Legislative elections under occupation are a maze and not a solution

author

Hikmat Ajouri

The coincidence of the legislative elections this fall in Palestine, America, Israel and Spain is a feeling that is supposed to inspire within us hope that the establishment of the long-awaited independent democratic Palestinian state is near, even though the only thing in common between these aforementioned elections and the Palestinian elections is legislative entitlement only. What is different is an event and there is nothing wrong with it. I mean that the elections in Palestine, which if they happen, will not be able to achieve their democratic purpose neither in legislation nor in implementation as long as Palestine remains a state under occupation where there is neither legislation nor Democracy and there is no law under occupation except the democracy of the occupation and its racist laws and laws, since the judge is the occupation and the executioner is also the occupation, as evidenced by the piracy of tax funds and the decision of the occupation court to oblige the Palestinian Authority to compensate Israeli soldiers and police for their injuries during their killing of the Palestinian people and the occupation’s decision also to prevent the Elections Commission from reaching Jerusalem and Gaza. There is no need to remind in the same context that there are some elected Palestinian leaders. She continues to languish behind the bars of this occupation's prisons for more than twenty years.

This introduction does not mean, as some expect, that it gives the occupation an electoral veto, but rather it means the necessity of striving to end this occupation as a top priority and by all available and possible means, after violence has become an impossible means of achieving this goal.

However, I acknowledge that the Palestinian popular insistence, which we sense through opinion polls and means of communication, to hold elections is justified as it is a legislative and constitutional entitlement that was delayed by about sixteen years, and this entitlement is right, but if this delay was actually voluntary, it is without the slightest doubt a forced delay, due to obstacles that still exist, namely the occupation, with all its laws, remaining perched on the chests of the Palestinians, whose damage has been doubled due to the division, which is considered another side of the same coin of occupation. If it turns into something resembling secession, add to that the presence of 925 military checkpoints, and the number is increasing, with the aim of fragmenting the West Bank to the point that some citizens are moving across the walls and roofs of houses to reach their homes or work, let alone how they get to the ballot boxes.

This dark reality is what makes me insist and repeat, despite my unlimited loyalty to democracy, that any elections under occupation will be a labyrinth, as they will lack any electoral content or value, specifically democracy, because if they take place under such a reality, they will not correct what the occupation spoils, but perhaps they will make it worse in the sense that they will divide what is already divided between the cities and villages of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and Gaza, which was kidnapped by Hamas a year after the elections. 2006 in order to establish its imaginary Brotherhood project in Gaza with the illusion that this project will later expand to the West Bank. In this context, it must be remembered that this Brotherhood project has no relation to the Palestinian national project for which the contemporary Palestinian revolution was launched in 1965.

The illusion of the Hamas Brotherhood project and its obscurantism were explained by one of the Hamas leaders by saying that Palestine is nothing more than a toothpick in this project, the illusion of which was embodied in what things have reached in Gaza twenty years after it was kidnapped by Hamas from the legitimacy embodied by the Palestine Liberation Organization, with facilitations from the occupation in service of a strategic Zionist project, which is to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state between the river and the sea, and these Zionist facilitations began with the withdrawal of the occupation. From Gaza unilaterally in 2005, followed by the 2006 elections, in which the occupation was undoubtedly aware of what things would lead to afterward, which is what happened with the kidnapping of Gaza by Hamas, in addition to the financial facilities granted by Netanyahu in order to revive and continue the rule of division by delivering Qatari funds to the Hamas regime in Gaza, which confirms that division and occupation are two coins of the same coin.

Of course, the maestro of this satanic plan is the extreme Zionist right ruling in Israel, on whose throne Netanyahu still sits, who exploited the division and its leadership with all merit and ability for something in himself, which is to rescue Netanyahu when needed, and it culminates in the flood of October 7, which saved Netanyahu from an inevitable fall, and after he became steps away from going to prison because of his conviction for four crimes, so that Netanyahu was able to reverse the direction of this flood with a war of genocide and ethnic cleansing. For our people in Gaza, which he reoccupied and turned into rubble, thereby achieving a Zionist strategic goal, which is to wipe out Gaza, but in reality it is Netanyahu’s dream that he would become king of Israel.

Of course, it is no longer a secret that Netanyahu knew about this flood before it happened, and that he hid its occurrence from all his security services in order to exploit it when needed, and this is what happened. Is there evidence of that from the confession of Netanyahu’s former military secretary, “Everything was known before the October attack” (Ofoq News). To that, I add what Hunter Biden, the son of the former US president, said, “Israel allowed the October 7 attack to occur to implement its plans in Gaza.” In addition to many other testimonies in this regard.

On the other hand, we must note another fact, which is that what we are witnessing of a popular coup in the West against Israel in favor of the cause of the Palestinian people is due to its justice, in addition to the fall of the last fig leaf on the shamefulness of the alleged democracy, the shamelessness of Israel’s victim role, and the emergence of the truth of the ruling Zionist nature in Israel, whose basis is racism and hatred of all non-Jews through what the children and grandchildren of Nazi Holocaust survivors did with their practices of ethnic cleansing. The genocide of the Palestinian people over the course of three years in Gaza, openly, day and night, in sound and video, as its ugliness and inhumanity surpassed everything we heard about the ugliness of Nazism, which led to what we are witnessing of a similar reversal in the official Western position, sparked by the illegal Zionist settlement project in occupied Palestine and settler terrorism supported by the ruling fascist regime in Israel, in addition to the practices of this regime’s army against the Palestinians in refugee camps in The West Bank and its cities with the aim of ethnic cleansing the Palestinians.

The West's popular and official coup, which reached the US Congress, occurred after this West woke up from a decades-long slumber imposed by the Zionist movement with anti-Semitic hallucinogenic pills and hallucinations of assuming the role of the victim, and after it became clear to this West that the children and grandchildren of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust had assumed the Nazi state and were practicing Nazism in its ugliest forms, killing, starvation, and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians for no reason other than that these Palestinians are the original owners of the land on which it stands. Israel.

What I mentioned does not prevent people from finding an excuse for all those who insist on holding legislative elections with the prior awareness that they will not give legitimacy to the Palestinian political system and will not uproot corruption, as they believe. This means that the elections, whatever their results, will not be able to fix what the occupation is ruining as long as this occupation remains and its tools remain with it, which are division and corruption, which the occupation has continued to employ as a means of soft destruction for the Palestinian mind and body. The excuse I mentioned in my belief is the desire of the Egyptians and this is their right to participate in constructive change and change. A reality that they themselves contribute to creating, but the fear of all of this I find in a verse of poetry: “I prayed for Amr and he died, and he pleased me, so I lived with people who cried for Amr.”

On the other hand, I believe that the most correct insistence at this stage should be centered not on elections, but on ending the division and rebuilding national unity under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization, through a national dialogue that includes factions, elites, and unions that preserves the organization’s value and international prestige as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. At the same time, it is considered the shortest and possible path to ending the occupation before the division turns into separation and Gaza into golf courses and the East Riviera, as Trump has dreamed of.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that national unity, whoever wishes, is an obligatory path to ending the occupation and embodying the Palestinian national project without violence, as it will give greater international political and moral legitimacy to our political system and much greater than any elections under occupation. The reason is that national unity is a possible and available successful means of investment to enhance and develop positive international support, specifically in permanent members of the Security Council such as Britain and France, which support, as we can see, is increasing day after day for our just cause and is transforming. To effective tools to end the occupation, just as happened with the apartheid regime in South Africa, as it is a Siamese twin of the racist regime in the occupying state.