Palestinian Democracy

This AP story has gotten widely linked thanks to its funny trashing of both Richard Gere and George W. Bush, but lurking beneath the soap factory worker's cutting remarks is an underlying reality that's far more important: The big Palestinian elections only really have one candidate. They only have one real candidate because the main opposition candidate is in an Israeli jail, and because the governments of Israel and the United States collaborated with Abu Mazen and the leadership of Fatah to muscle him out of the election. Thus, after yeards in which the Bush/Sharon position has been that you can't deal with Yasser Arafat because he's a pseudo-democratic leader of an entrenched kleptocracy, the US and Israel find themselves in the position of creating a new pseudo-democratic leadership drawn from the ranks of the same entrenched kleptocracy.

This is the main dilemma of Arab political reform a la Bush writ large. There's a desire to promote democracy, but this desire is inextricably bound to the notion that democracy will advance highly specific outcomes. We saw it for a long time in Iraq, too. We wanted the Iraqi people to elect a government of their own, as long as that government was headed by Chalabi or Pachnachi. Fortunately, we've managed to half-heartedly abandon that view, but only after it was probably too late. In Palestine, we want democracy, but only if democracy means Abu Mazen. Throughout the Middle East, we want democratically elected leaders only if those leaders will be the much-heralded moderates.

The tragedy of it all is that the underlying theory behind democracy promotion isn't wrong. If peace ever does come to Israel and Palestine, the fact that Israel is a democracy will be an important reason why. Much as Palestinians would rather deal with a Labor leadership than with Sharon, and would even prefer to deal with a Meretz leadership, forming a real deal requires Sharon. Not Sharon per se but the endorsement of the political forces he represents. A deal with the Likud will be hard to find, but if you find it it's a real deal. One of the things we saw over Oslo is that a peace made exclusively with the Israeli left has little value, because the forces that emerged to put Netanyahu in power still existed, and eventually backed out of the deal. A deal with Abu Mazen will be like a deal with Yitzhak Rabin or the deal with the Egyptian dictatorship -- a useful temporary expedient, but ultimate of little value because it doesn't represent a true popular consensus. At the same time, democratic leadership as such exercizes a moderating influence on regime leaders, because they're accountable to their people for actual results.