United Nations Must End Hamas and PLO Stranglehold On Power

September 9, 2016 by David Singer
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The United Nations effort to create a second Arab State in former Palestine – in addition to Jordan – has suffered another death-blow following the Palestinian Supreme Court ordering the suspension of local elections in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip scheduled for October 8…writes David Singer.

No parliamentary elections have been held since the 2006 – which Hamas won – but which the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) refused to accept.  A bitter internecine struggle saw Hamas end up governing the Gaza Strip and the PLO controlling areas “A” and “B” in Judea and Samaria.

No Palestinian presidential election has been held since PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was elected in 2005.

Hamas boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012 – but was due to participate this year.

In the absence of a popularly elected Government exercising complete authoritative and legislative control over the Gazan and West Bank Arab populations – any prospects of reaching a binding agreement with Israel in relation to Gaza and Judea and Samaria remains an impossible pipe dream.

Both the PLO and Hamas have used the slogan “End the Occupation” to demand that Israel totally withdraw from Area “C” in Judea and Samaria over which Israel exercises complete administrative and security control under the Oslo Accords.

The United Nations has repeatedly reinforced that slogan by maintaining its flawed position that building in Area “C” by Israel is illegal in international law – completely ignoring that Jews have the legal right to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in Judea and Samaria under article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations very own Charter.

The United Nations has allowed the conflict between Hamas and the PLO to career out of control for the last 10 years – allowing Hamas and the PLO to:

  • consolidate their power structures and political dominance within their own separate fiefdoms
  • allow corruption and nepotism to become entrenched and
  • pursue policies of confrontation with Israel that have proved disastrous for their respective long-suffering populations.

The United Nations has failed to insist that elections be held to enable such stranglehold on power to end and allow the people to have their say on who should govern them – the “self-determination” the United Nations has long been demanding but is being denied by Hamas and the PLO.

Ramzy Baroud – editor of PalestineChronicle.com – summed up the hopelessness of the political stalemate between Hamas and the PLO as long ago as 12 November 2013:

“In an initially pointless exercise that lasted nearly an hour, I flipped between two Palestinian television channels, Al Aqsa TV of Hamas in Gaza and Palestine TV of Fatah in the West Bank. While both purported to represent Palestine and the Palestinians, each seemed to represent some other place and some other people. It was all very disappointing.

Hamas’ world is fixated on their hate of Fatah and other factional personal business. Fatah TV is stuck between several worlds of archaic language of phony revolutions, factional rivalry and unmatched self-adoration. The two narratives are growingly alien and will unlikely ever move beyond their immediate sense of self-gratification and utter absurdity.”

Nothing has changed.

These irreconcilable differences between Fatah – the dominant faction in the PLO – and Hamas – not a member of the PLO – are still omnipresent in 2016.

The United Nations should be demanding that Hamas and the PLO end their decade-long occupation of power by allowing their respective populations the right to vote in internationally supervised elections.

“End the occupation” would then become a meaningful metaphor rather than a meaningless signpost that continues to lead to nowhere.

David Singer is a Sydney Lawyer and Foundation Member of the International Analysts Network

Comments

3 Responses to “United Nations Must End Hamas and PLO Stranglehold On Power”
  1. Paul Winter says:

    Wrong again, David. We both know that the almost universally corrupt, cynical, democracy hating, bigoted member states will never respect the rule of law, because doing so would show how far short they fall of the UN’s lofty ideals. We also both know the abject failure of successive Israeli governments in the Jewish state’s goals of gaining acceptance by being progressive, tolerant, law abiding, magnanimous in victory and generous.

    The only way the psychopathic, kleptocratic, antisemitic jihadis of the left wing revolutionary PA and of the medievalist Wahabist Hamas can be put out of business is by Israel grasping the nettle by invading the territories it allowed them to take over setting up administrations allowing peaceful Arabs self-government and deporting the ones who live only to kill Jews, to Jordan or to the wilds of Syria.

  2. Eion Isaac says:

    Hamas and Fatah have always denied the Jews the right to live in their Ancient Homeland even to escape the Nazi Genocide .
    These areas had many empty spaces that could have saved all the Jews of Europe without Arab Palestinians being displaced from the lands they tilled.
    The innate human flaws of Mass Murder Tribalism wrecked this utopia delusion .
    Municipal Elections would open raw wounds and disputes and will not help in calming the situation.
    There are too much provocation by Extremists in all the communities with outposts being built and to provoke violence But also hateful incitement against the Jewish people in their ancient Land and Modern Armed Sanctuary .

    • Lynne Newington says:

      The Holy See wasn’t in a hurry either voting against the right to a homeland in 1948 then refusing to recognise you until decades later.
      The reason history tells us they didn’t want to offend “the other side” and believed they had a greater chance of staking their claims for posterity.

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