TRIPLE BANK SHOT ON WEST BANK PEACE

The legislative elections for the Palestinian Authority on January 25th will determine the vexing question on whether the Fatah PLO group can withstand the Hamas election campaign wherein Hamas is trying to shed its outsider status in the search for a resolution of the conflict.

The Israelis in turn a have March 28th vote which will determine the successor to Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister.

The Churches for Middle East Peace
website has an updates on this highly controversial election. There is also a short note on Jordan and the Christian minority.

Suffice it to say about the elections that a large majority of both Israelis and Palestinians in two separate polls now favor some sort of permanent peaceful status, although the configuration of that status will predictably have to skirt political shoals that extremists on both sides have used in the past to prevent an agreement.

But don’t celebrate yet. While the Kadima Party now headed by Acting PM Ehud Olmert
appears ready for a solution to the perpetual conflict and has adopted a middle-of-the-road position, a possible victory by Hamas on Jan 25th could cause serious problems.

An opinion piece by M J Rosenberg spells out the conundrum clearly.

Mahmoud Abbas succeeded the late unlamented Yasir Arafat as head of the PLO Fatah, but has been unable to root out the deeply corrupt political culture that enabled Arafat’s misgovernance for over thirty years. Hamas proclaims itself a new broom that will be disciplined and incorruptible and is projected to win a majority of seats in the legislature. The problem lies in a projected Hamas majority in the PA legislature’s leading to a hardening of PA attitudes, now surprisingly pliant under the Presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, toward accepting peace with the state of Israel, to which Hamas has in the pre-campaign past sworn eternal enmity and hopeful destruction.

Rosenberg’s useful and even hopeful opinion piece evades grasping the nettle. In the event of a Hamas victory this week, will the Party, now quiet about the issue, resurrect its hardline stance toward a final settlement with Israel? And even if Hamas wisely keeps its present silence, will the far-right Netanyahu demagogue the peace issue in the two months leading up to the end-of-March Israeli vote?

At present, Kadima has a wide lead in the polls over Netanyahu’s remnant of the Likud.
Even if Hamas, who will still be accountable to the Presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, does not misbehave, will the Israelis wisely select Olmert, who promises to continue Sharon and partner Shimon Peres’ peacemaking?

Given the probability of a Hamas victory, there will be three actors in power in the hopeful event of a Kadima win this March in Israel. Abbas, Hamas, and Olmert.

But will elements on the extreme, like Hamas heretofore and Netanyahu and his settler supporters, restrain their impulse to anarchy?