While Israelis were voting last week, the fact that the Palestinian Authority has not held elections in ten years was hardly lost on many Palestinians. Evelyn Gordon argues that—contrary to the declarations of the liberal Western media—the lack of Palestinian democracy is a much bigger obstacle to peace than the choices made by Israel’s democracy:
[A]side from the fact that [the PA’s] denial of basic civil rights is bad in general, it has real implications for the peace process. . . . If Israelis see a chance for peace and consider their own prime minister an obstacle to it, they can unseat him—an option they’ve in fact exercised in the past. Palestinians have no such option.
But the problem goes deeper than that: [Mahmoud] Abbas, now in the eleventh year of his four-year term, also lacks the democratic legitimacy needed to make the kind of concessions any peace agreement would entail. Palestinian human-rights activist Bassem Eid summed up the issue bluntly . . . : Abbas, he told his shocked audience, will never be able to make peace with Israel, because he currently represents nobody except himself, his wife, and his two sons. . . .
[I]f Western leaders are serious about wanting Israeli-Palestinian peace, working to rectify the lack of Palestinian democracy would be far more productive than wringing their hands over the choices made by Israel’s democracy. For precisely because Israelis can always change their minds again in a few years, the Palestinian democracy deficit is far more detrimental to the prospects for peace than the outcome of any Israeli election ever could be.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/the-election-that-didnt-happen-matters-far-more-than-the-one-that-did/