Palestinians – and young people in particular – were bitterly disappointed by President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to postpone parliamentary elections that were originally scheduled for later this month. The 85-year-old Abu Mazen, as he is widely known, was first elected for a four-year-term in 2006. Sixteen years later, he is still in power in Ramallah.

 Like many issues linked to the Palestine-Israel conflict, Abbas’s move has generated angry controversy. Presidential elections, planned for late July, have also been postponed. But the decision was hardly surprising: from the moment he announced them in January there was speculation Abbas would call them off because of fear of rivals from his own Fatah movement. Hamas, based in the Gaza Strip, would also clearly pose a significant threat.

 Prominent among his challengers was Marwan Barghouti, the charismatic Fatah leader imprisoned by Israel since 2004 for murder in the second intifada. Another is Nasser al-Qudwa, a nephew of Yasser Arafat. And Muhammad Dahlan, Arafat’s former Gaza security chief, who is living in the UAE, is now associated with the Future Party.

 Israel, still struggling to form a new coalition government after its fourth election in two years, insisted on excluding East Jerusalem from both Palestinian polls, providing Abbas with a good excuse to abandon the elections. A survey conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in March predicted Fatah would win only 32% of the vote. Israel, it seems, has a clear interest in keeping Abbas in power.

 Abbas defined the demand that all 150,000 voters in East Jerusalem be allowed to cast their ballots as his “red line”. But under a previous agreement, as few as 6,300 could vote in Israeli post offices. In the last election, the remainder were allowed to cast their vote only if they lived outside the post-1967 expanded municipal boundaries.

 Jerusalem, of course, has also been generating alarming news headlines in recent weeks, with right-wing Jewish extremists targeting Arabs and tensions rising during Ramadan over evictions of Palestinians from the eastern neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. “It’s the height of racism,” complained one resident. “Jews can get their properties back, but not the Arabs.” On May 7 the Israeli Foreign Ministry defined the problem as a “real-estate dispute between private parties.”

 That dismissive statement came in response to a rare expression of concern, by France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, about the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank. And Britain’s consul-general in Jerusalem clarified helpfully that the issue in Sheikh Jarrah centred around Palestinian families who had lost their original homes in 1948 and whose new accommodation was built by UNRWA in 1956 – on land previously claimed by Jews.  “It is clear,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli-Palestinian MP, “that the aim of this unjust eviction effort is to Judaize the Arab city of Jerusalem.” The UN even warned that evictions could constitute a “war crime.”

 Ha’aretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper, put it bluntly: “In the end, half of Israel’s capital city is occupied, and 40 percent of its residents are noncitizens who view Israel as a foreign, oppressive regime.” Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’s armed wing, also issued an ominous statement, warning Israel that it would “pay a heavy price” if it went ahead with the Sheikh Jarrah evictions.

 Hamas had already criticised Abbas’s postponement of the elections as “opposed to our national consensus and popular opinion.” Fatah and Hamas have tried to reconcile their differences many times, but every attempt has descended into mutual recriminations, leaving the Palestinians divided politically, as well as geographically, and further dashing their hopes for independence. 

 Fear of Hamas was likely the deciding factor for Abbas– and that is shared by Israel, Jordan, and Egypt – and the US. In March, Nadav Argaman, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, held a “fraught” meeting with the Palestinian president, in which he encouraged him to cancel the polls. “You can’t hold elections with Hamas,” Argaman reportedly warned.

 Going ahead with the polls would also have created a scenario which would complicate the Biden administration’s support for the Palestinian Authority (PA). That may account for Washington’s indifferent response to Abbas’ decision. Another factor may be Biden’s desire to return to the Iranian nuclear deal of 2015 – and not to arouse Israeli anger.

 In any event, with no new election dates announced, it leaves Palestinian politics in a dysfunctional situation of profound uncertainty. The PA is widely seen as a corrupt, self-interested and maintaining the status quo of the 1993 Oslo Accords despite the widely-perceived demise of a two-state solution.

 Palestinians born in the 1970’s and 1980’s desperately want to see a change in the grimly familiar reality of their lives under occupation: elections seem likely to interest young people, both as voters and as candidates, giving new life to their ageing political system – on the condition that Israel does not intervene or is prepared to allow only Fatah loyalists.

 Achieving Palestinian national unity obviously is an important step. No-one, though can argue with the fact that young people – on both sides of this bitterly toxic divide – represent the future.

by: IAN BLACK