Since President Mahmoud Abbas issued his decrees calling legislative elections for November of this year, a noisy argument has broken out among Palestinians, beginning with the question of whether the elections will actually be held- or whether the decrees are merely a maneuver to release the pressure of internal tension.
And before any conclusive answer to that question had taken shape, an active process of preparing for the elections began, through consultations and understandings over the formation of electoral lists, as though the vote were certain to be held, and soon.
Between the last elections, held in 2006, and the November scheduled elections, developments occurred that produced deep and far-reaching changes in the Palestinian situation.
The largest and gravest split in Palestinian history took place; Gaza fell under Hamas rule and entered a state of war with Israel, its military rounds pausing only for a time while the strangling siege imposed on it never lifted- this in the smallest and most densely populated place there is.
Matters reached the point of a war of extermination, and of Gaza's submission to the trusteeship of the Board of Peace, without Israel's leaving three-quarters of its territory.
Hamas came to a decline in standing and influence it could not have anticipated: it is negotiating with the new trustee, Mladenov, over its own fate, having relinquished the government of Gaza and given up the use of weapons.
In a war that ran more than two and a half years, Hamas lost every fighting, economic, and administrative capacity it possessed- quite apart from the leaders, cadres, and members it lost.
After President Abbas issued his decrees fixing the date of the legislative elections, Hamas officially announced its acceptance and readiness to contest the vote directly and under its own name, rather than under assumed names, as had been reported.
Hamas found in the legislative elections a suitable shelter from what threatens its political existence, now that the Gaza file- or its first phase- has been closed. It therefore decided to go to the polls, but this time through an expanded list including other factions not registered in Hamas's name. This will be the most important variable in the inputs of the November elections, and will bear on their outputs in the number of seats won and the capacity to shape decisions.
In discussing the legislative elections and Hamas's position in them, one ought also to take stock of the changes that have come over Fatah in the period between the second legislative elections, which were undone, and the coming November vote.
On both previous occasions, whatever differences and struggles for influence beset it, Fatah contested the elections as a single central bloc. And though it lacked the qualification to form a government, it was powerfully present in shaping political life, through its control of the West Bank and its hold on the legitimacy recognized regionally and internationally.
The second elections produced a short-lived Hamas government, and an attempt was made to repair matters by forming a coalition government, but the experiment failed. The split then developed by way of a military coup Hamas carried out against the coalition government, reaching the point of a separation between the West Bank and Gaza that every attempt to end has failed.
For the first time in their history, Palestinians living under occupation came to have two political systems and two legitimacies: One legal, the other a legitimacy of fait accompli. The scene appeared to be a split between fighters and negotiators- until, in our own days, the fighter has been stripped of his weapons and of the legitimacy of fait accompli, and the negotiator stripped of the negotiations, so that the two meet in a single place. It was not the homeland and its needs that united them, but the impasse, and the necessity of taking part in managing it and tending to their interests within it.
Hamas and Fatah are going into the elections at their weakest. Hamas has been weakened by the war of extermination and by the absence of allies; Fatah, by its internal struggles and by the absence of the political prospect that used to justify its steps, whatever direction it took.
The two will meet in the corridor leading to the next Legislative Council, with no guarantee for either that it can form a government. That is what will produce different outputs for a parliament whose inputs are different.
The expected image of the third Palestinian parliament is that it will hold formations limited in size, given the number and variety of the lists being prepared- clan lists, regional lists, sectoral lists, and alliances of individuals with no ties to the organizations, whose influence has receded to the point where they are searching for clan, regional, or sectoral levers to secure themselves a presence in the new parliament.
If no surprise occurs to furnish a logical pretext for postponing the elections, and they are held on schedule, Palestinians will obtain a pluralist parliament- one that will make coalitions necessary to form a legitimate government and an effective opposition to it.
This will happen for the first time since the first and second elections of the Authority era, because the party loyalty that once imposed itself on the factions' parliamentarians, and the factions' dominance, will not be there this time. Perhaps we will find a parliament that changes a Palestinian political life long lived inside the closed box of the factions- with everything that has meant, for good and ill.
