AJC Mideast Briefing

Where Did We Go Wrong? Reevaluating the Design for Regional Democratization after the Hamas Victory A Weekly Briefing on Israeli and Middle Eastern Affairs January 30, 2006 Dr. Eran Lerman Director Israel/Middle East Office It looked like the real thing. In procedural terms, ranging from the technical aspects of managing the lists to the absence of armed men within sight of the voting booths, the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 25 were almost exemplary: The former Czech ambassador to Israel, our friend Daniel Kummerman, who served as an international observer in the village of Salfit, told me that there were hardly any problems worth reporting, and his colleagues, led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, concurred. Interestingly enough, no one claimed that Israeli actions warped the outcome in any way. In some respects it was, indeed, the real thing. Moreover, it passed the one crucial test without which no democratic evolution can ever be said to have fully matured: It threw out a party in power through the ballot box. (There are democracies in good standing, such as post-1945 Japan, where this has yet to happen.) If one is in need of a silver lining, as a dark cloud rises over our immediate horizon and the prospects for peace recede beyond reach, it is this message from the Palestinian people, now aimed at the would-be Hamas political leadership: Fail us as Fatah did, and we can do the same thing to you. Yet for the time being, this is meager consolation for a major political disaster. Moreover, serious questions arise as to whether this was indeed a democratic exercise as we know it elsewhere. After all, the two key lists that competed for the Palestinian vote would both have been beyond the pale in any functional civil society: One, the so-called "Reform" list (a thin disguise for Hamas), represented an armed terrorist organization that blatantly refused to lay down its weapons. It won 30 out of 66 general national seats, which indicates that it does not yet have a full majority hold on public opinion; but it swept, by a huge margin, the local first-past-the-gate seats, beating a highly fragmented alternative and taking 46 out of 66 seats, thus ending up with a solid majority—76 out of 132—in the aggregate. The Fatah list—led, we should remember, by Marwan Bargouthi, a man serving five consecutive life sentences for murder—garnered 27 seats on the national level, coming a close second, but only 16 in the districts. Perhaps the saddest commentary on the Palestinian condition is that the one list led by a true reformer, who in fact did much to fight corruption (the issue often cited as the reason for the Hamas victory over the thieving hierarchy of Fatah politicians), to save the Palestinian economy from ruin, and thus to secure the livelihood of many of his countrymen—namely, former finance minister Salam Fayyad and his Third Way list— ended up with only two seats. Seven went to left-wing factions at the national level, and four to local independent candidates. There should be no illusions as to the nature of the organization that now stands to gain power, led by Khaled Mash`al in Damascus and Isma'il Hanniyah in Gaza: It is a highly disciplined and ideologically driven Islamist movement, splattered with the blood of hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians (as well as Palestinians killed deliberately—as "collaborators"—or because of Hamas's utter disregard for human life on both sides). It is, as its covenant asserts, dedicated not only to the eradication of Israel as a state, but also—as we have seen on a daily basis in their parallel educational system—to the dehumanization of the Jews and the denigration of all liberal values. It is now making some semi-conciliatory noises; after all, there can be no life in Gaza, literally speaking, without Israeli supplies and international aid, and Hamas leaders will soon find out that their boasts about "disengaging" from the "Zionist entity" and from the West are empty words. No amount of Iranian subsidies (which can, in fact, be blocked, since what they buy also flows through Israel) can compensate the Palestinian people for the losses they might sustain if Hamas actually were to choose a confrontational course. Yet even if the so-called "hudna" or ceasefire is upheld, and "practical" attitudes are put forward (Hamas might even seek to create a cabinet in which nonpartisan "technocrats" like Fayyad would hold the portfolios that require daily interaction with Israel), no one should be misled. We have heard such music from totalitarians before. In terms of the key purposes of the "War on Terror"—or more properly, the war against Islamist totalitarianism, whether the latter comes in the versions propagated by Osama bin Ladin, by Hamas leader Ahmad Yassin (killed by Israel in 2004 after the terror attack on the Ashdod port), or by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—we have all suffered a major defeat. How did this happen? What went wrong with the application of the noble prospect of democratization in the region? At this stage, little more than initial "lessons learned" can be offered. Yet here are three reflections on the broader aspects of this crisis: Movements with guns should never have been allowed to be legitimized at the ballot box. Compromises on this subject had already been made in Iraq and, of course, in Lebanon—motivated by the natural urge to glorify the democratic gains in both countries; and then this pattern went slippery-sloping into the Palestinian arena. Those who overruled the Israeli reservations in this regard did the Palestinian people no service. Elections should come last, not first, in what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once called the "generational" effort to transform the political culture of the Middle East. The understandable political urge to see "purple fingers" lifted in the air, celebrating the act of voting, should not have obscured the need to build first the foundational institutions and conditions—the rule of law, rights of women (now in serious danger in the Palestinian context—not to mention what may befall gays, already a hunted sector of their society), the emergence of a self-sustaining middle class in the context of a free-market economy. None of these powerful guarantees against the prospect of "one man, one vote, one time"—i.e., the abuse of the ballot box for a totalitarian takeover—were put in place in time for this electoral rendezvous with an uncertain fate. Finally, or initially, the e-word—education—remains the key. For too long, not only the Palestinian Authority (which did make some feeble attempts at reform, which are now likely to be erased or radically reversed by a Hamas administration), but Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as the more radical Arab states—not to mention Iran—got away with teaching their young a creed of dehumanization, divorced from modernity and shot through with conspiracy theories. The troubling aspect of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial, in this context, is not what he said, but that he thought it would make him popular among millions in the region—and apparently, he was right. The time has come for the West, facing the ugly result of these years of mind-poisoning, to come to grips with this core issue. Aid and strategic backing, powerful tools of influence, should be shaped to ensure that regional governments get the message. Speaking before a joint session of the U.S. Congress on December 26, 1941, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill, addressing the failure to prevent World War II, said: "Duty and prudence alike command... that the germ-centers of hatred and revenge should be constantly and vigilantly surveyed and treated in good time." The language may sound strange to our ears today, but the warning is as apt as it was then.

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