Support for Abbas dwindles due to lack of fight – and elections


September 17, 2014
Sarah Benton

Comments from Al Akhbar and the US’s The Hill. Below:

Amongst Palestinians, either Gaza PM Haniyeh or (imprisoned) Marwan Barghouti would be preferred as a leader to Mahmoud Abbas.
  

Poll: Only 10 percent of Gazans would vote for Abbas in presidential election

By Al Akhbar
September 16, 2014

Only 10 percent of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip would vote for current President Mahmoud Abbas if presidential elections were held today, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

The poll, conducted by the Gaza-based House of Wisdom Institute, indicates that 29.8 percent of Gazans would vote for senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh, while 28 percent would vote for jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti.

Interestingly, 32.4 percent would choose a different candidate.

The majority of those surveyed thought the Israeli assault unified Palestinians, but expected Hamas-Fatah disputes to continue in the aftermath of the war.

Regarding the Israeli assault on Gaza, 73.6 percent were satisfied with the performance of the different resistance groups.

When it comes to the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire deal, the survey, which was conducted in 30 locations across Gaza, showed that 40 percent were dissatisfied with the deal and 60 percent said they expected Israel to violate the conditions of the deal.

The seven-week Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip has killed more than 2,130 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, including 577 aged 18 or younger.


Time to reimagine Palestinian policy?

By Owen Kirby, The Hill
September 16, 2014

If only Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were to control the Gaza Strip. It goes without saying that almost anything would be an improvement from the Islamist movement Hamas’ ruinous reign in the Palestinian enclave. However, having disavowed terrorism as an instrument of statecraft and committed to a negotiated settlement with Israel, who better than Abbas to oversee the restoration of stability to Gaza and security along Israel’s southern border? The resumption of Abbas’ authority in Gaza should clearly be the goal for policy makers strategizing next steps in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Or should it?

In the positive column, the West Bank under Abbas has been a comparative oasis of stability. In Gaza, serious clashes with Israel seem to erupt on average every two years. Since Abbas’ election to succeed Yasser Arafat in 2005, terror operations originating in the West Bank have diminished dramatically and as a result the number of disruptive retaliatory incursions by Israel. While this could be attributed to Israel’s erection of a separation barrier (“the Wall”) along the length of the West Bank, the professionalization of Palestinian security agencies under Abbas – with U.S. assistance – has undoubtedly made a significant contribution. As has Abbas’ commitment to security cooperation with Israel, which he recently declared “sacred.”

Notwithstanding the relative calm enjoyed by Palestinians in the West Bank compared to their Gaza compatriots, an August 2014 survey of the West Bank-Gaza has Hamas’ Ismael Haniyeh trouncing Abbas for the presidency. Notably, only 25 percent of West Bank respondents say they would vote for the incumbent. Appearing to many during this summer’s crisis as impotent to either stop the killing or leverage it for strategic gain, the numbers reflect true disappointment in Abbas’ performance. However, conducted during a period of heightened emotions, such polling needs to be viewed in a broader context.

Prior to the Gaza flair-up, Abbas had been enjoying a multi-year run of consistently high favourability ratings when pitted against his Hamas rivals. In a June 2014 poll by the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), Abbas beats Haniyeh by 31 percentage points. In the same poll of 1200 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, respondents choose Abbas’ path to independence over the one advocated by Hamas by a margin of 32 percent; a finding bolstered by a decade of polling results showing majority support for a negotiated settlement.

On a less positive note, polls show significant numbers of Palestinians harbouring negative opinions about the internal state of affairs under the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, particularly with respect to civil liberties and personal freedoms. Accordingly, a significant portion of the public consistently expresses a preference for “none of the above” when polled on the issue of presidential or political party preference; neither Abbas nor Haniyeh.

Significantly, when asked in an October 2013 AWRAD poll whether “the assumption of control by the PA of Gaza” was a solution to ongoing political division, only 11 percent of Gazans said, yes. It should be remembered that prior to Hamas’ 2007 “coup” in Gaza, Abbas’ Fatah Movement lost to the Islamist movement in parliamentary elections deemed transparent by international observers, after a decade of incompetence. Perhaps not surprisingly, the same poll question had 48 percent of Gazans opting for “new legislative council [parliamentary] elections.” Support for elections is not only to be found in Gaza, with Abbas’ mandate having run out in 2009 polls show West Bankers overwhelmingly favor a return to the ballot box.

The inconvenient truth is that far from being the model polity that the international community hoped would lure Gaza back into the fold – or the Arab world’s first democracy as predicted by many observers at its founding in 1994 – the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has consolidated itself over the years along the lines of the one-party model hitherto common across the Arab World. Characteristically, criticism of authority is little tolerated, legislation is by decree, decision making opaque, and favoritism and patronage – aided by donor assistance (including over $900 million in budget support from the U.S. Treasury since 2009) – a fact of life. Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Transparency International and other international watchdog groups have been chronicling these developments for some time to little avail.

As policy makers now seek a path out of the current crisis in order to avert the next one, Mahmoud Abbas may present a worthwhile starting point, but maybe it is time to project forward and also imagine a course in which the binary choices of the past are not the only ones on the table.

Kirby is a development consultant with two decades of experience in the Middle East, including in the Palestinian territories. During the administration of George W. Bush, he served as senior advisor in the Department of State’s Office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative and previously as regional director for the Middle East & North Africa at the International Republican Institute.

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