'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Palestinian prospects

I am really delighted with the news from Gaza (as reported by the BBC) that,

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are pressing for a more broad-based national leadership in which they would have a say...

And also, that,

A Hamas spokesman said after the meeting that Mr Qurei [Abu Alaa] had accepted the idea in principle and that there would be more talks on how to implement this.

(The Beeb's Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston did, however, caveat that by noting that Qurei himself was "more vague on the issue".)

The prospect of Hamas and IJ joining a broad-based leadership would certainly help to stabilize the situation inside Palestine during the present transition, because:

(1) Between them these two Islamic groups form such a large proportion of the community that keeping them out of its ruling councils-- as has been Arafat's insistence up until now-- has been a recipe for political paralysis, a breakdown of internal trust, and considerable factionalism, and

(2) These two groups have considerably more internal discipline and dedication than the secular-nationalist groups, led by Arafat's own Fateh, that have monopolized PA/PLO decision-making until now.

(For more background on this, you might want to read the piece I had in Boston Review on Gaza, a few months ago.)

Beyond the immediate transitional arrangement of some kind of joint PLO/PA/Hamas/IJ ruling council the only plausible way to reconstitute any kind of a more lasting Palestinian leadership that can actually save Israelis and Palestinians from an escalating disaster at this point is to hold nationwide Palestinian elections in which all these different groups participate/compete.

Dr. Mustapha Barghouthi, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative has been at the forefront of the call for Palestinian national elections. He has argued that elections are, "a vital precondition for peace". He notes too that

[F]reedom of movement is needed to ensure these elections may take place.

... these elections will not take place unless the international community provides an international presence to ensure an easing of the political and territorial conditions that make elections impossible.

I would certainly second Barghouthi's appeal for elections. But I would go further than he seems to, and argue that the next elections for a Palestinian leadership should be designed to include the Palestinian people of the diaspora, not merely those living in the occupied territories...

It has, after all, increasingly become the general practice in recent years that when elections are held in the context of a (hopefully) conflict-terminating process, those members of the affected national communities who have been living as refugees outside their homeland have been recognized as equal stakeholders in the outcome and included in the vote.

Think South Africa, 1994. Bosnia. Kosovo... And most recently Afghanistan, and now also Iraq.

In all those cases (and probably others), given that the conflict that was about to (hopefully) be terminated had generated thousands or even millions of refugees along the way, there was full recognition that those refugees should not be summarily disfranchised but should instead be fully included in any electoral process.

How realistic is this in the case of Palestine? Extremely realistic indeed. The UN body that has been providing relief services to the Palestinians since 1949, UNRWA, maintains a full register of Palestinian individuals who meet its (extremely stringent) standards for relief-aid registration. Those rolls could form the basis of a refugee election-registration roll.

I stress that this would be imperfect, because it would be far more restrictive than the total number of Palestinian refugees now living in the nation's global diaspora.

But what it would, importantly, capture, are just about all the refugees who are most needy-- those who are still stateless and are living in dire straits here in Lebanon, or in slightly better circumstances (though still stateless) in Syria. It would also capture the large number of registered Palestinian refugees inside Jordan.

What's more, given that UNRWA already has schools and health clinics for the refugees in all these areas--as, too, for those in Gaza and the West-- those facilities could be used to help confirm the regustration roills and then to hold the election.

The Palestinians have only had one quasi-national election before today. That was in 1996, when Yasser Arafat was elected head of the PA and 80 or so members were elected to the PA's parliament. (By the way, that election went off extremely well.)

But the 1996 election, by design, excluded all those Palestinians living elsewhere than in the West Bank or Gaza. In my view, that was a terrible mistake. Among other things, it left Palestinians living outside the homeland feeling they had no stake in the Palestinian "future" being devised by Arafat and Co.

... Now is, truly, a significant moment in the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the transition to a post-Arafat world, with Tony Blair's new activism on this issue, and with the US more directly and precariously involved in the region than ever before, there is a possibility that some real progress might be possible. (There and, let's keep hoping, inside Iraq.)

Obviously, none of this will be possible if Sharon maintains his policy of bloodyminded aggression against the Palestinians.

Just yesterday, for example-- at a time when US envoys were calling for calm at the time of the Arafat transition-- the IDF decided to kill two Palestinians in a helicopter strike in Gaza.

According to the Beeb, the IDF said the two men "were suspected of carrying explosives." Only "suspected", mind you... Not even the IDF was able to come clean out and say, "Yes, the men actually were carrying explosives, and here's the proof..."

That's how trigger-happy they have become... Poof! They snuff out two (or possibly, three) men's lives on the basis of a mere, unsubstantiated "suspicion". (And you know what? Even if they were carrying explosives, in a civilized country there would be ways of incapacitating them that did not involve snuffing them out.)

Unbe-*!*!*!*-lievable!

That whole Israeli policy of wilful and quite gratuitous assassination of "suspected" Palestinian militants has to end. Obviously. Otherwise, why would the Palestinian militant groups ever have any incentive to rein in their own violence?

So will the new Bush administration make this case for de-escalation to the Israelis-- and back up this request with a real (re-)structuring of the incentives to Israel?

Who knows? It would be nice to say Yes. But I'm not, obviously, holding my breath for the answer yet.

I just do think it's important to keep on pointing out that there are ways to address and resolve all these seemingly intractable problems using means other than violence. And carrying on using the violence--by all sides-- will just keep everyone in the terrible situation in which they already are....

Whatever can be wrong with offering the simple recognition that all Palestinians are human, and as such are entitled to human rights just as much as all Israelis?

Anyway, isn't President Bush supposed to be in favor democracy in the Middle East these days? I kind of thought that was his current shtick...

Starting with decent free elections in Palestine--and including the diaspora Palestinians in them--would be a fine, fine way to start.