Palestinians ready for change

After the dramatic presidential elections of 2004, from our own national nail-biter to all of the confusion in the Ukraine, the world was more than ready for a predictable election. I guess we all felt we owed it to ourselves to look at some election results and take a sigh of relief, relax and say, "There. That's done. And just as we expected."

And so earlier this week, Mahmoud Abbas won the Palestinian presidential election in the most unsurprising of victories with over 60 percent of the vote. Even though Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad called for their members to boycott the proceedings, many view Abu Mazen's majority win as a sign that Palestinians are ready. They are ready to have a relevant leader, ready for the resumption of negotiations with Israel and perhaps even peace. However, from all the recent Palestinian elections, the most surprising and telling result was actually one that received little press coverage.

Over two weeks ago, The Associated Press ran a short clipping detailing a quiet upheaval that took place during the West Bank municipal elections. Of the 306 hotly contested individual races, female candidates won an unprecedented 51 seats. More importantly, women won 32 of these seats without the aid of the gender quota -- which mandated a certain minimum number of women -- and defeated male candidates.

In a society where women's traditional role as "mothers of the Palestinian people" is so ingrained and politicized that the West Bank fertility rate is over 4.5, the movement of women into relatively high positions of public responsibility is no small achievement. Considering that many of these women ran their campaigns against the intense wishes of their own male relatives, it's impressive that there were so many female candidates, let alone so many successful ones.

The 51 women of the West Bank are even more significant because of another surprising result from the local elections: the large number of winning politicians who were in some way associated or affiliated with Hamas. Despite the fact that popular support for Hamas in the Occupied Territories has been on the rise for years, the "Hamas" candidates and their 35 percent take of the municipal elections came as a surprise to the major news sources and was widely reported.

At first, these two results seem almost contradictory and indicative of some kind of deep divide in Palestinian society and politics. After all, Hamas was the organization behind the first Intifada's hijab campaign that with violent threats forced all Gazan women to wear headscarves. Unless you count its use of female suicide bombers as a step towards equality, Hamas' idea of the proper role of Palestinian women has not changed much into the current Intifada. Meanwhile, all of the women's non-governmental organizations spent the last decade attempting to undo the effects of Hamas' harm through gender training and workshops. It's hard to see anything but division when one side is trying to change Palestinian politics by bringing women out of the home as the other attempts the same by keeping women inside.

What most Westerners don't understand is that Hamas gets so much support from Palestinians not because it has such radical Islamic fundamentalist beliefs but because to them the organization has lately been the only viable source of opposition. When the Palestinian Authority abandoned the grassroots approach after the first Intifada, Hamas took its place and developed charitable organizations to fill in some of the gaps left by the PA's corruption. From these groups, Hamas has been able to build its base of support and a strong one at that. And it's easy to forget that in the late 1990s there was an unholy alliance between Hamas and leftist political groups, including those belonging to the women's movement. The organizations "agreed to disagree" on social issues in an attempt to provide stronger opposition the ruling Fatah party.

Perhaps Hamas' local election gains should not be interpreted as only a threat to stability and peace. It's likely that so many Palestinians voted for women and Hamas affiliated candidates in the late December elections because they again decided to "agree to disagree" in the latter case. Their support of Hamas is not an endorsement of the organization's larger philosophical beliefs but instead a sign of how ready they are for change. And that desire is certainly something that Abbas must recapture and build on.

Amara Rockar is a sophomore political science major from St. Louis. Out of Range appears on Fridays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.