West Bank vote to gauge Hamas

Palestinians throughout the West Bank voted in municipal elections Thursday in what some observers view as the barometer of Palestinian politics after Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

In Beituna, taxis draped in green-and-white Hamas flags and the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) clogged the intersection next to a polling center crowded with voters.

With these local elections as a gauge, many are closely monitoring the popularity of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that has 400 candidates vying for 1,018 local council seats. Both Israeli and Palestinian officials are concerned that Hamas, which says it will continue to attack Israelis, stands to gain ground in the aftermath of the Gaza pullout because it claimed credit for forcing Israel to withdraw.

Saadeh Shalabi, a candidate from the Hamas-affiliated Reform and Change Party, says that the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) needs to share power with other parties - particularly Hamas.

Thursday's vote, for which official results will be announced Sunday, is viewed by many as a prelude to January's Palestinian Legislative Council elections.

Israel's position is that Hamas should not be allowed to participate in the polls because it remains, by US State Department standards, a terrorist group. But the PA's viewpoint has been that the best way to conquer Hamas is to coopt it. As such, it holds that Hamas will indeed participate in the parliamentary vote.

At stake is the future of Hamas and whether it is capable of forswearing militancy in order to participate in a nascent democracy.

"There is a fundamental contradiction between building a democratic process and being armed and sworn to killing Israelis," says Mark Regev, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman. "How can the Palestinians talk about building institutions and laying the foundations for the future political state if they are still engaging in terrorist activities?"

Mr. Regev says that the Oslo Accords, reached between Israeli and Palestinian leaders during the 1990s, specifically state that organizations that reject peace should not be allowed to run in elections.

A prominent Palestinian pollster, however, says that a high turnout for Hamas in municipal elections, like those held Thursday, does not necessarily translate into support on a national Palestinian level. Exit polls after municipal elections held last January showed the No. 1 issue Palestinians had on their minds was corruption. As the antidote, they took votes away from the PA and gave them to Hamas.

But at the presidential level, exit polls showed that the foremost issue was not corruption, but the capacity of the candidate to assert his authority, maintain law and order, and reach future agreements with Israel, says Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. "In today's elections, I think it will be a continuation of the corruption issue, combined with a small town phenomenon of people voting along family lines," says Dr. Shikaki.

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