[News] Hamas Election Victory: A Vote for Clarity

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Hamas Election Victory: A Vote for Clarity
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 26 January 2006

[]

Hamas supporters, carrying their party's flags, attend a campaign 
rally organized by the Hamas movement for the upcoming Palestinian 
legislative elections in Gaza January 20, 2006. 
(<http://www.maannews.net>MAANnews/Wesam Saleh)

Hamas' victory in the Palestinian Authority legislative elections has 
everyone asking "what next"? The answer, and whether the result 
should be seen as a good or bad thing, depends very much on who is 
asking the question.

Although a Hamas success was heavily trailed, the scale of the 
victory has been widely termed a "shock." Several factors explain the 
dramatic rise of Hamas, including disillusionment and disgust with 
the corruption, cynicism and lack of strategy of the Fatah faction 
which has dominated the Palestinian movement for decades and had 
arrogantly come to view itself as the natural and indisputable leader.

The election result is not entirely surprising, however, and has been 
foreshadowed by recent events. Take for example the city of Qalqilya 
in the north of the West Bank. Hemmed in by Israeli settlements and 
now completely surrounded by a concrete wall, the city's fifty 
thousand residents are prisoners in a Israeli-controlled giant 
ghetto. For years Qalqilya's city council was controlled by Fatah but 
after the completion of the wall, voters in last years' municipal 
elections awarded every single city council seat to Hamas. The 
Qalqilya effect has now spread across the occupied territories, with 
Hamas reportedly winning virtually all of the seats elected on a 
geographic basis. Thus Hamas' success is as much an expression of the 
determination of Palestinians to resist Israel's efforts to force 
their surrender as it is a rejection of Fatah. It reduces the 
conflict to its most fundamental elements: there is occupation, and 
there is resistance.

For Palestinians under occupation, it is not yet clear what Hamas' 
win will mean. It is now common to speak of a Palestinian 
"government" being formed out of the election results, as though 
Palestine were already a sovereign and independent state. But if the 
first duty of a government is to protect its people's lives, liberty 
and property, then the Palestinian Authority has never deserved to be 
called a government. Since its inception, it has not been able to 
protect Palestinians from lethal daily attacks by the Israeli army in 
the heart of their towns and refugee camps, or to prevent a single 
dunum of land being seized for settlements, nor to save a single 
sapling of the more than one million trees uprooted by Israel in the 
past ten years. Rather, in Israel's conception the Palestinian 
Authority was supposed to crush Palestinian resistance to make the 
occupied territories safe for continued Israeli colonization. Hamas 
will certainly not allow that to continue, but whether it will be 
able to transform the Authority into an arm of the struggle against 
Israel is by no means certain. Hamas, which has observed a unilateral 
truce with Israel for a year, has signalled that it wants to continue 
this if Israel "reciprocates." The movement clearly believes it can 
make such an offer from a position of strength and it is to its 
tactical advantage to leave uncertainty about when and how it might 
resume full-scale armed resistance.

Elements of the Palestinian Authority security services run by Fatah 
figures may be unwilling to put themselves under the control of a 
Hamas-led authority, which could lead to the collapse of what is left 
of the Authority's structure, or even its break-up into personal 
militias. Israel and the United States which refuses to accept the 
outcome of the election may see an interest in encouraging such an 
internal conflict. Israel is likely to use Hamas' win as a further 
pretext to tighten repression and accelerate its unilateral 
imposition of walls and settlements on the West Bank designed to 
annex the maximum number of land with the minimum number of 
Palestinians. Such developments increase the risks of a dramatic 
escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

As for the majority of Palestinians, who live as refugees and exiles 
in the diaspora, they have been progressively excluded and 
marginalized from efforts to solve the conflict. Whereas the US and 
its allies, with UN assistance, went to extraordinary lengths to 
allow Iraqi "out of country voters" to participate in that country's 
elections, the same powers have shown no interest in giving 
Palestinian refugees a voice. Fatah, which many Palestinian refugees 
suspect would sell out their rights in a peace deal with Israel, 
obviously had no incentive to demand such participation. It remains 
to be seen if Hamas, born in Gaza where ninety percent of the 
population are refugees, will be able to articulate an agenda that 
speaks to the concerns of the diaspora.

For the "international community" -- principally the 'Quartet' made 
up of the United States, the European Union, Russia and UN Secretary 
General Kofi Annan, the election result is a major embarrassment. 
They, and the coterie of well-funded NGOs and think tanks that 
generate so much of their intellectual guff have built their approach 
on the notion that Palestinian "reform" rather than an end to the 
Israeli occupation, is the way to resolve the conflict. While 
nominally committing themselves to a two-state solution, these powers 
dragged the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority into an endless game 
where Palestinians have to jump through hoops to prove their 
worthiness of basic rights, while at the same time no pressure has 
been applied to Israel to end the confiscation of land and expansion 
of settlements. This peace process industry chose to hail Israel's 
tactical withdrawal of eight thousand settlers from Gaza last summer, 
while ignoring the far larger number of settlers Israel has continued 
to plant all over the West Bank effectively rendering a two-state 
solution unachievable.

The principal purpose of this game is not to bring about a just and 
lasting peace but merely to inoculate the players from the charge 
that they are doing nothing to resolve a conflict that remains an 
enduring focus of regional and worldwide concern. A true peace effort 
would require confronting Israel and holding it accountable, 
something none of the Quartet members have the political will to do. 
There is no doubt that Fatah was entirely complicit in the game, to 
which it had become both a prisoner and an indispensable partner. Why 
else would the United States have desperately tried to shore Fatah up 
by spending millions of dollars on projects in recent months designed 
to buy votes, and why else would the EU have threatened to cut off 
aid if Palestinians voted for Hamas? Most Palestinians could see 
clearly that after years of negotiations and billions of dollars of 
foreign aid that they are poorer and less free than ever before as 
more of their land has been seized. It is no wonder that this kind of 
bribery and blackmail had no power over them and probably had the 
opposite effect, increasing Hamas support.

Hamas' victory pulls the rug from under the project of trying to 
deflect the blame for the conflict from Israeli colonization to 
Palestinian internal pathologies. The peace process industry will not 
give up easily, however, and will now urge Hamas to act "responsibly" 
and to "moderate" its positions -- which means in effect to 
abandoning all forms of resistance and assuming the docile and 
complicit role hitherto played by Fatah.

The instant US demand that Hamas "recognize Israel" is like rewinding 
the clock twenty-five years to when this same demand was the pretext 
to ignore and exclude the PLO from peace negotiations. But as Hamas 
has observed, all the PLO's submission to these demands did not lead 
to any loosening of Israel's grip or any lessening of US support for 
Israel. Hamas is unlikely to do as the US demands, and even if it 
did, it would probably only give rise to new resistance groups 
responding to the worsening conditions on the ground generated by the 
occupation.

Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada


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