It's impossible to track political events in the Middle East with any consistency without coming up against a sense every so often that one is dealing with a theater of the absurd. The up-and-coming elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority - currently scheduled for January 25, 2006 - offer one such head-scratching, "This can't really be happening!" moment.



Never mind that elections were due in 1999, so that for almost seven years, the world has been attending to members of the Council as if they were democratically elected, when in fact their terms of office were expired. Never mind what happened when this writer interviewed an assistant of Ahmed Qurei, back in the days when Qurei was speaker of the Council. When the assistant was asked if he was excited about the possibility of voting in an election (the assumption being that they were going to have an election), he was actually heard to say (I kid you not), "We voted once, why do we need to vote again?"



Presumably Qurei himself, while he might have had similar opinions, would have been more politically savvy in his response. At the time, that comment provided a good clue to the depth of appreciation for democratic process extant in the Palestinian Authority, but it was, when all is said and done, mere kid stuff. It cannot compare with what is happening now.



A rallying cry has gone up from the Palestinian Authority and its apologists these days that is ostensibly pro-democracy. What is the cry? That attempts by Israel and Western democracies to interfere with the full participation of Hamas in the elections is "anti-democratic." On December 19, the PA-controlled paper Al-Ayyam pontificated in an editorial that only through permitting full electoral competition can democracy in the Palestinian Authority be achieved. Astonishingly, the International Herald Tribune put out a very similar editorial on December 22, to the effect that the greatest evil would be to interfere in the "democratic process."



Part of the problem here, I believe, is that an electoral polling process is being passed off as a "democratic process," with a conflation of that ostensible "democratic process" with "democracy" then taking place. This represents a couple of major jumps that can hardly be justified. Take a look at what has happened with this election to date: Fatah primaries in Gaza had to be stopped before they were completed because Fatah gunmen came in shooting and threatened to assassinate certain candidates; the officials responsible for running the primaries also feared for their safety. Following this, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas began making independent decisions about who would be on the Fatah list, with disregard for what the primaries indicated, thereby infuriating the young Turks, because their candidates were being pushed out as Abbas showed a marked preference for the old guard. This is democratic process?



But the heart of the matter, still, is the "right" of Hamas to run in the elections and the advisability of permitting this in the hallowed name of democracy. Every true democracy understands that rights are not absolute. For the sake of the common weal, limits must be imposed. For the sake of the preservation of the democratic state itself, participation in its government must be denied to those whose most deeply held principles run contrary to what a true democracy represents. There are, after all, inherent in the notion of democracy, principles such as respect for human rights and for law and order.



Hamas is an unrepentant terrorist organization, plain and simple. Its primary goal is the destruction of Israel and it advances violence in furtherance of that goal. Can a political entity that embraces such a party be seen in any terms as a democracy? Even an imperfect democracy-in-the-making? Has the world forgotten that Hitler was once "democratically elected," as well?



Why the rush to defend the PA's right to include Hamas in its elections and to frame this as an advance in "democratic process"?



It's clear to anyone who follows the antics of the PA that its chief representatives exhibit more than their fair share of audacity in the demands they routinely make. But this is perhaps the ultimate in chutzpah: when both the European Union and the US Congress hinted at a reduction in funding for the PA should Hamas win elections, the response from the PA was that this represented interference in internal PA affairs. Seems to me that the US and the EU have a right to allocate funds to whom they please.



© Arlene Kushner 2006