BEIRUT — Their faces flashed across my television screen at home in Beirut Thursday evening like multiple choice answers to a quiz show question, “which of these three images best personifies the future values you want to define the Arab world?”
First there was Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, releasing another audio tape addressed to the American people. He repeated the same ideas and rationales he had offered the world many times before, threatened more violence against the U.S., but also offered a long-term truce. Then came U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, speaking again about the American-led “global war on terror”. He also repeated why the U.S. had to track down and kill terrorists around the world before they invaded America and destroyed Western civilization.
It was something of a political anthropology overload: to witness on the same day, Osama the moral troglodyte emerging from his cave, and Dick the collector of indictments emerging from his bunker, both delivering ideological sermons. Neither one was very convincing, or appealing. Their deadly, supposedly divinely-sanctioned, combination of arrogance and violence has elicited the rejection and active political resistance of virtually the entire world. And in any case, both these guys are already in some trouble with the law.
The third image on my television screen was more hopeful, and probably represented an option that most ordinary Arabs would choose to define their future. That television image was a live debate in Rafah, southern Gaza, among eight candidates running for the Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for January 25. (Mini-memo to Karen Hughes: it was carried live on Al-Jazeera television, so for the sake of promoting freedom and democracy it’s a good thing nobody bombed that pan-Arab satellite station a while ago).
The eight candidates, included several women and representatives of Hamas, Fateh and independent parties, spoke openly about the problems of their society and their proposed solutions. The audience, as is typical in Palestine after 38 years of harsh Israeli occupation and a decade of low quality Palestinian self-governance, was slightly disheveled, occasionally raucous, and often inattentive. But it was as authentic an expression of the Palestinian and Arab will to live in a sovereign, pluralistic, free democracy as we will ever see in this region.
The event reflected shared sentiments among all the candidates, who routinely criticized the corruption, incompetence, crime, and security laxity prevalent in the Palestinian territories managed by the Fateh-dominated Palestinian Authority. The debate also captured an ongoing historic trend in Palestine: the leading Islamist group Hamas is making a slow, steady ideological strategic shift that sees it focus primarily on meeting the day-to-day needs of its constituents, including local security, jobs, basic social services, and clean, responsive, accountable governance.
Hamas has not dropped its antagonism to Israel, its resistance to American hegemony, or its desire to see Islamic law and values define nation and society. But it has quietly let those three traditional core dimensions of its political program take a back seat to the more urgent needs of Palestine’s citizen-voters. Hamas, like Islamists everywhere in the Arab world, and politicians everywhere in the whole world, has recognized that its surest route to political success is responding to its constituents’ practical, local, day-to-day concerns.
This is why we should grasp two key points about the televised Palestinian election debate. The first was the imperturbable, almost heroic, determination of ordinary farmers, workers and mostly unemployed and poor Palestinians in the deeply scarred town of Rafah to practice electoral democracy and political pluralism — to demand an end to Israeli occupation, subjugation and attacks, but also to demand an end to Palestinian corruption, incompetence and gangsterism. The second was the almost perfect convergence of all the candidates’ electoral programs on these common points.
Once seen primarily as an extremist, violent, militant armed group, Hamas’ migration towards the political mainstream of Palestinian politics is why it swept many municipal elections in Palestine last year, and is poised to win a quarter or more of parliamentary seats this week. Hamas’ pragmatic journey towards the political center of Palestinian life has been well documented in a report published earlier this week by the respected International Crisis Group (http://www.crisisgroup.org). This is must reading for anyone who seeks to grasp the facts and actual trends of Hamas’ place in Palestinian politics, which in turn mirrors the broader transformation taking place among mainstream Islamists throughout the Middle East.
Here’s where the Osama and Dick Horror Show comes in again. A new pragmatic center is starting to take shape in many Arab lands. It articulates the sensible aspirations and solid values of ordinary citizens who reject Osama- and Dick-style political extremism, intemperance, and sustained violence. These two fellows represent dark political underworlds inhabited by frightened people who spend much of their time hiding in caves and bunkers, deprived of natural light, unaware of the moral and political trajectory of normal human beings. Give me a televised political debate from Rafah any time.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 22 January 2006
Word Count: 821
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