October 1, 2003:
Mohammed's younger brother
Issam was seriously injured
and was taken to the hospital
about a week ago. His leg
was amputated and he is
undergoing medical treatment.

October 18, 2003:
Mohammad's younger brother,
Hussam [17 yrs old], was killed
by the Israeli army today.

Hussam was sitting at home
when he was shot in the face,
chest, back, legs. He had
nothing to do with any violent
or even political movement.

Hussam's crime is that he was
a Palestinian.

— The Webmaster

Election under occupation

The outcome was never in doubt, but the
prospects for peace are still uncertain

http://www.vermontguardian.com/global/0904/GazaElection.shtml

Special to the Vermont Guardian
Posted January 13, 2005

RAFAH, GAZA STRIP — “Taxi, taxi! Gaza City?” The young man, probably a university student, was trying to flag down a taxi in Rafah. He was leaning into the window of a battered orange Mercedes cab that was long past its youth. The driver looked as elderly and worn as his vehicle. “Gaza City?” the young man repeated.

The gray-haired driver had as many lines in his face as a map of the world. But appearances, as you discover throughout Gaza, can be misleading. Thanks to a poor diet, little access to medical care, and the relentless Gaza sun, people here can look decades older than their real years.

“Gaza City?” his would-be passenger tried for the third time. “I’m trying to get to class.”

“No, no,” the old man answered, “I won’t go to Gaza City. Why should I be tormented by the soldiers at the checkpoints, wreck my taxi a little more on the damaged roads? And if we do get through, I can end up losing money.”

“How do you lose money?” asked the young man.

“Well,” the taxi owner conceded, “maybe not a total loss, but at least 90 percent of the fare I can charge you burns up in my gas tank – if I can even get petrol.”

“It’s going to get better,” said the student. “Once Mahmoud Abbas is elected president.”

“Maybe,” said the driver. “Inshallah, God willing, we can hope he’ll stop this terrible occupation, the daily shelling, the bulldozers on our streets.”

“Inshallah,” repeated the student, opening the passenger door.

“Maybe we could buy petrol again at a decent price.”

Now the young man was inside the taxi, haggling over his destination from a better vantage point. Or, quite possibly, mulling over the election prospects.

Throughout Gaza in the last few weeks, variations on this conversation could be heard everywhere — on the street, in stores and cafés, every place Palestinians gather. All of the West Bank and Gaza was caught up in the presidential election, virtually every standing wall and building full of posters and campaign slogans. Every one of the seven candidates, even the marginal ones, filled the streets of the cities, towns, and refugee camps with banners and posters, all with similar sentiments: “End the Occupation!,” “Yes to equality!,” “Hand by hand to end corruption,” and, “Saving bread, health, work.”

Frontrunner Mahmoud Abbas was the clear winner by a wide margin in the Jan. 9 voting, an outcome that surprised no one. Popularly known as Abus Mazen, the Fatah Party leader quickly promised to reform the Palestinian Authority, improve security, and resume negotiations with Israel.

On the surface, the election process gave every appearance of being fully democratic, but democracy functions uneasily in the midst of a military occupation. The seven presidential candidates visited most of the cities and refugee camps in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, but not without some scuffles and harassment and Orwellian logic at the Israeli checkpoints. Israel supports the democratic process, it assured the world, and the candidates could travel to campaign freely — as long as they had Israeli permission.

Mustapha Al Barghouti, who trailed Abbas by a large margin, visited the most devastated areas of Rafah where the occupation has left its brutal calling card on acres of destroyed neighborhoods and on the faces of the injured children in the hospitals. Not surprisingly, given his background as a pediatrician, Al Barghouti’s stump speech concentrated on the importance of Gaza’s children, how they deserve a life without constant depression and suffering, and urging people to build on the sacrifices they have made during four years of Intifada. A pragmatic moderate, Al Barghouti was warmly received, even though virtually every person you speak to in Rafah will tell you that he had no hope of winning.

The election seemed to have a strange double face for most Palestinians. You heard plenty of wry jokes that it was wasteful for Abbas to keep plastering his photos all over Palestine. “By hook or by crook,” people laughed, “he’s going to be elected.” Palestinian voters were serious about their voting, yet thoroughly convinced that the Israeli media was determined to exploit the obligatory footage of Palestinians lining up at voting centers. Democracy, staged for the cameras, takes on talismanic significance in the eyes of the world.

The election results were a foregone conclusion before the official campaigning even began, when Abbas became the only candidate fielded by the late President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah Party. His only serious rival, Marwan Al Barghouti, known in the West Bank as the “Father of the Intifada” and serving several life sentences in an Israeli jail, announced his candidacy, then withdrew at the last moment. Many people speculated that the Fatah leadership pressured Marwan Al Barghouti not to run. An inconclusive election result, or a Marwan Al Barghouti victory, could play into the hands of the Israelis, who spent years declaring that as long as Arafat remained in power, there was “no partner for peace.”

If Al Barghouti, branded as a terrorist by the Israelis, became Palestine’s president, it would be an invitation for the Sharon government to retreat to its “no partner for peace” stance.

Some political analysts claimed that the field of candidates didn’t represent the full spectrum of Palestinian opinion. The Islamist parties, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, refused to field candidates; they felt it would require too direct a relationship with Israel and the United States. Other militant groups, such as Popular Front for Palestinian Liberation, the Democratic Front for Palestinian Liberation, and a few independent candidates did enter the race. While the hard-line Islamist view was not officially represented, 84 percent of adult Palestinians registered to vote.

Israel declared strong support for the democratic process in Palestine, but refused the Palestinian Authority’s request for 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners to vote. In this case, democracy required the permission of an occupying army.

“I predict that the voter turnout in the presidential election will be much lower than in the upcoming parliamentary elections,” said Mohammed Halayka, a foreign election observer. The West Bank and Gaza were full of election observers from many countries. Most of those in Gaza came from the European Union.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have declared their intentions to enter candidates in the parliamentary races, hoping to become an official voice in Palestinian civil society. A recent survey from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 65 percent of the adults from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank intended to vote for Abbas. Mustapha Al Barghouti was projected to receive 22 percent, while the other five candidates combined were estimated to have support among just 5 percent of likely voters.

Indeed, in campaign speeches, Abbas sounded less like a candidate looking for votes and more like a president-elect rallying the populace behind him. He made a deliberate effort to reach out to the militant groups, although he also had harsh words for the continuing rocket attacks on the Gaza Israeli settlements, urging the fighters “not to give Israel more reasons to attack us.”

Only few hours after a speech by Abbas on Jan. 5, Israel shelled 8 children, all from one family in North Gaza near Beit Lahia refugee camp. The children ranged in age from 11 to 17. They were reportedly working on the family farm picking strawberries at the time. Israeli claimed that it was going after armed militants; according to early wire service reports, an Associated Press photographer saw children among the dead.

In a separate incident, a 24-year-old Palestinian man was killed and five were wounded in the East of Gaza. In Rafah Refugee Camp, 17-year-old Rezeq Musleh was killed by Israeli gunfire while he was hanging a poster of Al Barghouti on the wall of his house. All of this came on the heels of incursions into Khan Younis and Jebalya in northern Gaza.

After the attacks, the usually moderate Abbas condemned “militarizing the Intifada.” For the first time, he spoke out bluntly against “the Zionist enemy.” Abbas also visited Khan Younis, scene of recent devastating incursions, and used the harshest language of his campaign. “We pray for the souls of our martyrs who fell today in the Zionist enemy’s tank shelling in Beit Lahia,” he said.

Israel Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said he was “deeply concerned” by Abbas’s remarks. The Israelis seemed non-plussed that the front-running presidential candidate had openly embraced pro-Palestinian positions. During his campaign, Abbas talked tough both to the Palestinian militants and the Israeli government.

Although it is widely assumed that Abbas has both the Israel and U.S. “seal of approval,” that relationship may not hold up well under the pressure of daily attacks on civilians. In the end, the prospects for peace will depend, as they always have, not on speeches but on events in Palestine’s ravaged streets and alleys.

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