The elections in Palestine and the anti-colonial struggle

The Palestinian people continue to resist oppression. January 2006. Photo: Saif Dahlah/AFP/Getty Images

On January 25, 2006, Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—won a majority in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. The Hamas victory represented an unexpected setback and sharp blow to Washington’s plans for the Middle East.

U.S. policymakers had been pushing for the election with the expectation that the outcome would be entirely different. They expected Fatah, the longstanding dominant Palestinian party whose leadership had increasingly turned towards Washington, to retain power.

The Washington Post’s January 28 headline, “U.S. Policy Seen as Big Loser in Palestine Vote,” typified the corporate media’s reaction to the Hamas victory. Dispensing with humanitarian pretenses, the Bush administration, along with both Republican and Democratic Party leaders in Congress, immediately began issuing threats to cut off all assistance, including food aid, to the economically devastated Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza if Hamas formed the new government.

Bush has justified these threats by stating that his administration would not deal with “political parties that have an armed wing.” This is sheer anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Faced with the brutality of Israeli military occupation, all Palestinian parties have military forces. Nearly all liberation movements worldwide that have fought colonialism have had both political and armed wings. The United States itself would have never become an independent country without an “armed wing” to fight the British.

The Bush regime was clearly hoping that the election outcome would enable it to orchestrate an agreement with a newly elected Palestinian National Authority that would fatally weaken the Palestinian resistance movement. After investing a great deal of political, and some financial capital, it’s back to the drawing board for U.S. policymakers.

While the election was clearly a blow to Washington’s plans, the triumph of Hamas at the same time was a setback for the left and secular nationalist forces in the Palestine liberation movement.

After a short and incomplete post-election lull, the struggle between the Israeli occupation army and Palestinian resistance resumed full-force. In early February, Israeli artillery resumed shelling Gaza City, and Israeli missiles killed several Palestinian fighters and civilians in the West Bank. Fighting broke out in several locations, with a number of Israeli soldiers and settlers wounded.

The clashes and the unchanged situation on the ground were reminders that the struggle against U.S.-Israeli colonial domination continues unabated.

Breakdown of the vote

The Jan. 25 election was successfully carried out under harsh conditions of Israeli military occupation. Of the 1.33 million eligible voters, 1.04 million, or 74.5 percent, voted in the election, a far higher percentage than in any recent election in the United States. They were electing 132 members of the Palestinian legislature.

Half of the new members of the Palestinian Legislative Council were elected from districts in the West Bank and Gaza; the other 66 were elected by the list or party system, also known as proportional representation. Under the list system, every party with at least 2 percent of the popular vote received seats in the new parliament. There were 16 lists that presented candidates. Six won seats.

Only Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank (including Jerusalem) could participate in the election. Israel forced more than 1 million Palestinians out of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 and 1967 who, with their descendants, now compose an exile community of more than 5 million.

Hamas won 45 district and 29 list seats. The long-time leading party, Fatah (Palestine National Liberation Movement), won 17 district and 28 list seats. Four independents won district seats. The Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine won three list seats, and two other left slates won two seats each. Two more went to Hanan Ashrawi’s “Third Way” list.

Thus, to the surprise of many inside and outside Palestine, Hamas won an absolute
majority of seats in the incoming legislature.

Winning 74 out of 132 seats, Hamas has the right to form the new government and to name the incoming prime minister and cabinet. Elected in a separate election last year, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah remains the President. Abbas succeeded the founder and historic leader of Fatah, Yasser Arafat, after Arafat’s death in 2004.

While Hamas achieved a strong majority in the parliament, the popular vote was much closer. For the parties reaching the 2 percent threshold for representation the breakdown was: Hamas 440,409 (42.3 percent); Fatah 410,554 (39.5 percent); PFLP 42,101 (4 percent); Al-Badil, a leftist party 28,973 (2.8 percent); Mustafa Barghouti 26,909 (2.6 percent); Third Way 23,862 (2.3 percent). Leftist slates won 9.4 percent of the popular vote.

Factors in the Hamas victory

There were several key elements in the Hamas victory. Religion was of course an important factor, but not the only one. Casting a ballot for Hamas was for many an expression of resistance to colonial domination.

Over the past year, every election in the Middle East—from Iran to Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine—has witnessed the victory or strong advance of Islamic parties. The character of these parties varies in numerous ways. Some, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, are nationalist resistance movements. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria is right wing, and is willing to collaborate (though usually not openly) with the imperialist powers against their respective governments.

Most of the religious parties in the region are perceived as rejecting Western (that is, U.S. and European) influence and values, at a time when imperialist domination is intensifying. The strong shift toward the religious parties is in large degree a repudiation of the colonizers.

In late January and early February, militant mass protests took place across the Muslim world in response to anti-Islamic cartoons published by several European newspapers. These protests dramatically expressed the rising anti-colonial sentiment in the region. The cartoons, first printed by a right-wing Danish newspaper, depict Mohammed, the most revered figure of Islam, in an extremely racist and degrading manner.

For Palestinians, anti-colonial sentiment was compounded by a devastated economy and sharp decline in living standards in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli government has deliberately sought to destroy the Palestinian economy, hoping that widespread suffering would lead to a mass exodus of the population. The World Bank recently called economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, “the worst economic depression.” More than half the population is living on $2.20 per day or less, the official United Nations marker for poverty. The average Palestinian’s living standard is one-fifteenth that of the average Israeli’s.

Under conditions of long-lasting and severe economic depression, a large part of the population of most countries would vote for a change of government. To make things worse, as poverty deepened, a part of the Fatah leadership was visibly appropriating a considerable amount of public resources for personal use. This significantly damaged the party’s standing in the eyes of the population.

Another factor was the division within Fatah. One wing of the party, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, oriented toward negotiations and receiving support from Washington. Another looked to Marwan Barghouti and is engaged in the resistance on the ground. Although an open split was averted, and Marwan Barghouti was given the top position on the Fatah party list in the election, the division was known to all.

Over the past two decades, Hamas had built its base through a network of social service, nutrition, and health care programs that have become a vital resource to an ever-growing section of the population. Whether a Hamas government will be able to effect economic changes remains to be seen. Neither Hamas nor Fatah are socialist parties.

The rise of Hamas

Hamas was formed in 1987 by forces from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. During the Intifada that began in 1987 and lasted until 1991, the Israeli occupation forces allowed Hamas to function. Meanwhile, it severely repressed Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other member organizations of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hamas was outside the PLO and initially not involved in resistance activities.

Hamas built a network to provide social services. Photo: Ahmad Khateib/Newscom Images

Israeli leaders wanted to draw support away from the secular PLO organizations, and portray the resistance as a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews rather than as an anti-colonial movement.

Within a short time, however, and under conditions of a sweeping national uprising, Hamas’s leadership and orientation changed, and it joined the resistance struggle.

During the 1987 to 1991 Intifada, the Marxist PFLP grew very rapidly. But in 1991, the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War and the destruction of the Soviet Union created a deep crisis for all Marxist forces worldwide. The Palestinian movement received a great deal of support from the Soviet Union.

Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Iraq war, the Fatah leadership entered into negotiations that led to the 1993 Oslo Accord. The PFLP remained an important and respected force in Palestinian society and was able to regain organizational strength during the Intifada that began in Sept. 2000.

Hamas and most of the leftist parties opposed the Oslo agreements as totally inadequate and a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle. They contended that the accords surrendered on basic issues, like the right of return, and would only produce a broken up, Bantustan-like Palestinian entity. While they boycotted the Oslo-mandated Palestinian Legislative Council election in 1995, Arafat and Fatah won an overwhelming majority of the vote. Fatah argued that Oslo would lead to a real Palestinian state and that, given the new relationship of forces in the region, it was the best that could be achieved at the time.

The totality of these factors led to widespread demoralization in the Palestinian left and a sharp reduction in the size and activism of the PFLP and other Marxist parties like the Democratic Front and the Palestinian People’s Party, formerly the Communist Party.

With Fatah engaged as the governing party, and the left weakened, the way was opened for Hamas. In the 1990s, Hamas emerged as the largest and most active resistance force.

Hamas and the new Intifada

Meanwhile, as limited as the promises of Oslo were, the Israeli government throughout the 1990s consistently blocked their implementation. Successive Israeli governments led by both the Labor and Likud parties stepped up the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The aim was and is to make the emergence of any kind of real Palestinian state impossible, even one that encompassed only the West Bank and Gaza—22 percent of historic Palestine.

Deteriorating conditions and the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank led to increasing clashes and growing tensions. A new Intifada, including secular and religious forces, erupted in September 2000.

Many in the younger generation of Fatah, who had risen to prominence during the 1987 Intifada, formed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which grew to number in the thousands. Its most prominent leader is Marwan Barghouti, who won a seat in the January elections while illegally imprisoned in an Israeli jail serving five life sentences. Altogether, 14 of the 132 elected members of the new parliament are among the 8,000 Palestinian political prisoners being held under abominable conditions in Israeli jails.

A very large percentage of the prisoners are the cadres of the resistance organizations. In the top slot on the PFLP list was Ahmed Saadat, the general secretary of the PFLP, who is currently in a Palestinian National Authority jail in Jericho under supervision of the CIA and the British military. The PFLP organized the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, named after its leader who was assassinated by an Israeli missile in 2001.

In the course of the new Intifada, Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassim Brigades, grew to an estimated 5,000 fighters, in spite of the fact that many of its top leaders were assassinated by the Israeli military.

As an organization that has played a leading role in the resistance movement, Hamas’s election victory must be understood as a mass repudiation of the U.S.-Israeli plan to liquidate the Palestinian struggle.

Despite all that they have suffered and continue to suffer, the election and the massive post-election demonstrations showed again the Palestinian people’s remarkable determination to resist, which has made them an inspiration around the world.

When the U.S. military invaded Iraq three years ago, Bush and his advisors exuded imperial arrogance, believing they were invincible. Their aim was to subjugate not just Iraq but the entire region. That remains the goal. But today, from Pakistan to Palestine, as well as in Iraq, mass resistance to the imperialist agenda is on the rise.