Posted on 01/12/2006 7:48:38 AM PST by SJackson
JERUSALEM -- Jihad Abu Zneid sighs deeply as she picks her way through the potholed streets of the Shuafat Palestinian refugee camp. The uncollected garbage is ankle high and children carrying startlingly real-looking toy guns sprint past her in packs, playing a game of "Arabs and Israelis" based on everyday life here.
To Ms. Abu Zneid, a long-time women's-rights advocate in this East Jerusalem slum, everything around her is proof of how close Palestinian society is to collapsing into complete chaos. Though she's a candidate for the ruling Fatah movement in parliamentary elections scheduled for Jan. 25, she believes her party has done enough wrong to deserve to lose.
With lawlessness on the rise, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy and the Islamist Hamas movement steadily gaining popularity, the coming election of the 132-seat Palestinian Legislative Council is increasingly looking like a make-or-break moment for Palestinians and their hopes of eventually having an independent, functional state.
With Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon incapacitated by a massive stroke and unlikely to return to office, the erosion of the Palestinian Authority's control and the rise of Hamas will pose significant challenges for his successor.
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"I ask myself every day where we are going, what kind of state we are going to build," Ms. Abu Zneid says grimly, her high-heeled boots slipping a bit on pavement red with blood from animals slaughtered this week for the feast Eid al-Adha, a Muslim holiday marking the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
"Nobody follows the rules, nobody believes in the law. . . . All the world is watching us as we build our state and our institutions, but this is the way to hell."
It's a state of affairs that Ms. Abu Zneid blames largely on her own party. Fatah, she says, was monolithic and corrupt under Yasser Arafat, and has proven weak and bitterly divided under Mahmoud Abbas. Much of the recent inter-Palestinian violence that has wracked the West Bank and especially the Gaza Strip has been instigated by Fatah-affiliated gunmen over which Mr. Abbas no longer exerts control, she added.
Ms. Abu Zneid, who is running for the first time and is expected to win a seat, nonetheless hears the complaints of a fed-up electorate every time she goes campaigning. "They complain the Palestinian Authority doesn't touch their needs. They talk about the corruption. They say that once you are a PLC member, we will get nothing from you."
The 38-year-old is a member of Fatah's "young guard," a faction more loyal to jailed militant Marwan Barghouti than Mr. Abbas. The group briefly broke away from the main party before rejoining in time for the elections to face the growing challenge posed by Hamas, which has dropped calls for the destruction of Israel from its election material as it moves closer to the Palestinian political mainstream.
Viewed by Israel and much of the outside world as a "terrorist" organization, Hamas is increasingly admired in Gaza and the West Bank for its dedication to the fight against Israeli occupation and its perceived incorruptibility.
The grassroots desire for change and the threat of Hamas capitalizing on it is so great that many in Fatah are eager for the Israeli cabinet to decide Sunday whether Palestinians living in East Jerusalem will be allowed to cast ballots, clearing the last apparent hurdle to the vote going ahead.
Mr. Abbas has threatened to further delay the election, which was originally scheduled for last summer, if a free vote is prevented in East Jerusalem, which is under Israeli control but Palestinians claim as their capital. Most observers see the last delay as a tactic to give Fatah more time to get its house in order.
Some polls now suggest that Hamas might take more than a third of the vote, and Ms. Abu Zneid says she expects Hamas could win as many as 70 seats, enough to form a majority in the PLC. Though she worries about a rollback in women's rights if that happens, she's not sure that a Hamas victory would be an entirely bad thing since it would finally introduce a batch of new, uncorrupted faces to Palestinian politics.
A changing of the guard seems to be the primary desire of many ordinary Palestinians. A random street sampling yesterday revealed that eliminating corruption, rather than a renewed peace process or the return of Jerusalem, is the main concern for a significant part of the electorate.
"If Hamas wins, there would be change and there would be reform," said Abu Mohammed, a 30-year-old pharmacist in Ramallah, a liberal-minded West Bank town that has long been a Fatah stronghold. He said he hadn't yet decided how to vote, but was considering voting for the Islamists just to "spite" Fatah. "They [Hamas] must be better than what we have now."
Just keep 'em walled off, like in Gaza. They'll kill each other off in a generation.
Fatah, Hamas, BarfGouli, Abbas, these are the building blocks of Palestine, and every one of them is nothing but terrorists. Terrorists do not build, they murders and cause terror. You cannot build houses with fire, and you can not build a society with terrorists.
The Arabs bet their souls, and lost. I pity them.
"...for from the viper shall come a dragon." (Isaiah 14:29) This is the fufillment of the prophecy of the destruction of the Palestinians, their evolvement into hell.
The prophecy is stunning, it speaks of their first government here in the land as the Grand Mufti as a serpent, from its roots comes his nephew Yassar Araphat the Viper, and from the Viper, a firey flying serpant, the Dragon. These stupid Arabs do not realize that when you vote, you get what you vote for. Democracy is no joke, and a vote for spite will cut off their nose.
Such a sad state of affairs when it is so obvious we should be building one just like it here yet the politicians let the Home Depot work camps determine counter-policy.
They should know, Hell must have a separate section just for these Islamic death cultists.
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