“Palestinians will not accept dictatorship. People want to be free,” one Palestinian adviser on the conflict with Israel said in March.
1 But since the last Palestinian parliamentary election in 2006, Palestine’s nascent democracy has been slowly squeezed by Israeli occupation and increasingly authoritarian Palestinian leaders. Now, fifteen years later, President Mahmoud Abbas has finally scheduled parliamentary and presidential elections. Rumors abound as to whether they will materialize. Ninety-three percent of eligible voters across Gaza and the West Bank have registered—of which roughly half (ages eighteen to thirty-three) have never voted. For some Palestinians, it is a moment of hope; for the EU, it is a moment of sobriety.