Middle East Democracy: The Hamas Factor

There is a degree of surrealism in all of this. Hamas has presented its choice of Prime Minister to President Mahmoud Abbas, as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine says it has agreed in principle to join a Hamas-led government.

In the Arab world, such political transformation (that of Islamists and Socialists working together to create a transparent and democratic Parliament) is only possible in political satire, not as an attainable and healthy political process. But Palestinians - as the Hamas Parliamentary victory sweep and the smooth transition of power have shown - are proving to be quite exceptional in this regard.

It goes without saying that Palestinians, and those who have genuinely supported their democratic insurgency have many reasons to be proud. Evidently, those who used democracy as a decoy to justify their grievous foreign policies or to defend their unwarranted military occupation are now being forced into an unpleasant era of 'soul searching' - as proposed by the Financial Times.

Hamas, not knowingly, perhaps, has abruptly deprived Washington of its last card in a Middle East foreign policy game, which was already in tatters. Delivering democracy was - until Hamas' political rise - Washington's strongest, albeit murkiest pretext to justify its military presence in the Middle East. Other pretexts also proved to be a sham; weapons of mass destruction and all. Even the war on terror logic was turned upside-down, as post-Saddam Iraq became a terror magnet, a term liberally used by US policy makers.

Nothing was left but the good old democracy pretence, which worked well, until Palestinians cast their vote on that critical day late January. The majority voted for Hamas, not because of its Islamic agenda, but because of its uncompromising anti-corruption platform, its stance on Palestinian rights and the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Those who understand the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict must have also decoded the vote as a strong rejection of the US government's dubious role in the conflict and in abetting Israel's defiance of international law. According to the deliberately ambiguous terminology of pro-Israeli fan clubs in Washington, the Palestinian vote reflected an emphatically "anti-American," stance, a most dishonest title indeed.

More
http://counterpunch.org/baroud03022006.html