Cabinet expected to approve East Jerusalem PA vote Sunday (no Hamas)

[Wordie]

Last update - 03:34 15/01/2006
Cabinet expected to approve East Jerusalem PA vote Sunday
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent

The cabinet is expected on Sunday to approve a proposal by Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to allow residents of East Jerusalem to vote in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council (the parliament).

According to the proposal, members of terror organizations will not be able to run as candidates in the election.

Votes will be cast at post offices in East Jerusalem, as was the arrangement in the 1996 and 2005 elections.

Olmert met Friday with U.S. envoys Elliott Abrams and David Walsh to discuss the Palestinian elections, scheduled for January 25, and the possible implications of Hamas' participation. Olmert told the Americans that Hamas had to fulfill its obligations to fight terror according to the road map.

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/670259.html

Doesn't this proposal defy US and EU requests that Israel not interfere in the Palestinian elections? The article doesn't make clear what the reaction of the US envoys to the proposal might be. There have already been reports of Israel preventing some candidates from campaigning. This is very bad. However one might feel about Hamas, for Israel to deny it's participation is only going to exacerbate the problems.

[Tom Joad]

1. Given that some Israeli parties that have been part of the governing

coalition have called for the full ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland, they would not have much to stand on to deny all Palestinians their right to express their views, to at least have that small measure of self-determination.

Certainly no lack of extremism in Israeli elections. See for example the Moledet Party, which was part of both Bibi's coalition and Sharon's.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/375/op6.htm
...
James Zogby writes:
On the eve of yet another round of peace talks with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has invited the leader of the Moledet Party to join his coalition government.

The Moledet (Homeland) Party is not just another far-right Zionist grouping. Its founding principle, as stated in its charter, is the call to transfer Arabs out of "Eretz Israel": "The sure cure for the demographic ailment is the transfer of the Arabs to Arab countries as an aim of any negotiations and a way to solve the Israeli-Arab conflict over the land of Israel." By "Arabs", the Modelet Party means not only the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza: its members also seek to "cleanse" Israel of its Palestinian Arab citizens. And by "demographic ailment", the Modelet means not only the presence of Arabs in Israel's midst, but also the "troubling high birth rate" of the Arab population.

While such racism puts the Modelet Party in the same camp as the Le Pen movement in France, or the David Duke movement in the United States, even those bigots do not call for the forced expulsion of the communities they see as polluting their respective societies.
....
********************
That such a Party not only is allowed to legally exist in Israel, but to become part of the ruling coalition, makes it clear that many Israelis have not given up the dream of sending the rest (after such a "good" start in 1948) of the Palestinians into the sea.

[Wordie]

2. My concern has to do with the election results as well.

The last thing that's needed is for the election results to be seen as illegitimate because of Israeli meddling. Of course, one possible reason may be that the incorruptibility of Hamas worries Israel. If Hamas were to win, and exercise the control over the militants that Israel keeps using as the reason for "no partner," what then?

[eyl]

3. Oh, I don't know

don't you think its just barely possible that what worries Israel is Hamas' comittment - both in word and deed - to destroying Israel? Just throwing it out as a possibility, unlikely though it may seem....

[Wordie]

4. Didn't they just withdraw that?

I don't mean to downplay that part of things, eyl. On the other hand, I don't believe for a moment that politics doesn't play a part here too. Who knows, maybe Israel is trying to give Abbas an excuse to cancel the elections? But that would be sure to lead to more violence.

Any way you look at the idea of Israel getting involved in the Palestinian elections, it seems like it will lead to a negative result.

And then, weren't several former Israeli Prime Ministers former terrorists? Do what I say, not what I do?

[eyl]

5. No, they didn't

they just avoided talking about it in the forecoming elections. It's still a part of their official policy.

And how long did it take for those "former terrorists" to become PMs?

[Englander]

6. Thirty years.

Those terrorwists, Begin & his buds, were, however, elected members of the Knesset in 1949.

'Factional and Government Make-Up of the First Knesset'
http://www.knesset.gov.il/history/eng/eng_hist1_s.htm