Fayyad Of The PA And Haniyeh Of Hamas--Not So Different

One of the things that the two have in common is that the way the two govern is similar--neither government is a democracy--and as the Economist points out Democracy is flagging in both the Palestinian territories:

Hanna Nasir, the head of Palestine’s Central Elections Commission, is not prone to expletives. But the Christian nuclear physicist and former dean of Palestine’s leading university was full of them when the cabinet of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who runs the West Bank, recently cancelled the municipal elections he was organising. If anything, his rival prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, is even less keen to put his movement’s popularity to the test.


It was the third election the Palestinian Authority (PA) has annulled in less than a year. The terms of the PA’s presidency, parliament and municipalities have all now expired. With no date for fresh polls and in constitutionally uncharted waters, officials increasingly rule by fiat. How far, bemoans Mr Nasir, has Palestine fallen from the heights of 2005 and 2006, when he ran elections that international observers hailed as being among the fairest in the Middle East. Instead of building a democratic state, the PA is fast on its way to creating just another Arab autocracy.

But the similarities go beyond the question of elections, or the lack thereof--the similarities go towards the way they actually run the country, such that

in both Palestine’s cloven halves, governance is remarkably similar. Both Hamas and Mr Fayyad rule by decree, merging executive and legislative arms into one. Both promise elections sometime in the future but in the meantime round up their opponents and silence unlicensed independent media outlets. As a signal of their intention to rule without the restraints of impending elections, Mr Fayyad has a two-year plan for government; Hamas has a ten-year one. Both try to replace popular participation with populism. Mr Fayyad ostentatiously parades in public, telling his people not to buy products made in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Mr Haniyeh, his Hamas counterpart in Gaza, takes to the pulpit in mosques and personally dishes out dollars to his beleaguered people.

In the meantime, the West sees this split between the West Bank and Gaza and is not necessarily displeased. After all, based on past experience, the opportunity for real elections brings with it the opportunity for expanded power and control for Hamas:

“The last thing many in Europe want is for Hamas to regain an executive role in the West Bank,” says a European official. “We prefer division and no elections to reconciliation and elections.”

What drives the West's policies in the Middle East is what it considers to be pragmatic. But then again, it was pragmatism that has led to the situation as it exists now and may very well be what is preserving an artificial status quo preventing a resolution of the conflict.

Technorati Tag: Fayyad and Haniyeh and Hamas and Fatah.