Most Palestinians were not eligible to vote in the recent Palestinian elections, because they are absentees, in a wide sense of that word. In the end, less than one million Palestinians cast their ballots. Outside Iraq, on the other hand, a small minority of absentees are vigorously encouraged to vote. In this way, and in others, Palestinians are – unwittingly or not – portrayed as a negligible quantity. However, there are in fact nearly eight million Palestinians, including refugees according to the UN definition of that term. They are still a vast majority in and outside Historic Palestine compared to the five million Israeli Jews. But they remain, in the foreseeable future, a fragmented nation.

The Bush administration seems to have forgotten why it went to war in Iraq. Let us remind the reader: in order to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction, and to pre-empt the use of these weapons by the former Iraqi regime. However, it did not find any, and after over one and a half years of vain searching (following over a decade of UN-led searches) – as well as other ‘mistakes’, including a very high civilian death toll and torture scandals – the US government has now come up with a mainly ‘retroactive’ reason for going there: to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq. As Seymour Hersh recently pointed out (The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret, New Yorker, January 19, 2005), the members of the new Bush administration have been picked to a large extent because of two publicly stated main government policy objectives: to win the war on terrorism and to bring democracy to the Middle East, objectives that were not on the official agenda when the first Bush administration was formed.

Is the democracy pledge a desperate Plan B, or just an exit strategy for the US in Iraq? Time will tell. What can be said now with a fair degree of certainty is that the upcoming Iraqi election will continue being used to justify the war.

As the USA and its coalition partners will claim credit for enabling these elections, whatever the outcome, there will no doubt also be many associations and comparisons made with the Palestinian presidential elections of two weeks ago. The latter have been styled by the west as the first-ever democratic elections in the Arab World. During the next few weeks we are thus likely to hear the following mantras in US government circles and media, and not only there: “We now know that Arabs can hold democratic elections”; “Democracy is spreading in the Middle East”; “We are on the right track: Israel, Palestinian Authority, Iraq, who’s next?”

It would perhaps be both prudent and instructive to reflect on the ideological importance of the Palestinian elections before they are used or abused for such purposes. The question that first comes to mind is: what do the Palestinian and Iraqi elections have in common? Obviously a great deal. Perhaps it is wiser to concentrate on how they differ.

Formally, the Palestinian Authority does not (yet) rule a state, as opposed to the Iraqi interim government. The main reason is that Israel militarily occupies the territory granted the Palestinians by the international community in 1947 and 1967, respectively. But Iraq is also under military occupation, also by powers with overwhelming military strength, so this difference, though formally important, appears to be less than essential. And the occupation troops are not going to be leaving Iraq on January 31. That is for sure. The Iraqi and Palestinian elections are thus both held under conditions of military occupation which severely limit their governments’ sovereignty and independence, and hamper a true democratic process.

The war in Iraq is a high-intensity war with hundreds of thousands of casualties so far. Last Thursday alone saw no less than four suicide attacks and at least 25 deaths. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on the other hand, is often referred to as a low-intensity war. But, obviously, this is a mere matter of degree. Tens of deaths have happened in a day here as well. The Israeli army’s ‘Days of Penitence’ operation in Gaza last year is not fundamentally different from the US assault on Falluja this winter. In sum, there have been hundreds of thousands of casualties here too. The ongoing US-led war in Iraq can be extended backwards in time to 1991, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to 1948. With hindsight, it is hard to say which one is the bloodier conflict.

The main difference between these elections does not seem so dramatic at first glance. Absentee votes did not take place in the Palestinian National Authority presidential elections. In just about every country with elections (whether democratic or not), absentee votes are extended to a minority group of people that remain citizens but are not present in the country during the general elections. With regard to Palestine, however, the majority of people, nearly five million people, are absentees. Many of them have acquired citizenship in other countries, a million in Israel alone. But many are denied citizenship altogether, for instance most of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. It would have made democratic and moral sense to let, at least, these stateless people vote in Palestinian elections, especially since Palestine is not yet a state, and also because they belong to no other state. Instead, there was no absentee voting at all in the PNA elections, not even the 8,000 Palestinians held by Israel as prisoners were allowed to vote. The inhabitants of east Jerusalem, however, were given the opportunity to vote with obstacles: Only 6,000 were allowed to vote in their home city, the rest of 125,000 east Jerusalem Palestinians eligible were forced to leave the city to vote. Moreover, the Israelis created “the appearance of an absentee ballot being cast in Jerusalem for sending to a Palestinian state that was ‘somewhere else’. Therefore, voting was carried out only in post offices…” (Gila Svirsky: A Tale of Two Elections, Miftah, January 11, 2005). Little by little, Israel is carrying out a blatant annexation of east Jerusalem in clear contradiction to international law. The voting and campaigning restrictions in east Jerusalem are an ideological and political part of this ongoing and illegal land grab.

The problem of absentee voting has wide connotations. One possibility of interpreting and justifying this peculiarity in Palestinian voting procedure starts from the fact that the vast majority of these refugees have never lived in the West Bank or Gaza. They were born in exile, and so they have no direct knowledge of the political situation. Nevertheless, they are directly affected by the policies and decisions of the new PNA president, and in return they influence PNA policy profoundly. Only yesterday, a senior Israeli official said that only an interim peace deal would be possible with the new PNA president, Mahmoud Abbas, since he holds final status issues such as the right of return of Palestinian refugees too sacrosanct.

On the other side of the ‘fence’, Israelis treat Palestinian refugees as non-existent, their rights as well. As Uri Davis pointed out in his book, ‘Apartheid Israel’ (London: Zed Books, 2003), “[U]nder Israeli law, any Jew throughout the world has the right of immediate immigration to, settlement in and citizenship of the State of Israel after an alleged forced absence of 2,000 years, but the displaced Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948 and their descendants – some four million people today – are denied the same right, in violation of international law and United Nations resolutions, although their [undeniably] forced absence is less than 60 years. The Israeli legislator does not recognize the term ‘refugee’ as far as the Palestinian Arab is concerned.” (pg. 100) Instead, Palestinians are divided into two classes by Israeli law, ‘present’ and ‘absent’. Those who are absent, moreover, have no right to their own property, otherwise a universal and basic human right, which in Israel has been confiscated by the so-called ‘Custodian of Absentees’ Property’, and has been and still is handed out to immigrant Jews instead. According to Davis, absentees are people who do not exist in the eyes of Israeli law.

The class of ‘absentees’ even includes 250,000 Palestinians, a quarter of all Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, who live in the state of Israel, so-called ‘present absentees’ (if this expression does not baffle you, look up ‘oxymoron’ in the dictionary), who also lack the right to their own property under Israeli law. These are people who were internally displaced during the 1948-49 war, the vast majority of them non-combatants, and their descendants. Similarly, Palestinians in Lebanon are not only denied Lebanese citizenship, but work permits and a host of other rights extended to other foreigners.

Although many Palestinians who were not eligible in the PNA elections do have the vote in other countries, they are being discriminated against in many of those other countries, and therefore a dual citizenship option with the possibility of voting in future Palestinian Authority elections would perhaps not be a bad idea. An even better idea would be to implement the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, as international law demands, but Israel refuses to let this happen.

With regard to the title of Uri Davis’ book: The present stage of Palestinian democracy is much more developed than any semblance of democracy that the South African Bantustans ever achieved, but the PNA areas are otherwise Bantustans. The Israelis have been practicing apartheid (oppressive separation) against Palestinians from the very start, from 1948, but the parallels with the crime against humanity perpetrated against a black indigenous majority in South Africa are becoming even more obvious than before in Historic Palestine. According to Yossi Alpher (‘Demography Tops Territory in New Strategic Calculus’, Forward, January 8, 2005), most Israelis now believe that territory does not necessarily provide security (for them), “especially when it [the territory] comes with millions of Palestinians”, and so Israelis now prefer to implement and enforce an oppressive separation (e.g. by means of an illegal wall) that already far exceeds most aspects of South African apartheid in intensity.

It therefore comes closer to ethnic cleansing than South African apartheid ever did, except during the 17th-18th century genocide of Khoikhoi people in the Cape. A new Israeli demographic study, carried out with a far-right agenda, and presently being circulated among US lawmakers and other influential people, states that there as many as 1.5 million Palestinians ‘missing’ from the occupied territories. The Palestinian Authority’s own figure is 3.8 million, but the new ‘study’ claims there are only 2.4. The strategy here is to discourage the creation of a Palestinian state, since Palestinians are allegedly already doomed to minorityhood in Historic Palestine. This strategy implies further conquest, division, expulsion, and killings.

The comparison with Iraq is of no use here. The war there resembles a colonial war of conquest. If present trends continue, Iraq is likely to end up, though, as a neocolonial dependency. In any event, Iraq is not being settled aggressively by invaders from afar who claim it is their home.

In the end, the bewildering situation in which Palestinians now find themselves is in the aftermath of an election in Palestine where only 45 per cent of eligible voters voted under foreign military occupation for a president of a country without sovereignty, and where the vast majority of nationals were not even eligible – an election which is nevertheless hailed in western countries and elsewhere as being the first democratic elections in an Arab country, ever. Paradoxically, they were essentially democratic, thanks to Palestinian and EU and UN efforts, but they were also essentially undemocratic, especially thanks to Israeli efforts.