Palestinian leadership must hold elections — and not run in them
This combination of pictures created and taken on September 3, 2020 shows (L to R) representatives of Palestinian factions gathered at the Palestinian embassy in Lebanon’s capital Beirut attending by video conference talks with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas (screen); while their counterparts in the West Bank’s Ramallah watch the speech of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh as he speaks in Beirut during the same meeting, in rare talks on how to respond to such accords and to a Middle East peace plan announced by Washington this year. – (Photos by ANWAR AMRO and Alaa BADARNEH / various sources / AFP) (Photo by ANWAR AMRO,ALAA BADARNEH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Image by ANWAR AMRO and ALAA BADARNEH AFP via Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Muhammad Shehada October 19, 2020
The Palestinian leaders of the status quo have demonstrably failed to represent their people in the reshaping of the Middle East.
This week, commercial flights between Israel and the Persian Gulf are becoming regular scenery, after the Knesset voted Thursday to approve the so-called “peace deal” with the United Arab Emirates. This premature Israeli-Arab normalization, along with Trump’s war against the Palestinians and Israel’s de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank, ignited enough anger to get Palestinian leaders to set aside their internal divisions and attempt a unified response.
But their unified national committee for popular resistance — which called for civil resistance across the West Bank: hoisting the Palestinian flag on the day of the signing of the Abraham accords, and marching to the West Bank’s roadblocked and walled-off borders a week later — did not garner any meaningful engagement.
So we are back to Square Zero.
The reasons for this disappointing outcome are clear. First, anger and frustration burn quickly; they are not as effective as incentives and opportunities in terms of motivating unity. Second, bureaucratizing a struggle for freedom and dignity by confining it to endless summits and speeches in glossy conference rooms heavily damages the potential to inspire action.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, with no national elections since 2006, our intractably divided Palestinian leaders have become increasingly disconnected from their base. They are holding onto office a decade after their terms expired, and have exhausted their political capital domestically, regionally and internationally. Nothing they do now would inspire considerable action from the public or our allies.
A democratic change of Palestinian leadership is now of paramount importance as the main option left to revive of a system of checks and balances; to reconnect the leadership with the public; and to move the Palestinian struggle forward.
Elections Are the Only way forward
Restoring electoral accountability, after its 14-year-long erosion, would be the worst nightmare of the status-quo leaders in both Fatah, the party that dominates the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, and its rival Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip. It would force them to confront constituents who are increasingly disaffected and enraged with the leadership’s failure to deliver on their promises or see their people’s needs and wants.
Though I live abroad, this disaffection is strongly visible in any conversation I have with fellow Palestinians, especially our youth, regardless of political faction. Elections would make the population visible again to a leadership desperate for their vote.
Palestinian general elections would be akin to a national referendum on who’s most deserving of leading the struggle and in which direction. This would vigorously reenergize the Palestinian public by giving them a say in their own fate. Palestinians will become responsive to a leadership they chose fairly and freely.
Elections would give young Palestinians an opportunity to mobilize and organize their own platforms separate from the traditional Fatah-Hamas spectrum. Palestinian youth movements that have otherwise challenged the throne of status quo leaders are too easily crushed: when Gazan youth organized the “We Want to Live” demonstrations to protest economic deterioration in 2019, for example, Hamas violently disrupted the movement.
But when Hamas wrote a letter last year officially embracing elections, it demanded that the Palestinian Authority ensure freedom of assembly and expression in the West Bank and allow candidates to campaign freely — so it would have to reciprocate in Gaza. Both sides have welcomed international monitoring groups to ensure the sound conduct of elections.
This would allow Palestinian youth to safely and freely organize, mobilize and campaign for their own initiatives unafraid of crackdown. Injecting new blood into the PA and PLO from younger generations would make those structures far more responsive to the public’s priorities and dire needs and more open towards the world.
Hamas’s 2006 Scenario
Our last election was hardly a model. When Hamas won the balloting in 2006, it tried to form a Palestinian Authority government as authorized and regulated by the Oslo Peace Accords — while simultaneously refusing to recognize Oslo or Israel. This was met with an international boycott and sanctions that fueled intra-Palestinian tensions, which has eventually produced violent in-fighting and 13 years of division.
But this time could be different. Several Hamas leaders have floated a proposal that Hamas not run in the elections but instead support a slate of independent technocrats sympathetic to the movement, or alternatively form a political party separate from Hamas’ armed brigades. This is what Hamas did ahead of the 2016 municipal elections, only to see them canceled in Gaza.
Conditions have also changed tremendously since 2006. While Hamas then was rewarded for Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza the year before, it has since been blamed for the disengagement’s negative impacts on Gaza’s economy, three bloody wars with Israel, and a general failure to deliver on its promises of better services.
Voters are now less likely to cast an angry vote for one Palestinian party to extract vengeance from another. Having been let down by both parties, young Palestinians in particular are more likely to be cautious in their vote and make more informed choices based on their bitter experiences with the current leadership.
Our election system has also been changed to rely on proportional representation nationwide, which would mean that no Palestinian party could have a clear majority to lead alone; instead, different political groups would have to collaborate to form a government.
The best thing the international community could do now to salvage the wreckage and help Palestinians is to actively push for Palestinian elections, to allow the Palestinians to decide democratically how they want to interact with the new reality in the Middle East.
Palestinian leaders, from both sides, who have held office 10 years beyond their terms should refrain from running. They would do Palestinians a great service by allowing for a new transparent, accountable and highly-motivated leadership.
Muhammad Shehada is a contributing columnist for the Forward from Gaza. His work has also appeared in Haaretz and Vice. Find him on Twitter @muhammadshehad2.
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