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Updated: Jul. 5, 2021 4:00 PM
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Updated: Jul. 5, 2021 4:00 PM
The West Bank protests since last month’s death of political activist Nizar Banat while in Palestinian Authority custody continue to occupy political circles in the PA, primarily the Fatah movement. The security apparatuses in the PA seem to feel the protest is weakening, but Fatah sources told Haaretz that they believe the slowdown is only temporary. Senior officials in the movement, like the field activists, say the effort to subdue the protests with arrests and verbal attacks on the organizers won’t calm things down, and may even lead to a flare-up.
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Israeli President Shimon Peres and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
I pray for innocent Palestinians as Hamas terrorists intentionally and cynically use them as civilian shields. Their nightmare reality is that when Israel is forced to defend itself (and every nation has a moral obligation to defend their citizens when rockets are being fired at their civilians), tragedy happens despite deeply careful efforts to reduce civilian casualties. The fact that the responsibility for their loss of life is in the hands of Hamas and other terrorists does not take away the horror or pain of their loss of life. This is especially true now as it is a holy time for Muslims.
After years of hibernation due to internal conflict, Palestinians were expecting to head to the polls on May 22 to choose local representatives to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) until those elections were (again) postponed indefinitely by President Mahmoud Abbas last week.
Those who preach to Palestinians about democracy, including Americans and others in the international community, must take an active role in an effort to ensure these necessary elections take place.
The PLC, a 132-member council aimed at regulating life for Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was created through the Declaration of Principles, often referred to as the Oslo Accords, signed at the White House in 1993. That agreement was supposed to serve as a five-year interim solution until an independent Palestinian state was established. It has, unfortunately, become near permanent.
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Mar. 17, 2021
Mahmoud Abbas waited for more than a decade to call for elections to the Palestinian Authority’s Legislative Council, the presidency, and the PLO’s National Council. Ironically, those planned elections are likely to backfire, and cause irreparable harm to Palestinian democracy.
That’s not because elections and democracy are bad for Palestinians. But the
timing is terrible: the elections could jeopardize the post-Trump restoration of ties with the U.S., could throw the peace process into an even deeper freeze and could lead to Fatah’s disintegration.
Furthermore, the elections are scheduled to be held in the midst of a raging pandemic which Abbas is badly mishandling: failing to both secure vaccines by his own efforts for Palestinians, and failing to make the case forcefully enough that Israel, according to Geneva Conventions, UN Security Council Resolutions, and human rights codes, is responsible for securing the vaccine for Palestinians still l