So much for the only democracy in the Arab world. Having experimented with real, representative and fair elections, the Palestinian Authority, or the part that is controlled by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has announced that in effect it will not allow Hamas, the victors in the last elections, to take part in any new elections.

In a presidential decree yesterday, the Palestinian electoral law has been changed so that candidates for both legislative and presidential elections must “respect” the political programme of the PLO and previously signed agreements between Israel and the PA.

In other words, Palestinian politicians must now be fully paid-up members of the two-state solution as defined by the Oslo accords. Not only do Hamas and Islamic Jihad fall foul of the law, anyone, and this includes many Palestinian intellectuals and independents who believe Oslo was a trap, and everything since has been proof of that, will walk the wrong side of the line.

The law is problematic in the extreme. It stymies Palestinian options and robs Palestinians of genuine choices. It means that Palestinians will, in essence, only now be able to vote covering a few percentage points of the West Bank with regard to the thing that really matters to them: how to achieve statehood and freedom.

It also represents a quite astonishingly open bending to Israeli and US diktats. Where once Yasser Arafat, confident in his own ability and power, was quite willing to allow others to run on whatever tickets they felt reasonable while defying the West, the new Palestinian leadership is threatened to the degree that it wants to gerrymander elections that have neither been scheduled nor appear likely to take place.

There will be no elections if Hamas does not want them, and even if there were, elections without the demonstrably most popular political movement in the occupied Palestinian territories will be seriously compromised in terms of legitimacy.

In addition, for as long as the PLO excludes the growing political trends among Palestinians, be they Islamist or one-state, it too will appear just a private playground of an old guard increasingly jealous of its power.

There is no alternative to inclusive and free elections. At least there is no serious and credible alternative.

People in this region, but especially Palestinians, will no longer accept being dictated to by those claiming to represent them.

It has to be repeated: Palestinians need to unite before they can successfully confront the Israeli occupation, whether across a negotiating table or on the uneven battlefield. There is no way around a Fateh-Hamas reconciliation. It would be better if this were realised sooner rather than later.