The U.S. congratulated Israel yesterday for the peaceful Palestinian elections — but the real story behind the vote is the strong strength displayed by the Islamic militant faction Hamas.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement won most municipal councils across the West Bank and Gaza Strip this week. But initial results indicated Hamas netted the three biggest towns in play. A harbinger of things to come?
In other words: in the end, Abbas finds himself in a position somewhat like Great Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair: this week Blair’s Labour Party won the election but it has some serious work to do if it wants to triumph handily in the long run.
For instance, Knight-Ridder reports this:
Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, won Thursday’s elections in the towns of Rafah and Beit Lahiya, the most battered after 4 1/2 years of clashes with Israel, as well as Qalqilya, a key border city with Israel that is slated to be handed over to Palestinian control. Hamas also claimed as many as six of the seven seats allotted to Muslims in the holy city of Bethlehem.
“Our victory indicates that the Palestinian people favor the choice of resistance,” Hamas leader Ismail Hania proclaimed Friday on his faction’s Al-Aksa radio station in Gaza. That message was likely to anger Israeli leaders, who say they won’t deal with a Palestinian Authority rife with armed militants sworn to destroy the Jewish state.
Mohammed Ghazal, a senior Hamas official in the West Bank, tried to allay concerns that his group would impose hard-line religious views in the communities they now will govern, saying the group will focus on providing better services in the municipalities.
“We are not Iran or the Taliban,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “We believe that personal freedom is one of the foundations of Islam.”
Overall, Fatah captured 56 percent of the votes and twice as many councils as Hamas, which received 33 percent of the votes, according to partial and unofficial returns from 76 municipalities on the West Bank and eight on the Gaza Strip. More than 280,000 voters turned out for the elections, which international monitors declared were free and fair.
The preliminary findings leave Fatah in a strong position for its crucial July 17 face-off with Hamas over electing the 88-seat Palestinian Legislative Council.
Arab News sees it this way:
Fatah, the dominant Palestinian group, yesterday beat back a strong electoral challenge from Hamas in municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, winning 56 percent of the vote. However, Hamas made a strong showing in urban centers in the occupied territories. It received 33 percent of the vote….At a news conference earlier, senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar claimed the movement won 34 out of 84 municipalities.
The local elections were seen as the final test for President Mahmoud Abbas before parliamentary elections in July. Abbas has been seeking to persuade Hamas to give up violence and transform itself into a political party, but is also concerned an increasingly powerful hard-line opposition can hinder his peace efforts with Israel.
Hamas opposes negotiations with Israel, though the local campaigns focused on clean government rather than the conflict with Israel. Fatah officials were disappointed. “The results didn’t live up to our expectations,� said Kadoura Fares, a Fatah legislator and leader of the movement.
And here’s how Times Online see it:
The very fact that Hamas is participating in elections is a bonus for Mr Abbas’s strategy to wean the gunmen off violence by co-opting them into the political process, instead of risking civil war by confronting and disarming them, as Israel demands. It is a high-risk gambit that could mean that Fatah is undermined or in many places replaced altogether by the hardline Islamists.
Both sides immediately claimed victory. Election officials said that Fatah appeared to have won control of 52 of the 84 councils contested, to 24 for Hamas. Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas’s senior leader in Gaza, insisted that his organisation had won 34 councils, saying that many of his group had stood as independents because they were nervous of being identified as Hamas by Israeli troops.
“These results confirm the real trend among the Palestinian populace towards Islam as a programme of reform and resistance,� Dr Zahar said.
The possibility that Hamas will win seats — and Cabinet positions — in parliamentary elections in July also confronts Western diplomats with a problem, putting them under pressure to begin political dealings with a group hitherto regarded as terrorists.
Even Fatah officials conceded yesterday that Hamas was now a force to be reckoned with. Abdullah al-Ifranji, a senior Fatah official in Gaza, said: “We are proud of this democratic experience and we are proud of Fatah that we executed this process,� he said.
The Bottom Line: Hamas has established itself now as an electoral force to be dealt with — a force with both militant and electoral power. Will it enlarge upon these gains in Parliamentary elections in July elections?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.