Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected to the Palestinian Authority (PA) presidency for a four-year term in 2005, recently declared that the PA will be holding parliamentary elections in June, followed by a presidential election in July. Benny Avni is skeptical:
It’s an old trick. Not that it went unwelcomed by the marks at the United Nations. Secretary-General Guterres was to make that clear. He was followed by a number of Western governments.
So don’t hold your breath. Who, after all, is eligible to run? Take Mohammad Dahlan, a former Fatah leader in Gaza who has a large following despite living in the United Arab Emirates as top adviser to its leader, Mohammad bin Zayed. Even before finalizing the details, the Palestinian Authority announced Dahlan will be barred from running for the presidency, reasoning that, as Dahlan was convicted in absentia by a Ramallah court, he won’t be eligible.
Above all, a question mark hovers over the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Despite a Fatah-Hamas agreement, . . . reached recently with the help of Egypt and other Arab states, the reconciliation among Palestinian factions remains fragile. Rivers of bad blood do not easily disappear. Will Ismail Hannyieh, Hamas’s top leader who decamped Gaza in 2019 and now lives luxuriously in Qatar, come back? Would he be eligible to run?
More crucially, will the participation of Hamas, listed by America and others as a terrorist organization, add to the facade of democracy Ramallah tries to project to the world, or lead to global condemnation?
But, Avni concludes, such speculation is moot, because most likely Abbas simply won’t follow through on the promise of elections—a promise he’s made and broken many times over the past years.
Read more on New York Sun: https://www.nysun.com/editorials/palestinians-greet-our-new-prexy-with-an-old-trick/91404/