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COMMENTARY
Palestine
elections short on democracy
By
Sam Bahour and Todd May
During the 1970s,
the apartheid government of South Africa sought to
bolster its claims to legitimacy by allowing
elections in the Bantustans - the equivalent to
today's walled-in Palestinian communities in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip. The thought was that if
people elected local officials, even to hold
largely ceremonial offices, then the rest of the
world would stop whining about how undemocratic
and illegal apartheid was.
There were two
problems with this strategy. First, the world
understood that ceremonial elections do not make a
democracy. Second, the major candidate in any
election who would be endorsed by black South
Africans - Nelson Mandela - was being held in a
South African prison. Instead, black South
Africans were being offered collaborator
candidates who were chosen by the white South
African government.
Through its policy of
"constructive engagement", however, the Ronald
Reagan administration tacitly endorsed this
strategy, even when the United States Congress
resisted by passing the Anti-Apartheid Act in
1986.
How little has changed. Except for
the lack of congressional resistance, the
situation in the Israeli-occupied territories
mirrors that of apartheid South Africa.
Palestinians are being forced, either by choice or
fate, to agree to "acceptable" candidates for
elections to offices that will have only as much
power as the Israeli government, underwritten by
the Bush administration, grants.
Consider
the ceremonial character of the offices for which
any Palestinian would be running. The Palestinian
infrastructure has been decimated by 37 years of
military occupation and, more recently, the
Israeli invasion of 2002 and subsequent military
incursions. Palestinians do not control the
resources that lie on their land. Their streets
are patrolled by a foreign army and their
movements limited by humiliating checkpoints.
There are not even recognized borders for this
land over which the legislators will have no
legislative control. In short, for those who would
receive the honor of being elected to a
Palestinian democratic institution, there will be
nothing to legislate, nothing to be legislated
over, and no resources with which to legislate.
This is the democracy Palestinians are being
offered.
And there is more. Not only was
the last elected president of the Palestinian
people, Yasser Arafat, forced to languish until
his death under permanent house arrest, two
current Palestinian Legislative Council members,
who were supposed to be immune from Israeli
interference, currently reside in Israeli jails
for their political leadership. Along with these
two political prisoners, over 7,000 Palestinian
prisoners remain detained by Israel, many of them
leaders of their communities.
Say what one
will, both apartheid South Africa and Israel have
recognized leaders when they have seen them.
Eventually, South Africa stopped the
bloodshed on its land by reversing the historic
injustice caused to blacks in South Africa.
Israel, on the other hand, seems not only blind to
the future Palestinian leaders, but has refused
even to acknowledge the growing number of its own
citizens who are choosing to be jailed instead of
serving the Israeli occupation.
Calls for
democratization among the Palestinians serve the
wider purposes of the Sharon and Bush
administrations. Such calls hint that the problem
lies not in the occupation of Palestinian land but
in the political character of the Palestinian
people. If we are not ready for democracy, as
defined by our occupier and its funder, then
perhaps, they reason, the occupation can
justifiably continue.
However, the
Palestinian people, and much of the world besides,
understand the difference between an empty
democracy and the real thing. If Palestinians have
been so slow to ratify the institutional trappings
that have recently been offered to them, if they
seem to balk at the "generosity" shown by the
Israelis and the Americans, perhaps the fault does
not lie solely with the Palestinians. Perhaps it
is because what Palestinians seek is true
independence on their own land over which they
have effective control. In other words, a
democracy.
Sam Bahour is a
Palestinian-American living in Ramallah and
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at
Clemson University; both are frequent contributors
to Foreign Policy In Focus.
(Posted
with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus) |
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