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President George Bush will be
happy to know that the Palestinian pubic fully supports the demand for
genuine reforms in the Palestinian Authority. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
would be amazed if he heard that many Palestinians share his view that the
game of musical chairs orchestrated by Yasser Arafat in his government is
not the change they wished to see.
Bush, no doubt, would not oppose the basic political assumption of many
Palestinians that only general elections to the Palestinian Legislative
Council and the presidency of the PA can breath life into the debate over
the necessary reforms, even if they can't implement them immediately. He
certainly would agree that Arafat and the PLC should not have a life-long
term in office. An election campaign would sharpen the analyses that find
fault not only with this or that person but also with a system in which
one person - Arafat - decides and dictates all, naming to positions of
power people who owe their allegiance to him, not to their constituencies
or an ideology.
American and European consultants, however, will have to advise the
Palestinians on how to conduct an election campaign under conditions in
which the West Bank and Gaza have been carved up into besieged enclaves.
Clearly, the sieges are not temporary. Israeli TV does not show how the
IDF enforces the siege and the requirement to get passes for movement
inside the territories. But this is a daily experience for thousands of
people delayed for hours at dozens of checkpoints in the territories, and
when their numbers begin to appear threatening to the soldiers, the troops
open fire, first with tear gas and stun grenades often immediately
followed by gunfire.
It's not only Palestinian movement from one enclave to the other that is
paralyzed by the dictates of the siege. Movement from city to village has
become an impossible mission, undertaken at great risk and with high
anxiety. Assume the Palestinians are ultimately forced to obey the Israeli
orders and start going to the Civil Administration (since the early 1980s,
the main bureaucratic arm of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians)
to get their travel passes.
What will happen if during an election campaign this or that candidate's
pass is delayed, and he does not reach an election rally, while his
opponent gets his pass immediately. The delays, as years of experience
have show, will be usually be explained by security needs, or a broken fax
machine, or overburdened lines, or a clerk on maternity leave. Won't that
immediately harm the chances of the opponent, who will be suspected of
being connected in some way to the Israeli authorities?
And when the candidates do make it to their election rallies, how will
they discuss domestic Palestinian issues, which interest the public,
without reference to the sieges. For example, how will a candidate promise
that his voters' children will be able to get through the checkpoints to
get to school on time in Hebron for a test without their eyes being
reddened by tear gas and their knees shaking after taking cover from
flying bullets? How will they speak about improving the school systems,
raising teaching standards, increasing the number of classrooms? And what
will they say to a 70-year-old woman with only one leg from the besieged,
cut-off village of Dir Abzia, seven kilometers from Ramallah, whose son
has to carry her on his back, climbing hills and evading the armored
personnel carriers posted on each one, to get her to hospital in the city?
What will the candidates say to a taxi driver, who complains he has to pay
taxes as if he continued to ply the Jenin-Ramallah route, when in fact he
can't leave Jenin any more and his daily income is barely enough to cover
the tax bill? How will they respond to people who have lost their jobs
time and again because the tightening siege shuts down places of
employment? How will they convince hopeless youths that they should not
think about joining the army of suicide bombers?
Anyone demanding reforms in Palestinian government should not dismiss the
importance of the electoral process. But the process will be obstructed
from the start, and practically impossible to monitor, because of the
siege policy. Aside from that, it won't be the Bush administration that
sets the agenda for the elections, but Israel's policies. Palestinian
political activists cannot and do not intend to give them the standard
Israeli response, that the sieges and cantonization are only the result of
Palestinian terror attacks. Like their constituents, Palestinian
politicians are convinced that the sieges are meant to protect the Israeli
occupation of the territories, and their purpose is to bring the
Palestinian people to such a degree of poverty and internal breakdown,
that its leadership will be forced to surrender to any solution offered, a
temporary, transitional state on a cantonized 42 percent of the
territories.
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