Voting for suicide

Christopher Hitchens:

Almost all our commentary on the Israel-Palestine dispute is unconsciously ethnocentric and practically every paragraph on the Hamas election victory has followed this bias by asking what it means either for the Israelis or for the "peace process." It might be worth just thinking about what it could mean for the Palestinians.

The preferred analysis, which certainly derives from a kernel of fact, is that the vote represents a repudiation of the baroque corruption of the Arafat gang (which was so brilliantly anatomized by David Samuels in the Atlantic Monthly of September 2005). But there are at least two difficulties with this comforting conclusion. For one thing, anyone voting for a clerical party in the hope of abolishing corruption is asking to be considered a fool and also treated as one: There is corruption all over the Middle East, but it is nowhere as flagrant and exploitative and damaging as in the region's two main theocracies, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Those who come to power as puritans lose no time in becoming positively gorgeous in the excess of their corruption, and Hamas will not be an exception to this rule.

There is also an element of condescension in the "corruption" explanation. Hamas says that it wants an Islamic state all the way from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. It publishes and promulgates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Why not assume that it is at least partly serious about all this?...

...

It is shallow and short-term, therefore, to write up the election result as a bitter fruit for the Bush administration's democracy initiative. (What was the alternative? No elections? Elections but without Hamas participation? And do not forget that the combined vote for the four secular and leftist and independent lists, at a time of extreme pressure to conform to either Fatah or Hamas candidates, was over 112,000 ballots, or about a tenth of the total.) This is, rather, another stage in a process of coercive Islamization that has been going on for some time. The opposition party was already better organized than, and had almost as many guns as, the nominal Palestinian "government." It has a host of unemployed and semi-educated and well-armed young men, who will no doubt relish the task of bullying women and "unofficially" collecting the al-Jeziya revenues. Critics of the "road map" correctly pointed to the enclosure of Palestinians in ghettolike enclaves and Bantustans. Wait until you see what life looks like in a hermetic society, cut off by the Wall whose permanence this election almost certainly guarantees and subjected to Islamic rule.

...