As irony would have it, democracy is now the biggest threat facing the so-called peace process between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. This we have learned from the press reports and media spins that preceded and followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s photogenic visit to President Bush’s ranch in Texas last week.
Both the Americans and the Israelis are concerned, deeply concerned that is, by the specter of the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council that are scheduled to take place on July 17, just a few days before Sharon’s planned expulsion of all Jews from their homes, farms, businesses, synagogues and graves in Gaza and northern Samaria.
According to the polls, Hamas, which won some 70 percent of the seats in the recent municipal elections in Gaza, will do quite well in these elections – winning at least a third of the legislative seats. Fatah sources acknowledge that, if anything, the polls have severely underestimated Hamas’s support base. They believe that if the elections are held on schedule, Hamas will win a majority of seats in the PLC.
Recent weeks have brought on a steady drumbeat of statements by top IDF officials and Palestinian sources that Fatah is planning a major terror offensive in June in a bid either to force a postponement of the elections or to increase public support for PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s party ahead of the poll.
Senior Fatah officials told The Jerusalem Post that they wished to postpone the July elections in order to prevent a Hamas takeover, and the Israeli government, like the Bush Administration, was praying for their success. The thing is, both the U.S. and Israel are largely responsible for the current political realities in the PA – where not only are all major political parties also terrorist organizations, but the relative popularity of each party is directly proportional to the volume of terror attacks it has carried out. It was the Bush Administration that first lumped the January 9 elections for PA chairman together with the January 30 general elections in Iraq for a transitional constitutional assembly, as well as with last month’s anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon as evidence of a wave of democratization in the Middle East.
This conflation of these events has made it difficult for the general public to understand just how different the situation in the PA is from that of Iraq and Lebanon. As events in the latter two advance the goals of the global war on terrorism, the events in the PA work to its detriment.
In Iraq, the electorate was given the chance to choose its leaders freely, with its former dictator Saddam Hussein in jail and his Ba’ath party defanged, delegitimized and barred from competing in the elections. Not only were Iraqis empowered to speak out freely against the former regime, they have also bravely exposed the roles played by the former regime’s allies – the UN, Jordan, Syria and Iran – in prolonging Saddam’s grip on power and in fueling the insurgency in the aftermath of his fall.
So, not only was the Iraqi dictatorship destroyed before the Iraqis went to vote, the international and regional systems that were allied with the dictatorial regime and allowed it to continue to rule were also delegitimized in the eyes of the Iraqis.
In Lebanon, where the fate of democracy remains much more unclear, last month’s mass protests against the Damascus-backed Lebanese government and the effective Syrian occupation of Lebanon were not simply a result of domestic frustration with the status quo. The Lebanese would never have taken to the streets if former prime minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination had been greeted with a yawn by Paris and Washington. The protesters were responding to what they sensed to be a change in the momentum of events, and this is what allowed them to express their political desires in public. For the first time in years, it seemed that the Syrian mukhabarat and Hizbullah terrorists were on the losing side, and so they were suddenly fair game.