Palestinian Election Update

[Moses]

Update on the Palestinian Elections

Predictions about the January 9th Palestinian elections remain confused, even after the withdrawal of Marwan Barghouti as a candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority.

Even though there now seems little doubt that Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) will be elected on January 9th, the real question is whether he will be completely successful in ending Palestinian violence against Israelis. And even more important is whether he will be able to persuade the Israelis to end their unceasingly violent behavior towards the Palestinian population.

Israeli commentators are being unusually circumspect in judging the situation among the various Palestinian factions, hoping of course that there really will be an opening to peace, even on a limited scale.

The Sharon government so far has made only minor concessions in facilitating a successful Palestinian election. It has agreed to release 200 Palestinian prisoners out of the 8,000 they are holding as a gesture of good will to Egypt. It has agreed to allow voter registration on the West Bank and Gaza to proceed, but registering the 200,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem remains problematic. Israel wants to cut the Palestinian ties to East Jerusalem as much as possible. Sharon's government has announced that it will allow voting in East Jerusalem, but as in 1996, the number of voting places may be so limited that only a few thousand will be able to actually vote. The Israelis continue to re-issue resident permits in a very dilatory fashion, including those of American citizens of Palestinian birth and residence in East Jerusalem.

Despite this cloud over facilitating democracy in Palestine, the polls indicate that Mahmoud Abbas is likely to gain a clear majority.

Nonetheless, despite Marwan Barghouti's withdrawal, there will be confusion in the minds of some voters, particularly those in Gaza, who may vote for Dr. Mustafa Barghouti thinking they are voting for Marwan Barghouti. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is much better known on the West Bank than he is in Gaza.

It should be noted that there are no important candidates in the race for president now representing those who wish to continue the intifada. But Marwan Barghouti, in withdrawing, made plain that he expected Abbas to continue the struggle.

Abbas is the candidate of choice for Israel and the United States, in expectation that he will end the violent response of Palestinians to the occupation. Only if Israel continues her violent retaliations and assassinations will Abbas face a situation where he may be unable to stop the young guerrillas who have been blooded in the most recent intifada.

The new Israeli national coalition government will also have strong contradictory impulses built into it, with Shimon Peres on one side and Ariel Sharon and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish colonists on the other. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Sharon to step back and find other means than violent retaliation to respond to any major incidents. Abbas needs breathing room to build an effective security service. In the present atmosphere it seems almost impossible to conceive of joint Palestinian-Israeli patrols, an effective tool during the Oslo process.

Palestinian and Israeli commentators agree that Abu Mazen has so far made not a single misstep. He has even visited Kuwait, once a great supporter of the Palestinian cause, and apologized for the mistake the Palestine Liberation Organization made in 1990 by supporting Saddam Hussein.

It is interesting to compare the losses of civilians and "insurgents" in Iraq, which number some 15,000 to 20,000 in a population of 25 million. The Palestinian West Bank and Gaza population is about 1/10th of that. Palestinian families have lost the equivalent, when compared to Iraq, of 35,000 killed and some 200,000 hospitalized. More and more, the juxtaposition of Palestinian elections on January 9th and Iraqi elections on January 30th represents the most crucial test yet of the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East and around the world.

It is probably a safe bet that the Palestinian elections will be accompanied by much less violence than the elections in Iraq. But both elections are only the beginning of a very long and difficult phase in American relations with the Middle East.

Council for the National Interest <[e-mail]>

[Moses]

The Palestinian Election: What You Can Do
"Washington Wednesday" Action Alert

Start Date: Wednesday, January 5
End Date: Monday, January 10


Action Requested:
Contact your Members of Congress, the State Department, and the White House and ask that the United States work to insure that the election for a new president of the Palestinian Authority is a first step toward Palestinian freedom from Israel's illegal military occupation.

Contact Information: <br>Contact information for your Members of Congress is at: www.congress.org/ or call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 or 800-839-5276.

Contact the Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs at the State Department at [e-mail] or 202-647-3672.

Contact the White House by phone at 202-456-111, by fax at 202-456-2461 or by email at [e-mail]

Background Information:
On January 9, Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem are scheduled to cast a ballot to elect a new president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to replace Yassir Arafat, the former president of the PA, who died in November.

Talking Points:
* The transition from one elected president of the Palestinian Authority to another is an important milestone in the development of Palestinian democratic institutions.  The Palestinian people are to be congratulated for conducting a contested, democratic election while living under a harsh foreign military occupation.

* The commitment of the Palestinian people to democracy must be honored by enabling them to exercise self-determination; however, Israel's illegal 37 year-old military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, which is supported militarily, economically, and diplomatically by the United States, prevents the Palestinian people from living in freedom.

* Democracy cannot be exercised without freedom.  The United States must work to insure that the Palestinian election is a steppingstone toward ending Israel's military occupation and the illegal policies -- i.e. land expropriations, the building of walls and settlements, collective punishment, extra-judicial assassinations, targeting of civilians -- associated with it.

* President Bush has stated that one of the goals of his administration is to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East.  In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy he asked: "Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free." (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html)  Now is the time for the president to act on his conviction by promoting freedom for the Palestinian people by ending US support for Israel's military occupation.

[Moses]

While many press accounts regarding Israelis and Palestinians have struck a hopeful note of late, the struggle continues for those who live with the conflict every day. Take, for example, Anan al-Attira, Nablus' Health Director, whose journey to try and get to the American Consulate in Jerusalem was chronicled recently in the New York Times. Al-Attira, as a "Palestinian from Nablus" can't "travel to Jerusalem to the American Consulate there, let alone to Tel Aviv." Instead she must pass "four checkpoints to reach Jericho," then cross "the bridge to Jordan" where she can finally "fly from there" to Jerusalem. Once there, it "was only after waiting five days in Amman that the American Embassy agreed to grant her...visa to take up her invitation from the State Department." Situations such as these will no doubt be made even more difficult if there are more measures such as those recently noted in the Mideast Mirror, which states that of late the Israeli government has sequestered 12 thousand dunums (one dunum equals 1000 square meters) "from the lands of 12 Palestinian villages" and has annexed "them to the largest West Bank settlement."  According to the article, this "serves to separate the Northern West Bank from its Southern part," furthering the disconnect between different Palestinian communities. -- aaiusa.org

[Moses]

Occupied Elections in Jerusalem
Aaron Lakoff, Sunday, 09/01/2005 - 15:04


 <br>http://aaron.resist.ca/?q=node/20

By Aaron Lakoff
Jerusalem - January 9th, 2005


Miraculously, I awoke at 6:30am this morning. Izzy, the British girl I asked to wake me up, didn’t even need to. I groggily rolled out of my bunk and headed to a quick ISM meeting in the tea room of the hostel.

We decided that we were going to split up into groups of three and head out to the different polling stations located at post offices in East Jerusalem.

The first station we got to was a few blocks away from our hostel, a large post office called Al-Saladin. Palestinians of all shapes and stripes were beginning to arrive at 7:00am, and there were just as many (if not more) internationals, journalists, and foreign observers. This was going to be quite the show.

The first crazy incident of the day happened at about 7:15am. A man with a bright red kafiyeh showed up at started to aggressively hand out simple flyers in Arabic. The flyers were a religious message encouraging people not to vote. Many of the middle-aged men in line were clearly offended and started to shove the man. A fight almost broke out, but the PA security came out to clear it up and remove the man handing out the flyers. Later on, we found the ripped up flyers scattered about the sidewalk.

As the morning unfolded, things seemed to be going smoothly to an unscrutinizing eye. Palestinians were lining up, going in, and coming out. We had heard rumors of a large settler protest to take place against the elections in Jerusalem, but no sign was to be seen. We felt kind of strange standing there with our “International Human Rights Observer” badges on, as nothing out of the ordinary was happening yet.

All of the sudden, a motorcade of 3 or 4 giant SUV’s pulled up, and out stepped former US President Jimmy Carter and his entourage. They were immediately swamped by reporters and the strobe show of one thousand camera flashes. They headed straight into the polling station. A group of Palestinian boys were very excited that I snapped a close-up of Carter.

On his way out, he made a statement saying there were too many observers around, and they were preventing Palestinians from voting. What about the difficulty of holding an election under occupation, eh Jimmy?

More and more now, we were seeing how many Palestinians were being turned away without a vote because they weren’t on the lists. They were really pissed off, and they deserved to be. Even though there were PA-sponsored vans waiting to drive rejected voters to alternate polling stations, hardly anyone seemed to be getting into them. As one man said later on in the day, “This is my home! I was born in Jerusalem! Why can’t I vote here?” Those who can’t vote at Al-Saladin are unsympathetically given a white rejection slip and told to move on.

Of the people we spoke with, many were voting for Abbas, but weren’t too hopeful. One 17-year old I talked to who voted says Abbas is “not too good, not too bad.” That seemed to be a popular sentiment.

A few hours later, another group came to relieve us, and we headed to the Jaffa gate post office. This is where the trouble really started.

This time at the Jaffa gate, far fewer Palestinians were showing up to vote. We heard that not one person had been able to vote there in the morning, and by the end of the day, only four people had been able to. Seeing the people coming out of the station with faces of dismay, it was easy to believe that.

Unfortunately, as we suspected, settlers and ultra-right wing Zionists began to arrive one by one. Some of them were from a settler radio station, Arutz Sheva (or Israel National News), and tried to interview visible solidarity activists.

Everything people have told me about the settlers appears to be true. I hate generalizing, but the ones here were crazy, crazy people. First of all, they wear those orange stars of David on their clothes to evoke images of Jewish persecution in the Holocaust in order to protest the Gaza disengagement. How disgusting. The stars say “settler” on them. They are horribly offensive, especially to me as a Jew. These people are the extreme of the extreme.

They ask you leading questions and try to put words into your mouth. They call you racist. They call you a looser. They call Palestinians terrorists. They shout at you, and they accuse you of collaborating in the Holocaust, all with a snide grin on their faces. It takes a lot of courage and stamina to face them down, even to ignore them! My heart goes out to Palestinians on a regular basis.

As there were fewer and fewer Palestinians showing up to vote, and more and more settlers, we decided to head back to the hostel for a quick break.

By the end of the day, the East Jerusalem voting process had been rendered a complete disaster by the Israeli authorities. Thankfully we heard reports that voting went smoothly in other parts of the West Bank and Gaza, where it was actually Palestinians and not Israelis controlling the Palestinian elections. By 2:30pm, some of the voter rejection problems in the city had been cleared up, but it was too little to late for many Jerusalemites, ripped-off from their democratic rights. As night fell, we discuss the day’s activities and await the imminent victory of Abu Mazen, the new winner of an occupied election for an occupied people.


To view my pictures from the day's events, visit:
gallery.cmaq.net/album21

aaron.resist.ca
Aaron in Palestine