Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced plans for parliamentary and presidential elections for the first time in about 15 years, while Palestinians seek to rebuild their ties with President-elect Joe Biden after disagreements with the Trump administration.
Palestinians have repeatedly tried to hold elections in the past decade, but each attempt has been thwarted by challenges, including strong divisions between Fatah, the party that largely controls the Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank, and Hamas, a Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza. .
Still, the decree issued on Friday night by Abbas, 85, who is in the 16th of a four-year term he won in 2005, was as far as Palestinians have legally come to hold national elections in a decade and a half. .
The Palestinian leader’s decree defined legislative elections for May 22 and presidential elections for July 31. Elections for the Palestinian National Council, which represents Palestinians abroad, were scheduled for August 31.
A member of the Palestinian security forces stood guard outside the Legislative Council building in Ramallah on Saturday.
Photograph:
ahmad gharabli / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
The proposal is part of a broader effort to heal internal schisms within the Palestinian leadership. The issue of Palestinian unity gained importance for both Hamas and Fatah after the United States-mediated Abraham agreements, which since September have seen Israel normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. For decades, Palestinians relied on their Arab allies to avoid normalizing relations with Israel until Israel made peace with them.
In recent years, Sunni Arab governments have been more concerned with containing Iran’s rise in the region than with resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This change brought them closer to Israel. Since the beginning of the Abraham Accords, Hamas and Fatah have intensified their efforts to unify, in an attempt to restore a united Palestinian front in the face of these regional political changes.
Abbas froze relations with the U.S. in December 2017 after President Trump declared his intention to transfer the Washington embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, where Palestinians have for decades hoped to have a capital for a future state.
Now, the Palestinian authorities hope to be able to renew ties with the United States. Biden has been a fierce critic of building Israeli settlements in the West Bank and said he supports a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would result in an independent Palestinian state.
With long-standing US support for Palestinian democracy, analysts see the electoral decree as a way for Abbas to renew his democratic legitimacy.
Hamas welcomed the electoral decree, saying on Friday that it considered voting a “basic right of our people”.
Since a violent confrontation between Hamas and Fatah in 2007, after the Islamic group’s victory in the 2006 legislative elections, Hamas has controlled the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority jointly governed the Palestinians in the West Bank with Israel.
The promise of elections has challenges inherent in US-Palestinian ties. The rival Fatah movement, Hamas, is considered a terrorist group by the United States. It is not clear how relations with the United States would progress if Hamas took control of any governing body of the Palestinian Authority. The same is true of relations with Israel, which also considers Hamas to be a terrorist group.
A poll published in December by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Policy Research and Research Center concluded that Fatah would win the legislative elections with 38% of the vote against 34% for Hamas. Abbas, however, would lose the presidential election to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, 43% to 50%, the survey found.
The Fatah-Hamas conflict has been a major obstacle to Palestinian national elections. Both sides would need to agree on an authority to judge the elections and whose security forces would guarantee the vote, issues with which the two sides had not reached agreement in previous attempts at voting.
Another question is whether Palestinians in East Jerusalem, which is under Israeli control, could vote. Governments led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu previously prevented the Palestinian Authority from holding elections in Jerusalem, arguing that the city is entirely under its sovereign territory.
Abbas said Palestinians living in Jerusalem must be able to vote in national elections or they will not be held.
Hanna Nasir, chairman of the Palestinian Central Election Commission, said in a statement on Saturday that her commission has no promise from Israel that Palestinians will be able to vote in Jerusalem.
“We realized that there are some problems, but we hope that they will be resolved next week and, if they don’t, we will solve them,” said Nasir.
Neither Israel nor the US commented on the planned Palestinian elections.
Write to Dov Lieber at [email protected]
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