Sunday, July 13, 2008

The futility of holding elections under a foreign military occupation


By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

"It is often said that a wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top. It is also said that a wise man learns from the mistakes of other people, an imbecile learns from his own mistakes, but a fool learns neither from the mistakes of others nor from his own mistakes. Unfortunately, these adages apply squarely and accurately to the American-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah. Its foolishness just transcends reality as it keeps repeating the same stupid mistakes over and over again.

Like an irredeemable drunkard who drinks so much that he begins to think that he is the greatest person on earth, the PA seems thoroughly convinced that it is a “state,” or at least a state in the making, that it has “authority,” even “sovereignty,” when in fact it has neither.

How many acts of rape the Israeli army must carry out against our towns, where the PA is supposed to exercise “exclusive responsibility,” will convince us that we are lying to ourselves and being lied to?......

.......after all, people languishing under a foreign military occupation don’t usually have presidents, governments, and ministers and security forces and huge bureaucracies. And when they do, these governments and presidents are usually referred to as “collaborators” or “quislings” or “Judenrate”.....

Now, this Palestinian Authority is urging Palestinian political factions to agree to organize “presidential and parliamentary elections” as soon as possible in order to form a government that would “run the country.”

Well, have we really become the laughingstock of the world? Have our stupidity and foolishness transcended reality?......

In 2005, I covered the municipal elections at the town of Dhahiriya, 25 kilometers west of Hebron. I remember that on the eve of the elections there, the Israeli army stormed the homes of several local candidates, including the would-be mayor and his deputy because they happened to hold “non-conformist views.”.......

And if these essential preconditions proved to be impossible to meet due to Israeli intransigence, then we would have to forget about such elections. Then Maybe we would have to think of dismantling the PA once and for all since it has already become a devastating liability undermining the morality of our just cause.

In the final analysis, we must not fool ourselves once again, because if we did we would be more than a laughingstock of the world. We would be our own worst enemies."

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