Hamas Wins Palestinian Elections

international | politics / elections | opinion/analysis

Friday January 27, 2006 11:11

by Dave - swp

HAMAS WINS PALESTINIAN ELECTIONS

HAMAS WINS PALESTINIAN ELECTIONS

In a major upset, Hamas has won the Palestinian election in a landslide winning
76 of the 132 seats.
Fatah, the party led until his death by Yasser Arafat, and which has dominated
Palestinian politics for 40 years, was pushed into a poor second place winning
just 43 seats.
But those voices in the West who have been demanding “democratisation” of the
Middle East were far from willing to accept the outcome. What they wanted to see
in the Palestinian Bantustans was a pliant strongman who would follow Arafat in
agreeing to yet further concessions to Israel while putting down more brutally
than even Arafat managed opposition to Israel’s demands. In other words a
pro-Western puppet that would oversee the continued humiliation of the
Palestinian people.
What they got was the rage of the mass of Palestinians.
Bush’s denounciation of Hamas as terrorists and his demand that they “renounce
violence” is sickening hypocrisy. This is the same Bush who is leading a war
against Iraq that a new report in the British medical journal Lancet claims has
killed between 150-250,000 Iraqis.
Last week the US bombed a house inside Pakistan, in which 17 innocent people
including women and little children were killed. This was justified as a failed
effort to kill one alleged Al Qaeda leader who wasn't even there.
Socialists oppose indiscriminate blowing up of Israeli civilians, but as Dave
Lindorf notes in his piece on counterpunch.org, “That's exactly what the Israeli
government has its military forces do--blow up and gun down Palestinian
civilians--only Israel has bigger weapons.”
Founded as a specifically Jewish state, Israel was inevitably built on “ethnic
cleansing”, discrimination, brutality and expansionism. It required making
non-persons of the Palestinians. Former Israeli PM Golda Meir, famously said
“There is no such thing as Palestinians”.
The Zionist enterprise could only be realised with the backing of the dominant
imperialism seeking a pro Western ally in the region. The British at the end of
the First World War promised to back a Jewish state in Palestine in the Balfour
Declaration. Winston Churchill remarked that it could become “our little Ulster”
in the region. From 1948 the American government has showered Israel with
military and other aid—it has been the largest recipient of US aid for decades.
Always on hand to veto a UNSC resolution or to deny the IDF’s war crimes, to
cover up for Tel Aviv’s nukes, the US government has been Zionism’s protector.
For these reasons we in the Socialist Workers Party have always opposed the
state of Israel. We have argued that the only long-term solution is a secular,
democratic state in Palestine for all, Jew, Arab, and others, where all have
equal rights.
Many Western liberals and even leftists will be appalled that Palestinians have
apparently made a decisive lurch towards Islamism. But the move is entirely
understandable. The corrupt and collaborationist Fatah movement has failed,
meekly accepting the Oslo Accords and more as Israel continually moved the goal
posts of any settlement.
The poverty and degradation in the overcrowded and squalid refugee camps of the
occupied territories, the continuous murderous attacks from Israeli tanks and
helicopter gun ships, the “Aparheid Wall” eating into the West Bank, the water
and land stolen, the houses and farms bulldozed; the hours waiting at
checkpoints have fed a seething hatred of their conditions.
Israel hoped that such oppression would so demoralise the Palestinians that they
could force them to accept a stone in place of a loaf of bread. But that changed
with the intifada. By standing up and fighting, Palestinians found a new dignity
and a renewed strength to resist.
As elsewhere, the rise of Islamism is a reflection of the failure of secular
movements for change. The PLO refused to attempt to unite the mass of the
working class and the poor in the Middle East against the corrupt pro-Western
stooge Arab regimes. Instead it constantly searched for diplomatic favour from
the UN and those very regimes.
In the midst of poverty the welfarism of Hamas won it many supporters and among
degradation and corruption its religious zeal and uncompromising hostility to
Israel brought it admiration. It is not necessary to support appalling suicide
bombs on civilians to understand that armed resistance to occupation is
legitimate.
However Hamas’s problems are only now beginning. Having won the election and
facing Fatah’s refusal to join them in government, they too will now be put to
the test. Serious divisions within Hamas are likely to open up now it is the
governing party. The US and Israel have declared they will have nothing to do
with a Hamas led government unless it lays down its arms and gives in.
The Palestinian people have elected their leaders. They will be watching them
and seeking lessons from the experience. It is unlikely Hamas can win where
Fatah failed. If this precipitates debates and fresh thinking among Palestinians
and others in the Middle East about what sort of politics can measure up to the
challenge of winning liberation and equality, there can be progress.
In the meantime we must demand that the US and the West keeps out, that further
Israeli aggression is loudly opposed and that the EU not be allowed cut off its
meager aid to the Palestinian Authority because it doesn’t like the political
complexion of the election’s victors.