Karma Nabulsi
Tuesday December 19, 2006
The Guardian
Mahmoud Abbas declared yesterday: "Let the people decide for themselves what they want." But there already is a national consensus: there must be Palestinian elections, not for a president of the Palestinian Authority, or for members of its legislative council, but for the Palestinian National Council, the institutional body that forms the sovereign base of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people have already elected a legislative council that represents a proportion of the body politic. They now demand elections for the entire Palestinian population.
When Fatah lost power to Hamas in January, Fatah needed to avail itself of the democratic benefits that accrue to those who lose power in an election: the opportunity to reconnect with their constituents, to learn why it had lost and how to regain their people's trust. Instead, the "international community" told Fatah it was still in power and had to contnue to play this role or take responsibility for abandoning its suffering people to an even crueller fate .
What we are witnessing today is the horrific and inevitable outcome of a process of deliberate coercion, designed to force an occupied people to surrender their elected representatives. That this coercion is being carried out by the military occupier Israel and its neocon backers in the US administration is to be expected - and resisted. What is harder to understand is just how this coercion can be so flagrantly insisted upon by the British and the EU - who should be standing by the Palestinians, if not for the values of decency then as part of their responsibilities as co-signatories to the fourth Geneva convention.
The Palestinian people have indeed already spoken: for elections to the Palestinian National Council; for lifting the economic boycott of a democratically elected authority; for liberty and independence.
· Karma Nabulsi, a former PLO representative, is an Oxford politics fellow commentisfree.co.uk/karma_nabulsi
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