Unlike the prevalent spin in much of the global media, the victory by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in the Palestinian presidential election Sunday, is not really about a new opportunity for peace. It is, above all, a testament to the extraordinary human resilience, political determination, and moral clarity and depth of the Palestinian people. It is about Palestinian perseverance to confront the pain and suffering of modern history with a show of human dignity, a determination to affirm life’s bountiful promise of the ordinary pleasures of living a normal life.
The Palestinian people have just done something very striking that needs to be acknowledged and applauded. Despite years and decades of being occupied, exiled, ostracized, subjugated, disenfranchised, curfewed, penned in and surrounded by a wall like animals, attacked by jet fighters, imprisoned, unable to work or study normally, assassinated by Israeli snipers and rockets, restricted in their travel and movements within their own country, discriminated against by Israel and also in most Arab countries, expelled from their own and other communities and countries, and having their lands confiscated and their orchards destroyed, after all this and more the Palestinian people have just held what is universally acknowledged to be the most free and fair — and genuine — democratic election in the modern Arab world.
This should be the starting point for any wider analysis of where we go from here. For the election that was just held under the gaze of some 25,000 election monitors from Palestine and other countries must be appreciated as the positive flip side of those more controversial, problematic or unacceptable actions by some Palestinians against Israelis in recent years, including suicide bombings or rocket attacks against Israeli targets. The overwhelming Palestinian desire to live a normal life — unoccupied, unexpelled, unimprisoned, unkilled — was manifested in the election process, just as it has been manifested in the two intifadas of the past 16 years.
Democracy is perhaps the highest form of resistance, and democracy happened in Palestine Sunday effortlessly and indigenously. Credit goes to all the Palestinian people who engaged in this exercise, but especially to the candidates themselves, the electoral commission headed by Dr Hanna Nasir, and the many monitors and campaign workers who managed to carry off the feat under very difficult circumstances of Israel’s occupation and travel restrictions. This should totally silence the simplistic, even idiotic, claims by many in the West and Israel, including the highest American, British and Israeli leaders, that Palestinian “reform” is needed before negotiations for peace can resume between Israelis and Palestinians.
Palestinian society certainly needs improved practices in some political, economic and security sectors, but these are not the issues that have held up an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. The problem is not a “democracy deficit” among the Palestinians, for the world just witnessed the Palestinians holding a veritable democracy jamboree — organized on their own, within just weeks, managed smoothly, and even with the results of exit polls released by a Palestinian university within hours of the polls closing. This is not a people with a problem of political reform. This is a people with a problem of being occupied by Israel for 37 years (since the 1967 war) and denied national rights for 56 years (since the 1948 war in which Israel was created).
Ironically, Palestinian and Israeli societies can now engage each other as certifiably democratic cultures with equal legitimacy. Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon represent the wishes and concerns of their people. If they are true leaders they will now try to mobilize their societies to engage at a deeper and more productive level than as combatants on a perpetual field of battle. The Palestinian presidential election — and all that it represents in Palestinian aspirations, values and capabilities — provides a starting point for these two societies to re-engage each other in the diplomatic arena, but only a starting point. The Palestinians have accepted and passed with flying colors the false test that the world handed them: to prove that they are democrats whose values provide them entry into the modern world. Mission accomplished.
The onus is now on Israel to reciprocate, and to show that it, too, adheres to global standards of morality, legality and decency when it comes to coexistence with the Palestinians. The Palestinians have voted overwhelmingly for Abu Mazen, who advocates non-militarized resistance to Israel and resuming the peace process. It is the Israeli people’s turn to make a return gesture and show that they, too, want their deep humanity and rich moral values translated into national policy, as the Palestinians have just done. The Israeli people and government must rise to the challenge now and indicate quickly that they are serious about negotiating in good faith to end their occupation of the Palestinians and to resolve the Palestine refugee issue according to international legality and legitimacy, in a manner that allows both Jewish Israeli and Palestinian Arab states to live side by side, with integrity, security, sovereignty, and dignity.
Abu Mazen’s election as president of the Palestinian Authority is mainly about Palestinian values, aspirations, and capabilities. The world — especially the Palestinians — now awaits a reciprocal expression of Israeli values. Will Israel respond with more colonialism, settlements expansion, land expropriations, assassinations of young Palestinians resisting occupation, and bombings of urban quarters? Or will Israel finally grasp the historical futility of such sustained and violent militarism, and instead — as the Palestinians just did — send us its many fine democrats and humanists?
Rami G. Khouri is executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright © 2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 12 January 2005
Word Count: 916 words
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