The victory of Hamas in yesterday’s Palestinian election has elicited anxious statements from the White House and the EU. But that’s democracy after all, and although they tried, the West can’t decide who wins. And despite all the hype, it is very unclear what victory for Hamas means. In this excellent article, veteran Occupied Territories correspondent Graham Usher argues that, “Hamas has gone mainstream, moving from a movement of parallel or alternative political authority to the existing PA/PLO political system to one of participation and integration within it”. In fact, with their anti-corruption message, pragmatic views on the economy, and willingness to enter the democratic process, Hamas look very much like the reform movements the West has welcomed so wholeheartedly in other parts of the region. This is the Ukraine’s Orange Revolution dressed in green.
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On the other hand Hamas remains publicly committed to the destruction of Israel, whereas Fatah was at least nominally on board the peace process. In other words, what we have here is the Palestinian people, with eyes wide open, electing the pro-war party over the pro-peace one.
Regardless of whether that was their primary motivation for choosing Hamas, the upshot is that a war between two democratically elected governments may well be in the offing. So much for the old saw - often repeated by the Bush administration to promote its policy of "democratic evangelism" - that this sort of thing just doesn't happen.
Hope you are right. But we know all too well that democracies can survive for a while with anti-system parties in the mainstream, until they implode.
Time will tell, and sooner, I suspect, rather than later. As for "a war between two democratically elected governments may well be in the offing", well, what shall we call the state that they've been in for the last several years? At any rate, the Hamas victory was birthed by Israel. If Israel had really worked with Fatah, would Hamas have been so successful? And frankly, I think it's a good development. It's not like the system we had was working.
As G says Israel's refusal to engage with Fatah left them without any kind of program. Hamas was able to claim the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza as a victory because Fatah had no part in the process. Compare this to the massive legitimacy accrued to Arafat during the Oslo process, when he negotiated the Gaza/Jericho first deal.
That said, the fact that Fatah needed Israel to bolster their position speaks to how isolated from their society they had become. And Hamas played on that, by painting the PA as incompetent and corrupt (all too true). Having won something of a negative victory, however, it remains to be seen whether Hamas have the ideas to sustain political leadership in the long term.
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