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COMMENTARY
January 8, 2005
Palestine votes
Algeria was the first Arab country to hold a general election in which it was possible for the government to fall. "Palestine" (quotes for it is not yet formally a state) will be the second tomorrow. At the end of the month Iraq will become the third. What matters here is not what went into the elections but what comes out. A democratic order is not merely a matter of elections. Even Stalin had elections for show and governments in many Arab states have mounted similar carnivals. The word "democracy" is shorthand for a complex bunch of practical ideas from a sovereign state to a state of mind in which people assume governments may be removed without violence. Crucially it implies government answerable to a rule of law West or East a theocratic "democracy" is inconceivable. The whole notion of democracy is founded in separation of church and state. It is not merely secular by disposition it is the heart and definition of secular life. Which is why democracy has presented peculiar problems to faithful Muslims whether Arab or not for whom this separation may well appear contrary to the divine order. This was an issue in Algeria and has become an issue in Iraq especially among Iraq's Shia Muslims (who never had to think seriously about democracy until the American invasion). It is much less so in Palestine where the conflict with Israel has been of a nature to mask the fundamental issues. The Palestinians have felt themselves a people stifled sucking for air. But they can only define themselves as a people on secular grounds. There is no way to define what is a Palestinian and what is not in Islamic terms. The nation itself is an artefact of geography and European imperial history. It is only in the last several years that the Hamas terrorists have begun to articulate a vision of a thoroughly Islamicized Palestinian society unfortunately on the model of Fallujah or Taliban Afghanistan. The formal Palestinian leadership has been secular if hardly democratic. As in Iraq and Syria there was a very strong Christian presence among the earlier nationalists and they left a legacy of secularism in the revolutionary movements that succeeded down to the present time. Palestine also benefits paradoxically from having been locked in its deadly embrace with Israel. Israel has been comparatively the success story. As I first learned travelling on foot through the West Bank only a few years after the 1967 war Palestinians are compelled by circumstance to imagine their state in comparison to Israel. For all they might hate Israelis individually or as a race there remains a profound envy for what the Israelis have accomplished. And "democracy" is universally assumed to be at the root of that accomplishment. With the passage of years and the deepening of the conflict the Palestinian propaganda against Israel had to claim democracy as an ideal. The world would hardly have been charmed by Palestinian revolutionists who claimed they were fighting against democracy. These are the background reasons why I think now that Yasser Arafat is gone there is a chance something actually like democracy may (slowly) emerge in the West Bank and Gaza. Add to these reasons the hard fact of exhaustion. The Palestinian people have been through two generations of hell -- much of it of their own creation. Yet Israel today shows no more sign of being washed into the sea than it ever did and at some point human beings come to terms even with realities they don't like. The foreground arguments go mostly the other way. Mahmoud Abbas the predictable winner of the election has posed throughout the campaign as a true successor of Arafat. He has made alarming statements to the effect that the Palestinian Authority will under his leadership do everything in its power to protect armed gangs from Israel instead of itself bringing them to heel. He says he will never surrender the Palestinian "right of return" to ancestral homes within what is now Israel -- a concession Israelis can never grant without committing national suicide. But again a wall is a wall. The Palestinian election is a first step towards creating a flexible non-violent order that can confront realities and find ways to cope. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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