and over-rule the UIA is– provided the UIA people hang together– quite absurd and out of the question.
Much more likely than a bloc that marginalizes a significant portion of the UIA would be a bloc that marginalizes the Kurds– and the Kurds know that.
Oh, here’s AP now running with that, “major obstacles for a Jaafari confirmation” story, as well. Looks like Zal and his buddies are taking advantage of Moqtada’s temporary absence to try to spook the UIA into overturning the Jaafari nomination and going the way they want it to?
Colonial bullying politics really is pathetic sometimes. (But also, very damaging to the peoples colonized.)
Meantime, Iraqis continue not to have a governing admionistration that is accountable to them. The DDI counter here on JWN now stands at 66 days.

Some good sense from Tom Friedman

New York Times uber-columnist Tom Friedman has a pretty good column in today’s paper. Basically he’s urging everyone in Israel and the US (perhaps especially the US) not to get completely hung up on the nature of Hamas rehtoric, but to focus on the movement’s deeds instead.
A very good point!
I wish I could quote some decent-length excerpts from the column, or put in a link to it. But the NYT has instituted a system of tightly locking up much of its content into plutocrat-favoring payment systems. (Actually, our family does subscribe to the paper NYT and we thus have supposedly free access to the “NYT Select” online material… I jumped thru numerous hoops to become registered with that but I still can’t unlock Tom’s wisdom. What a crap system, may i say.)
Back to Tom. His bottom line:

[I]t is critical that Israel, the U.S., and the Palestinians not get themselves up in a tree right now over words. There is nothing Hamas could say today that would reassure Israelis, but there is a lot it could do on the ground that would have a huge impact over time. That– for now–is where the test should be.

Excellent advice. Of course, he could have mentioned that for nearly one year now — with one exception only– Hamas has already maintained a quite unilateral tahdi’eh (ceasefire) with Israel, in an extraordinary act of organizational self-discipline that was completely unmatched by Fateh… (And Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has already given some public acknowledgment of that fact.)
Interestingly, in an op-ed that appears rights above Tom’s column in the paper edition of the NYT, Robert Wright — writing about the “cartoons” controversy– notes that back in the 1960s, the African-American “Nation of Islam” leader Elijah Muhammad, “called whites ‘blue-eyed devils’ who were about to exterminated according to Allah’s will.” But most US liberals– though they urged Muhammad to tone down his rhetoric– nevertheless recognized the place of deep wounding and hurt that it sprang from, and managed to live with it. And, as Wright notes, the N.I.’s rhetoric became calmer over time.
Another interesting argument that Tom makes in his column is that “If Hamas is going to fail now in leading the Palestinian Authority, it is crucial that it be seen to fail on its own… not because Israel and the U.S. never gave it a chance.” He quotes Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki (whose brother Fathi, btw, was killed by an Israeli assassination squad ways back when) as saying, “Any minute that it is evident that Hamas is being forced to fail [by outsiders] will guarantee that any future elections will only produce another Hamas victory.”
Another good point there.
Now, it seems evident to me that Tom probably really would like Hamas to fail. I can understand that though, personally, I’m more agnostic on that question. In my view, if Hamas can deliver good results for the Palestinian people, then it really is not up to Tom Friedman, or Helena Cobban, or any other outsider to pronounce on whether they “should” succeed or fail. (I would add in there parenthetically that imho, smart pursuit of a strategy of nonviolent mass citizen mobilization is by far the most effective way for them to succeed– but I think the Hamas leaders have already figured that out.)
I certainly, however, agree with the content of Tom’s analysis there: namely, that if Hamas is seen by Palestinians as failing because of external pressures, then that will only increase the support they win from the Palestinian public.
One final note. Tom prefaces the column with a little bit of Zionist-mollifying boilerplate: “Israel would be fully justified in saying that the only correct policy toward Hamas today is a fight to the death” … before he goes on to ask, ” But would that be smart right now?”
That first statement is a really stupid, pandering thing to say. “A fight to the death”? What on earth does Tom mean? Does he think for a moment that the IDF hasn’t tried to wage just such a struggle almost continuously over the past decade? How many assassination attempts has it launched against Hamas leaders over the years, and how many mass-punitive actions against the movement’s supporters? (Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is probably the only leader of a major political movement anywhere in the world today who is certifiably the survivor of a chemical-weapons attack. Undertaken by you-know-who, back in 1997. But many, many of his meshaal’s mentors and colleagues in the leaderships were indeed wiped out by Israel, including within the past two years.)
So why does Tom– who’s a fairly well-informed and smart guy– even say something idiotic and inflammatory like that?
I guess he was trying to cover his rear end against the swarms of NYT readers who will no doubt descend on him the moment they read the rest of his very sensible column…
So I wonder how long it will take the “usual suspects” here at JWN to descend on me for writing this little blog post?

For Saddam trial afficianados

I put up a post at Transitional Justice Forum today titled “Haiti, Iraq, and political transition”. It explores some of the “justice” issues involved in the very messy and risk-freighted post-election periods in Iraq and Haiti– and the role that “transitional justice” mechanisms can play (for good or ill) during such transitions…
Check it out.
One source I cite there is this report, from AP’s veteran Baghdad correspondent Hamza Hendawi, who writes that the trial is now having an unintended new unifying effect acorss sectarian lines inside Iraq– Iraqis are increasingly treating it as a sitcom! Including quotes from both a Shiite and Sunni, Hendawi writes, “Iraqis are united over one thing — the trial’s entertainment value.”
Oops, perhaps not quite what the US occupation authorities and their RCLO intended when they invested $138 million in this trial process.
Meanwhile, over at the “Grotian Moment” blog, which is group-authored by a large number of law professors, some of whom have played an active role in prearing and help organize the trial, giving “training” to its Iraqi judges in London, etc., there is an understandable degree of consternation at how things have been going there.
In this post, Michael Scharf, one of the judges’ trainers, explains how far he sees the trial falling short of the three “cardinal rules” that he, presumably, urged on them there. They were:

David Crane, who was Chief Prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone,wrote,

I have a concern about an appearance of bias on the part of the new Chief Judge, currently presiding over this stage of the trial of Sadaam. An Iraqi Kurd, who lived in a village destroyed by Sadaam, a defendant, can give the appearance of just such a bias. This may bring a result that may appear to be unfair to this fledgling democracy. I am surprised that there has not been a stronger move to have the Chief Judge recused.

But most intriguing of all, on that blog past as on the one before it, there are some fairly lengthy comments from Saddam’s own preferred defense lawyer, the former Qatari Jusice Minister Dr. Najeeb al-Nuaimi.
The blogosphere really becomes a more and more interesting place, eh?

The Weissglas “diet”

In a move eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration’s redefinition of “torture” to the point that “anything’s okay so long as the person doesn’t die or suffer permanent organ failure”, Dov Weissglas, the longtime adviser to Israeli premiers is now talking about projecting Israel’s war against Hamas onto the bodies of Palestinian children and other noncombatants.
This, from today’s HaAretz:

We have to make them much thinner, but not enough to die

A couple of posts ago, I was getting into a discussion about the quite foreseeable effects of a cutoff of external aid to the OPTs, which I said could lead to actual deaths from starvation.
I still think that. But to even get into that argument, it seems to me, is to set the bar for acceptable human behavior far, far too low. (Like the Bush definition of “torture.”)
After getting into that argument, it became clear to me that we should oppose all attempts to intentionally– in pursuit of a political objective– place any barriers at all on the flourishing of noncombatant persons. Just “not forcing them to starve” is ways too low a bar to hold up.
In a sense, nearly all of the present corpus of international humanitarian law as it has developed since the 1850s aims at separating civilian populations and other noncombatants from the harmful consequences of warfare. Certainly, any deliberate attempt to entangle civilians in a political battle between two political leaderships– in the way that, for example, Shimon Peres did in his disastrous April 1996 military aggression against Lebanon– should be completely rejected and opposed.
This is exactly the same basic principle that underlies the prohibition on terror attacks against civilians… There too the aim is to use the deliberate infliction of harm on civilians to sway the decisions made by political leaders.
In both cases, this deliberate entanglement of civilians in a political/military battle should be completely opposed.
Shimon Peres may claim (as indeed, he did to me in person in March 1998) that he “didn’t intend” to kill the 120-plus old people who were killed by IDF shelling in Qana. Ah yes, but what he and the rest of the Israeli leadership clearly did intend– and we know this because they said it very publicly at the time– was to put such huge pressure on the civilian population of Lebanon that they would rise up and beg their leaders to ‘cry uncle’ to Israel.
And along the way there, in the course of that panic-driven uprooting of one-third of the population of Lebanon (which yes, was enitrely a part of Peres’s plan… he said he wanted them to be forced to go to Beirut), quite predictably old people died and babies and the sick and infirm died, purely because of the uprooting. That was entirely foreseeable, given the record established during tens of previous rounds of IDF-spurred mass uprootings in Lebanon. Then on top of those foreseeable deaths, given the amount of lethal firepower used in the assault, it was not surprising at all that 120 old people ended up getting killed in Qana…
So anyway, as I said, that 1996 attempt to entangle a neighboring population in a hard-fought political battle ended up disastrously for nearly everyone concerned… except Hizbullah, which at that point won nearly all of its long-fought battle for the liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation. (That victory didn’t fully unfold till 2000; but the strategic balance had tipped definitively in April 1996.)
See, here’s the thing about attempts to entangle civilian populations in violence and coercion: they very frequently backfire. I could argue this, certainly, about Peres’s pathetic and very harmful aggression in 1996. I think I could argue it convincingly about the terror campaign that Hamas and others waged against Israel’s civilian population since 1987… In both cases, the fact that the assault comes against civilians stiffens the reolve of civilians. It doesn’t cow them. (Maybe the Hamas leaders realized that. Maybe that’s why they agreed unilaterally to halt their operations against targets inside Israel back in February of last year?)
So where is Israel’s learning curve on this issue? Can’t Israel’s leaders, too, look back at the past (including April 1996 in Lebanon, but a lot of other occasions, too) and realize that this latest attempt to starve the Palestinians into submission is likewise doomed to fail?
That HaAretz piece goes on to say this:

Some officials suggested separating the Palestinian population, which would continue receiving the aid, and its government. This was also the American administration’s position, it was said at the meeting.

Gosh, can these people really all be that stupid? But no, they’re not! Look at the next paragraph:

since the overwhelming majority of Palestinian workers in the humanitarian organizations are Hamas people.

Exactly. (Readers might want to go back and check point #3 I made in this JWN post, Tuesday.)
… At a broader level, I must say I’m finding it a most enjoyable spectator sport, sitting here and seeing all these Israeli and US officials running round like headless chickens as they try to figure out how to respond to Hamas’s electoral victory. (All except Giora Eiland, that is. A very sensible man.)

Hamas’s diplomatic and leadership strategies unfold

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal arrived in Turkey today, in a very smart move which is the first visit by any Hamas leader to a non-Arab country– one that is majority-Muslim but also a member of NATO and has many links with Israel.
(He’s also been invited to Moscow and may well go there straight from Turkey? Russia is, of course, a member of the so-called ‘Quartert’ that backed but totally failed to implement President Bush’s failed ‘Road Map” to peace, when was it? a century or two ago?– oh no, just in 2002… How time flies, eh?)
Meantime, in what is most likely a carefully planned move, back at present Hamas “home base” in Damascus, Meshaal’s second-in-command, Moussa Abu Marzook has publicly announced the movement’s next move in the current, very complex diplomatic dance. Let me reproduce that AP story, by Albert Aji, almost in full:

Actually, I’m, wondering whether AP writer Aji got that quite right, when he wrote, “Abu Marzouk described as ‘absolutely unacceptable’ Israel’s call for Hamas to start an unconditional dialogue with the Jewish state.”
So far as I know, Israel has never called on Hamas to join an “unconditional” dialogue?
And indeed, right now, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and the Defense Ministry itself have been calling for tightening the already stifling movement controls that the IDF/IOF maintains on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. And the bought-and-paid-for members of the US Congress have of course jumped into the collective-punishment act, voting to cut direct US aid to the Palestinian Authority, “unless Hamas renounces its call to destroy Israel.”
Hamas meanwhile looks looks as though it might be about to enact a winner-takes-all-ish political strategy at home, in the OPTs. They have named their candidates for Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). These are, respectively, university professors Aziz al-Duwaik, from the West Bank, and Ahmed Bahar, from Gaza.
That BBC story linked to there– like several other recent news stories– says that Hamas is likely to nominate one of its own people as prime minister. They say, Ismail Haniya, who headed the group’s national list of candidates in the recent elections.

Update: Thursday afternoon: Yes, Hamas did apparently just nominate him.

I am not sure how wise a winner-takes-all-ish strategy is for them. (Hamas did, after all, get only 44% of the vote, so need to continue to show the Palestinian people that they will be acting in an inclusive and statesmanlike way rather than from triumphalism?) But anyway, Fateh has been quite adamant since the elections that it would not participate in a Hamas-led national unity government… And Fateh PA President Abbas might well have riled the Hamasniks when he steam-rollered a “clever” little constitutional-court resolution through the lame-duck PLC last week.
I wouldn’t have expected Hamas to nominate a Fathawi for PM, but earlier there was talk they would support a non-Hamas indpendent. Anyway, we’ll see who their nominee is, soon enough. I guess the PLC will hold its first session on Saturday. Most likely, given Mofaz’s recommendation to the Israeli cabinet re border-closings, this will be by videolink between Ramallah and Gaza. The Israelis did release one elected MP yesterday– a Hamasnik– but 13 other elected members of PLC, mincluding Marwan Barghouthi, remain in Israeli custody. Will they be able to participate via videolink, too, I wonder?
I guess when the PLC gets seated, it needs the Speaker and Deputy Speaker almost immediately. Then they have a further two weeks to name the PM. I think that is formally done by the President (Abbas). But obviously, if he names someone whom Hamas fails to support in the PLC, then the PLC wouldn’t even confirm the nomination, so they do all need to work together on this…
Gosh, isn’t it going to be an interesting time there in the next couple of weeks?
(Btw, if you’re interested in what’s been happening to the once-vaunted Fateh “Young Guard” sinc the Jan. 25 election, there’s a fairly interesting report on this issue here, from the “Arab Reform Bulletin.” It’s by Ben Fishman and Mohammad Yaghi, who write, “If the elites within Fatah were divided before the election, they are even more so in its aftermath and have yet to devise a strategy for moving forward… For Fatah to compete effectively with Hamas and lead Palestinian politics once again, it would need to develop a mechanism for handling disputes internally and find honest, respected, and popular leaders. Whether Fatah’s young guard can regroup and tackle these challenges depends entirely on its ability to solve the organizational and personal rivalries that became painfully evident during the electoral process. The very survival of secular Palestinian nationalism may hinge on whether such a transformation occurs.”
You can read my Dec. 30 musing on this latter question, here.)

How to deal with an uncomfortable vote

(1) You could not hold it.
(2) You could hold it, but make the conditions for campaigning and voting very unfair. (Egypt 2006, Florida 2000.)
(3) You could hold it and then toss out or try to burn many boxes full of your opponents’ ballots. (Haiti, right now.)
(4) You could hold it, and then tie the post-election government-formation process up in knots for several months (US-occupied Iraq, Jan. 2005 and currently– see today’s DDI counter here, now at ’62 days’.)
(5) You could hold it, and then threaten the duly elected leadership with “economic starvation” (occupied Palestine, currently.)
(6) You could hold it, and then send your goons in to beat up and terrorize the entire electorate (East Timor, 1999.)
(7) On the other hand, you could hold the election, allow for fair and equal campaigning and an orderly and transparent voting process, and then undertake to work in good faith, good order, and decent respect with whatever leadership emerges. How revolutionary is that?
(God help the peoples of Haiti, Palestine, and Iraq.)