Dealing with democracy

The success of the Islamist movement is not attributed to any one single issue. Rather, it is a result of numerous variables that ultimately, (however one decides to synthesize them), highlight the democratic inclinations of the Palestinian people — a people that continue to live under a brutal apartheid like occupation.

This is not the sole conclusion of Arabian Business but the underlying belief of former US president Jimmy Carter, who was an official observer of the elections in the Palestinian territories.

The situation that led to this enormous victory, where Hamas won 76 seats out in the 132-member Parliament, is multi-layered and complex. This is representative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Everybody is still confused. Even Hamas did not want this result. It was a swing, a very sharp swing from one side to another. People wanted the swing but they wanted to aim at the centre, not to go that far,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian democracy activist and a candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority in 2005.

“If you take the historical impact of what has happened, it is as if the Palestinians recognised Israel, after agreeing on Oslo and then Israel retreated,” he continues.

“Israel practically cancelled Oslo and brought Likud into power. It’s an historical reaction from Palestinians going back to the same place where we were, before Oslo.”

The Palestinian people, (around 77% of them), were not voting for more suicide bombings, as some in Israel and Washington believe. Their sweeping verdict was essentially about the endemic living standards in the territories, where more than half of them live on less than US$2 a day.

The election of Hamas is also about unfulfilled expectations and unrealised dividends from years of peace talks with Israel, which chose to disavow itself of its obligations under the Oslo framework that brought the late Arafat and his clique in exile, back to the territories.

At the start, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank gave Arafat and his Palestinian Authority the benefit of the doubt. But with the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, (killed by an Israeli fanatic), peace became elusive. A right wing government came to power in Israel with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, arguably in reaction to suicide bombings on the eve of that election carried out by Hamas. Those attacks were the first of their kind and were meant to scuttle a peace process that Hamas was adamantly opposed to.

But then there was also widespread corruption that had become symptomatic of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the nepotism that typified Arafat’s mode of operations. The prevalence of corruption in the PA along with the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister by Israelis in 2001, who then reoccupied territories that were handed back to the Palestinians within the Oslo agreement, exacerbated Palestinian resentment and opened the door to an alternative. Thus, Hamas enters.

“The key element’s of Hamas’ success was that it managed to appeal to a large number of constituents who do not necessarily endorse its policies, agenda or ideology, but came to see it as a combination of two things: the processed vehicle of choice against the corruption and mismanagement and the failure to realise the political vision of the PA. Sharon has now created dominant Islamist movements in the Arab world, Hezbollah in Lebanon and now Hamas in Palestine,” explains Mouin Rabbani, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a respected think tank.

But Barghouti believes Palestinians may have gone too far with their overwhelming support for Hamas. “I don’t think people wanted exactly this result. They wanted to punish Fatah, they wanted to punish the Palestinian Authority, they wanted a more balanced political system to end the monopoly of one party but they practically ended up giving a monopoly to another party,” he says.

The Islamist movement, which traces its roots back to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was originally supported and effectively nurtured by Israel to counterbalance Arafat’s influence. But much like Afghanistan, where guerrillas supported by the US against the Soviets came back to haunt them under the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, the same happened with Israel and Hamas.

Hezbollah was an organization that was born amid Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982. Backed backed by the majority of Lebanese, Hezbollah effectively became a resistance movement that fought the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

Similarly, in the late 1980s when the first intifada or uprising began in the occupied Palestinian territories and Hamas began to assert itself; it remained independent of Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

But the movement’s recruits soared and ostensibly Hamas took cue from its cousin in Lebanon and operated along similar lines delivering basic social services, providing health care, education, welfare services and recently a television station that ultimately allowed it to attain considerable support at the polls.

“The difference between Hamas and Hezbollah is that in Hezbollah’s case there wasn’t the kind of direct encouragement and direct relations that you would have seen with the Muslim brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s,” explains Rabbani of the ICG.

Israel’s elimination of ‘the PLO’ in Lebanon in the 1980s was the main factor that facilitated the emergence and subsequent domination of Hezbollah. [Similarly], what Sharon did in the last five years in the occupied territories: the destruction of the PA and leaving none of its political programme intact, made it clear that there will not be a negotiated end of the occupation … [and this] made Hamas the alternative choice,” he adds.

But what are the implications of the new realities on the ground now? The Palestinians are still coming to grips with the seismic earthquake of the recent elections. But at the leadership level, the Palestinians have demonstrated the cohesiveness of the political system.

The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, immediately issued a statement saying the results were legitimate. The Palestinian prime minister and his government tended their resignations. The secularist group Fatah, which has dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s, now has to live together with Hamas’ Islamist ideology.

Abu Mazen, who will serve out his four-year mandate as Palestinian president, will now coordinate with Hamas as it vies to form a new cabinet and nominate a prime minister. Hamas is not averse to working with Abu Mazen. As Rabbani of the ICG explains, “They have always had a soft spot for him. There are two things in particular they like about him: his honesty and his weakness.”

It is likely that Hamas will try hard to work with Abu Mazen. In their view, he showed real leadership before the vote by insisting that it go ahead despite significant pressure from within Fatah circles to have the vote postponed.

“If anything, he was swimming against the tide. Once the vote was concluded he could have very easily called the results into question but he came out with a very clear statement that the result has to be respected. This will only increase Hamas’ willingness to continue working with him,” explains Rabbani, adding:

“Hamas was not expecting this victory and now having to become the government of the PA is a challenge enough. The last thing they now need is a vacuum in the presidency as well.”
However, Fatah has refused to enter into a coalition government with Hamas. But the Islamist movement’s desire to pursue an inclusive strategy as it scopes out its cabinet is encouraging.

“They called for partnership with Fatah because they see that there could be a real danger of transforming Fatah into a powerless opposition movement, which could potentially threaten their achievement at the ballot box,” explains Rabbani.

“So I think they will try very hard to accommodate Fatah, One advantage is that Fatah is internally divided. There could be situations where they are able to get at least significant sectors within that movement to join them. And failing that,” he says, “you will see them trying very hard to form coalitions; whether independents or more leftist forces.”

The road ahead for the new Palestinian government could prove more than bumpy, however. Members of the European Union and the U.S. are now faced with a dilemma, especially since all of these countries threatened to cut aid to Palestine if Hamas won during the pre-election campaigns.

But the new realities appear to have tempered the American administration. On her way to a conference in London, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted that Washington had not read the pulse of the Palestinian street correctly and adopted a more diplomatic ‘lets-wait-and-see’ stance.

“The US took a one-sided position with Israel and followed the Israeli narrative. Europe did as well. Europe was not as biased as the US but they bought into the Israeli narrative … and Sharon’s plans,” says Barghouti.

“The outcome was this reaction. In a way they kept saying we support democracy. [But] they didn’t support a democracy, they supported a corrupt regime and they supported the corrupt policies of the Israelis in the occupied territories.

“In a way this vote was a vote of protest against their policies,” he suggests.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leading Egyptian pro-democracy activist and a professor of Political Sociology at the American University in Cairo believes America has to live with the status quo.

“The lesson for the U.S. is that you can’t choose your partners. [There are] partners already in the field; they are [the] players. All you can do is find a formula to engage them,” he says.

Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington believes the US is going to work through deciding the parameters of its policy but will also try to bring in others to share those parameters.

“This is going to be an ongoing process. Anyone who has looked at Hamas over the last two decades recognises this has been a remarkably dynamic and responsive organisation that has a very keen sense of its environment and it will be a mistake on the part of the Americans, the Israelis and their allies, not to seize on the adaptability of the organization and try and get it to adapt in constructive ways,” says Alterman.

The cutting of aid is unlikely to take place. The Palestinian Authority’s financial condition is in tatters. The PA had a $69 million deficit in its budget for the month of January alone. The Palestinian economy is anaemic; it relies on aid from the EU, the World Bank, the US in addition to other countries and organisations that contribute close to a $1 billion annually. Cutting off that aid will very certainly trigger a humanitarian crisis that will serve to exacerbate the existing political malaise among Palestinians and almost ensure an eruption of violence. It will also push Hamas to seek an alternative to solve its cash flow problems.

“In that event, Hamas will turn to the Gulf States in the first instance and then other Islamic states,” explains Rabbani. “My suspicion is that if the US and EU cease to provide any funding to the Palestinians it’s going to make it that much more difficult for these other states. When you are talking about huge sums — and they have to be transferred to the occupied territories through the Israeli banking system — it’s a bit more complex than writing a cheque,” explains Rabbani.

“Hamas’ position is that they will seek to make the point that Western donor assistance to the Palestinians serves an Israeli interest. And the political interests of the donors themselves even more so — at least as much as it serves the Palestinian interest, and that severing this aid will pose as big a problem for the donors as it will for the Palestinians.” By doing so, Hamas will be trying to throw the ball back in the donor’s court and at the same time make clear to their own constituents that they are not responsible for the decrease in Western aid.

There are parts of funds that can be dispensed with. The most recent American assistance to the PA, around $200 million, was made on the provision that some of it be paid directly to the Israeli utility companies. A huge sum was deducted from that and given to Israel to build transit points in the wall. “That’s a kind of aid that most Palestinians will be happy to do without,” Rabbani points out.

The victory of Hamas also has implications for Israel. With Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in a coma, Israelis may now very well vote for right wing Likud to stay in office as opposed to his new Kadima party. Ehud Olmert, the present Israeli premier filling in for Sharon, has refused outright to talk to Hamas. “On the whole, Israel is going to deal with Hamas in essentially the same way it dealt with Abu Mazen and Arafat before him: Israel has yet to come across a legitimate Palestinian leader it considers a serious negotiating partner,” says Rabbani.

“This is a pattern that goes back to the 1920s with a partial exception of the immediate aftermath of Oslo. Israel prefers not to have a Palestinian partner because it understands it will never get one who will accede to its own ambitions and Palestinian territory.”

Notwithstanding the next few months, the Islamist movement has signalled its willingness to adopt a more pragmatic line than the one it has traditionally followed. And there is reason to believe it has the necessary calculus to follow through on its intentions. In the past 12 months, Hamas entered into a hudna, (or ceasefire) with Israel, and it has not carried out any suicide attacks. This is no mean feat when one considers there have been no peace talks for almost four years. Hamas’s officials in the occupied territories and in Damascus have said they have no qualms about entering into a permanent hudna if Israel honours UN Resolutions 242 and 338. [This requires Israel to withdraw from the borders of the 1967 war.] These were the exact demands of the late Yasser Arafat.

For her part, Israel refuses to deal with Hamas until the party recognises its existence, shuns violence, and amends its charter, which calls for its destruction. “Israel wants a ceasefire…If [it] wants to negotiate, [it] can but they will not get recognition for nothing,” Barghouti concludes.||**||