By a big margin, the terrorist group, Hamas, has won the Palestinian elections. From the London Times:
In the end it was a landslide. Hamas, the Islamic militant group, won 76 votes in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, compared to 43 for President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement.
The conventional wisdom, predictably is that this is a disaster. Richard Chesnoff, of the New York Daily News, is right about what gave Hamas the victory.
Yasser Arafat's chickens have come home to roost. After decades of dictatorial and corrupt control by the late Fatah leader and his cohorts, vast numbers of voters in both the West Bank and Gaza have angrily turned their backs on Arafat's heirs and given their support to rival Hamas, the radical Islamic party.
He is wrong, I think, about the consequences of Hamas' victory.
Hamas remains the same terrorist party it's always been, a heavily armed, blood-drenched gang that boasts of suicide bombings and doesn't even pretend to want peace with Israel. Its goals are crystal clear: the total annihilation of the Jewish state in favor of an Islamic state throughout the entire Holy Land. Its presence in a Palestinian government is hardly incentive for Israel to follow up on its recent withdrawal from Gaza and move ahead on the U.S.-sponsored road map to Mideast peace.
The danger is that there are already some in Israel - and a growing flock outside - who talk about the need for Israel to launch a dialogue with Hamas leaders - as though talking to this band of religious fanatics who hate Jews and Christians would be any more successful than trading land for peace was with the Arafat gang.
Israel had already largely abandoned the idea of negotiations with the Palestinians in favor of building a concrete toddler gate to keep the terrorists out of Israel. I don't think they will be more friendly to Hamas.
Yet there are those who argue that if Hamas gains political responsibility, it will find itself forced to weed out its militants, eventually turn from terror and moderate its policies. You mean like the mad mullahs in Iran moderated their policies after they took power?
But the Mad Mullahs did not come to power in an election, and have never submitted their authority to the voters. Iran has a functioning democracy, of sorts, but the control of the security forces in firmly in the hands of the clerics. And the latter can decide who is eligible to run for office. You can't expect democracy to have a beneficial effect on those who are never required to submit to it.
Hamas has come to power for the first time by means of an election, and that may well prove decisive in shaping the future. The conventional wisdom that favored Fatah was based on the theory that Fatah was willing and had the power to eventually make peace, which it wasn't and it didn't. Hamas is only worse in the sense that they actually say what they think. But Hamas is also a more efficient organization, having experience in building networks of charities, clinics, and schools. They may actually be capable of building a functioning government, something Yasser Arafat's Kleptocrats were altogether uninterested in. And having tasted electoral power, they now have something to lose. I think that will, eventually, make them more responsible.
I think this is in fact progress. But if I was in Israel, I would think the Lord for Sharon and his wall.
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