Palestinian Election

▪ 2007

      On Jan. 25, 2006, in a major political upheaval, the Islamist Hamas won a landslide victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election. Hamas, a fervently religious Islamic resistance movement, supplanted the secular Fatah party, which had held uninterrupted sway in Palestinian politics for nearly 40 years. The victory of the hard-line fundamentalists seemed likely to further erode prospects for an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians.

      Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats in the Legislative Council to Fatah's 45, with the remainder going to the Marxist Popular Front and various independent lists. In the Palestinian system half the seats are contested by proportional representation and half in constituencies. Hamas received only 44.45% of the popular vote to Fatah's 41.43% but secured its comfortable parliamentary majority by routing a disorganized Fatah in the districts. It was the first time Hamas had competed in a Palestinian national election—and the first time a party with ideological roots in the radical Muslim Brotherhood had come to power anywhere in the Middle East. In the outgoing Palestinian Legislative Council, Fatah and its allies held 68 of the 88 seats. Fatah's position was undermined by widespread charges of corruption. The allegations were given added resonance by young Fatah activists who set up a rival party called al-Mustaqbal, or “the Future.” On Dec. 28, 2005, the two Fatah lists agreed to merge under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti, the young activists' jailed leader, but this failed to arrest the anti-Fatah trend.

      The Hamas victory had major ideological, political, and diplomatic consequences. The movement's charter rules out negotiations with Israel and calls for jihad, or holy war, to establish Islamic control over all Palestinian land, including Israel. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time,” the document says.

      On March 29 Ismail Haniyeh was sworn in as prime minister of the new Hamas government. Soon tensions surfaced between him and Palestinian Pres. Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah over control of Palestinian armed forces and policy toward Israel. Haniyeh found himself caught between Abbas, who called for negotiations with Israel based on the internationally accepted “road map,” and the Syrian-based Hamas leadership abroad, led by Khaled Mashal, which insisted on ideological purity. Although Haniyeh adhered to the March 2005 tahdiya, or temporary lull in the fighting with Israel, he made no ideological concessions. Israel urged the international community to boycott Hamas and cut off direct funding to the Palestinian government unless it recognized Israel, accepted previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements, and renounced terror. By and large, the international community accepted the Israeli position. In the initial months of fundamentalist rule, the international dilemma was how to exert pressure on Hamas by withholding funds without causing a humanitarian catastrophe among the Palestinian people.

Leslie D. Susser

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