Palestinian Elections

Electricity, water, and communications remained firmly in Israeli hands. This control was codified in agreements such as the 1994 Paris Economic Protocol, which restricted what goods Palestinians were permitted to export and import. 

Foreign inflows, principally from the U.S. and EU, became the sole means of liquidity for the Palestinian Authority. These funds, however, came with a political price and were designed to buy compliance with ongoing colonization. Patronage and corruption were the obvious and logical consequences of such a system. With little opportunity of sustaining a livelihood, individual survival became dependent on the disbursements and personal contacts in the PA or Fatah. Around half a million Pales- tinians are reliant on the PA for their livelihood. 

Moreover, prominent figures in the Palestinian Authority held control over the large Palestinian monopolies that directly conducted business with Israeli and foreign companies. Their profiteering depended on the continued status quo. Perhaps the most notorious example of this was the cement companies owned by the Palestinian prime minister, Abu Ala, later found to be directly involved in building the apartheid wall. 

An increasingly wide gap between the majority of the population and the wealthy elite in and around the Palestinian Authority turned into a vast chasm following the onset of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000. Poverty levels reached 70 percent in areas such as the Gaza Strip while the conspicuous consumption of an increasingly small elite reminded the general population that the brunt of Israeli attacks against Palestinian society was not being borne equally. In contrast, Hamas activists are now seen as honest, reliable, and committed to the interests of the poor. 

The elections were conducted with two votes: one for a West Bank/Gaza Strip-wide party list (66 seats) and one for individual candidates running on the district level (66 seats). Confirmation of how Hamas candidates were perceived by the communities closest to them was shown by the district level vote where Hamas took 45 out of the available 66 seats. 

What Next? 

T he election heralds an enormous shift if a Hamas-led PA fulfills its promise to act in accordance with popular interests. To take one very concrete example: currently, around 100 Palestinians are held as political prisoners in Jericho prisons by the Palestinian Authority. These activists are drawn from all political factions. Perhaps the most notable are leaders of the PFLP who are being held for the assassination of the far right, Israeli tourism minister, Rehavam Ze’evi, in response to the killing of the PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa. Their imprisonment was ordered by the Israeli, U.S., and British governments and was hugely unpopular across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, Ahmed Saadat, the general secretary of the PFLP, won a seat to the legislative council at the head of the PFLP list while being detained in Jericho. It appears highly unlikely that Hamas will continue to comply with measures such as these and, indeed, one of their first announcements following their victory was that they would release Saadat. 

If Hamas makes good on its promise not to sustain these structures of occupation then this will be a huge setback for Israeli and U.S. interests in the region. The situation, however, defies simplicity due to the network of factions and interests located throughout the PA apparatus. The legislative council is a weak body and considerable power remains in the hands of Abu Mazen and the presidential office. 

A number of commentators have raised the fear that the election results could herald a repeat of the 1991 Algerian experience where the election victory of the Islamic party FIS was overthrown by a military coup and led to prolonged civil war. Any repeat experience in the Palestinian context would undoubtedly involve the Israeli military and security apparatus in both provoking and maintaining internal armed strife. There is no doubt that Hamas is aware of this threat and they have repeatedly stated that Hamas supports a government of national unity and have so far refused to be drawn into armed clashes with other Palestinian factions. Nevertheless, covert Israeli support for such an eventuality is a real possibility. 

The push to keep Palestinian security forces under Abu Mazen’s control could lay the groundwork for such a scenario. U.S. support for key PA security chiefs, such as Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, is an open fact and both have been prominent in the post-election armed demonstrations by Fatah supporters. These demonstrations have condemned the Hamas victory and called for the resignation of Abu Mazen and the Fatah central committee. Nevertheless, in a statement released on January 28, Fatah’s armed wing, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, described these demonstrations as a populist grab for power by particular Fatah leaders. In a none-too- oblique reference to Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, the AMB sharply criticized the organizers of the demonstrations as “ones who spread corruption and greatly contributed to the humiliating Fatah defeat.” 

The key question will be how Hamas manages the contradiction between its commitment to the national struggle and maintaining the structures of the PA. The economic dependency of the PA will not disappear with the Hamas victory although the political character of this relationship has been made strikingly obvious with threats by the U.S. and EU to cut funding. It remains to be seen whether Hamas can find alternate sources of support and whether they will attempt to implement some form of wealth re-distribution or, instead, become more acceptable to the West. 

This contradiction is not of Hamas’s making. A conscious aim of Oslo was to narrow the Palestinian struggle to a dispute over land percentages in the West Bank and to sever any link between Palestinians in the West Bank/Gaza Strip, those who remained in 1948 historic Palestine as Israeli citizens, and those exiled outside of their homeland. Key to this was the destruction of the PLO as a national liberation movement and its replacement by the Palestinian Authority state building project. 

The formation of the PLO in the 1960s was a critical step forward for the Palestinian struggle as it unified the dispersed Palestinian nation across many generations and countries. The bedrock demand of this struggle was insistence that Palestinians had the right to return to their homes and lands from which they had been exiled. A key feature of all negotiations since Oslo has been an attempt to undermine this demand, reducing it to the symbolic return of a few thousand Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Despite the willingness of individuals such as Abu Mazen to acquiesce to such attempts, Palestinians across the globe remain united behind a full return to historic Palestine. 

In a show of tragic irony following the Hamas victory, Abu Mazen claimed that he would continue negotiations with Israel under the auspices of the PLO rather than the PA. Although this has technically always been the case, the neutering of PLO structures post-Oslo meant that the direction of negotiations was far removed from democratic or popular control. 

Both Hamas and the PFLP campaigned around the importance of renewing Palestinian structures outside of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The PFLP included in its program that the Legislative Council elections should form the mandate for the West Bank/Gaza Strip representation for the Palestinian National Council (PNC). As the Palestinian parliament in exile, the PNC is the highest leadership body of the PLO and supposedly represents all Palestinians in exile. It has, however, been moribund in recent decades. The PFLP has called for elections across the world to elect the rest of the PNC and to re-establish it as the primary force for Palestinian decision making. 

In an encouraging sign Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal clearly identified this as an important strategic orientation of Hamas. In an editorial published in the Guardian on January 31, Mishaal stated, “Our message to the Palestinians is this: Our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home. We promise you that nothing in the world will deter us from pursuing our goal of liberation and return. We shall spare no effort to work with all factions and institutions in order to put our Palestinian house in order. Having won the parliamentary elections, our medium-term objective is to reform the PLO in order to revive its role as a true representative of all the Palestinian people, without excep- tion or discrimination.”

In this context, the Palestinian solidarity movement is faced with important challenges. Given the disarray that Hamas’s unexpected victory has caused for Israeli and U.S. plans, we should fully expect a sustained ideological offensive against them in the mainstream media. This campaign has already begun with the predictable stories of the impending “Talibanization” of Palestinian society. Such claims, however, must be treated with suspicion. Hamas’s victory expressed a political sentiment and desire for a real alternative to the Oslo straitjacket. The Hamas leadership clearly recognizes this and has shown little inclination to imple- ment far-reaching social changes along religious lines. 

The Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has overwhelmingly stated that these negotiations have been a cover for the deepening of Israeli apartheid. The clear message of Hamas representatives in the weeks following the election is that the peace process—as understood by Israeli and Western powers and dutifully regurgitated by the mainstream press—has nothing to do with a genuine, just peace. It remains to be seen whether the rest of the world will heed this message.