Who runs Palestine anyway?

In the aftermath of the recent Gaza conflict, leaders in Israel, the US and Europe seem puzzled as to why the Palestinians insist on following those mean people of Hamas instead of that nice President Mahmoud Abbas? Mr. Abbas is seen as the far more moderate voice in Palestinian politics and was given the honor of being the first foreign head of state that Barack Obama called after becoming president. That’s all well and good, except that Mahmoud Abbas technically isn't the president of Palestine any longer.

Abbas' term of office technically ended on January 9. Of course Abbas has continued to say that he's the president and governments from Israel to the US are happy to keep calling him president, but according to the Palestinian constitution, it’s simply not the case. Since Abbas’ term expired the job should go to the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (their version of a national parliament) a man named Abdel Aziz Dweik. The only problem there is that Mr. Dweik is currently in an Israeli prison for being a member of Hamas. Next up would be his deputy, Ahmed Bahar, who also happens to be part of Hamas.

So far Hamas hasn’t pushed the issue of their guy taking over for Abbas because of the crisis in Gaza, but that is unlikely to remain the case. Abbas meanwhile, wants to stay as president until election are held for the legislative council. Abbas wants those elections moved up from 2010 to sometime this year, and wants the rules changed so that people only vote based on party, not on an individual-per-seat basis as stated in the Palestinian constitution (hoping that change will make it harder for Hamas to win). The problem for Abbas though is that in a functioning democracy you can’t just make the rules up as you go along.

And all of this mess in Palestine is partly our fault. In 2005 the Bush administration pushed the Palestinians to hold elections for their legislative council, even though many experts in the region said that Hamas was likely to win a majority of the seats. When they held the elections in 2006 - which were lauded as the most fair and open ever held in the Middle East - Hamas won as expected. Our next move was to refuse to talk to Hamas, even though they were now democratically elected, because of their support for terrorism. Now we're asking the Palestinian people to follow a leader who’s now illegally squatting in the president’s office rather than following the laws they laid out in their own constitution and giving the presidency to a member of a party we don’t like (and before we get into the ‘terrorist organization’ argument, keep in mind that Abbas is from Fatah, which started as the political wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) – itself once committed to the destruction of Israel).

Ultimately Abbas’ future is bleak. Whether he holds elections now, later in the year or in 2010, his chances for reelection are pretty low. Even before the Gaza conflict many Palestinians were fed up with Abbas. Years of negotiations with Israel failed to remove the Israeli checkpoints that make movement for the Palestinians within the West Bank an incredible hardship, nor was Abbas ever able to get Israel to stop the growth of their ‘settlements’ that are gobbling up more and more of the land the Palestinians hope will one day be their country. During the Gaza conflict he was unable to even secure a brief cease-fire for humanitarian aid to get into the Gaza Strip and looked incredibly irrelevant.

Abbas may be able to stay on as president for a little while longer by ignoring the constitution, but it’s another blow to the idea of democracy in the Middle East.