Voter Discontent Boosts Hamas

Arafa Ayyash wears a pained expression as he recounts how his expectations soared when Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority a year ago.

“We had hope that he would bring peace and stability, and that borders would open and we would have better business,” said Ayyash, 55, who fixes and resells automotive parts in a shop no bigger than some walk-in closets. “But none of that happened.”

Instead, Ayyash and other impoverished residents of this ramshackle camp on the edge of Gaza City have watched prices for propane and other household essentials rise, and some of those lucky enough to have jobs say earnings have fallen further as the Palestinian economy struggles to recover after more than five years of conflict with Israel.

Rubbing leathery hands on his grease-stained shop coat, Ayyash said his income had dropped to about $7 a day because residents with empty pockets have put off car repairs. Meanwhile, the gunmen who run amok in the streets of Gaza have so rattled residents that Ayyash prefers to keep two grown sons in the workshop as a way of protecting them.

But the shopkeeper has a plan for avenging his dashed hopes: He will vote for the radical Islamic group Hamas in Wednesday’s election. In doing so, Ayyash will be joining many Palestinian voters who seek to punish the ruling Fatah party for what they see as its failures during the last year, and to unleash their pent-up anger over its longtime mismanagement and graft.

The parliamentary election, the first since 1996, is shaping up as a chance for Palestinians to take stock of their lives, dreams and prospects in the wake of Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004 and Israel’s historic pullout from Gaza and parts of the West Bank last summer.

Fatah, the movement once led by Arafat, could still capture the larger share of 132 legislative seats being contested, but it is facing its first serious challenge to its role atop Palestinian politics. Hamas, forecast to capture about one-third of the vote, is capitalizing on widespread disenchantment over Fatah’s single-party rule and a growing sense that previous formulas for making peace with Israel have proved fruitless.

Many Palestinians say they understand that a strong showing by Hamas, an armed militant group whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, may further inflame tensions with the Jewish state. But some of these same voters contend that a ballot cast for Hamas is a means of seeking calmer circumstances rather than an endorsement of a return to violence. Hamas, in an apparent attempt to widen its appeal, doesn’t mention the destruction of Israel in its election platform.

Even though the vote will fill a parliament that traditionally has been largely powerless, it will serve as a referendum on Abbas’ leadership. It is also expected to reflect how Palestinians view the likelihood that Israel will loosen restrictions that shape their daily lives.

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From the northern reaches of the West Bank to the scrubby flatlands of the Gaza Strip, a sense of restiveness and disappointment courses through Palestinian cities, towns and refugee camps. Unemployment remains high, the result of a stagnant economy and continued closures by the Israeli military. The chaos in the streets of Gaza and in West Bank cities such as Nablus, much of it caused by members of militias linked to Fatah, has produced the impression that the Palestinian Authority cannot keep law and order.

Although violent confrontations with Israelis have ebbed, shootouts between rival Palestinian factions or between clans have become almost routine in the Gaza Strip. During a flare-up between feuding families, a man was shot dead in Gaza City in broad daylight on the same day that the shopkeeper Ayyash was interviewed.

Gunmen have even brazenly stormed government buildings in the middle of the day to demand jobs on the police force. One Fatah-linked group used a tractor to topple a portion of the concrete border wall between Gaza and Egypt to protest the arrest of one of its members on charges of kidnapping a British woman and her parents. More than a dozen foreigners have been kidnapped in recent months, usually as part of a group’s demands for employment; all the abductees have been released unharmed.

The wave of violence produced a staggering finding by a Palestinian human rights group last year: Palestinians killed by gunfire were more likely to have died at the hands of their own people than of Israelis.

Meanwhile, the central aspiration of most ordinary Palestinians -- peace, or some approximation of the normal life that should accompany it -- appears a distant notion.

“We can only pray to God for help,” said Izzat Sheik Khalil, sitting on the front steps of his cramped cinder-block house in the Shati refugee camp.

Sheik Khalil, 51, once earned about $40 a day installing wiring in new homes inside Israel. That work dried up as it became more difficult for Palestinians to get permits to enter Israel after the second intifada, or uprising, began in September 2000.

Sheik Khalil hasn’t had a job since then; only one of his 12 children, all working age, is employed. It is a life without opportunities, he said.

So he plans to seek some relief at the polls. He, too, will vote for Hamas, whose popularity stems largely from the social network of schools and hospitals it provides and from its image of incorruptibility.

“Hamas is somebody that knows God well.... They’re not like these corrupt ones who stole our means,” he said. “We want corruption to go away and a better life to come.”

A friend, Ramzi Hifmat, joined the conversation. He agreed with most of what Sheik Khalil had to say, except the part about corruption. Though he blamed the Palestinian Authority for the rising lawlessness, Hifmat, a member of the security forces, said he believed that Fatah was cleaning itself of its most corrupt elements.

The Fatah leadership revamped its national slate of candidates and placed Marwan Barghouti, the uprising leader imprisoned in Israel who is popular with younger members, at the top in an effort to keep the party unified. This showed, Hifmat said, the rise of a “new guard” in the party less tainted by cronyism and graft.

“We want clean members of Fatah to be elected. I believe the new list is going to be better than the previous list,” Hifmat said.

Sheik Khalil’s wife, Heijar, took in the conversation and waved dismissively. She said she would sit out the vote because there was little hope any candidate was better than another. “I don’t know who is the good, and who is the bad,” she said.

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The possibility of a Hamas victory worries the Bush administration, which classifies the group as a terrorist organization. The U.S. government has spent $1.9 million in recent months on a variety of small-scale projects meant to improve the image of the Palestinian Authority. The projects, from tree plantings to funding for a soccer tournament, were ramped up after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank last summer, an American consular official said Sunday.

Those recent efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development, detailed Sunday in the Washington Post, are most likely to enhance the prospects of Fatah, being the ruling party, but U.S. officials denied they were an attempt to influence the election.

“We’re working with the Palestinian Authority to enhance democratic institutions and work with democratic actors across the board,” Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. “This isn’t about Fatah.... This isn’t about parties.”

For Palestinians of all political leanings, a look at the landscape around them is a glimpse of a shrinking world -- and a corresponding sense of growing powerlessness.

On countless West Bank hilltops, the red roofs of Jewish settlements continue to proliferate, despite a freeze on settlement activity by Israel mandated by the U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan. The formidable barrier that Israel is constructing to keep out suicide bombers seems to gash through fields and farms.

A network of military checkpoints and roadblocks has rendered large swaths of the northern West Bank all but impassable for ordinary Palestinians, splitting it into cantons between which only the lucky and the patient can make their way.

“Our lives seem to get worse and worse,” said Iftikhar Aweis, who had just trudged on foot through the Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus, where she teaches middle school. Although she lives in a village only a few miles down the road, her daily commute, sharing different taxis on the two sides of the checkpoint, can take two or three hours.

Israel says its virtual lockdown of the northern West Bank is driven by necessity, because the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad has continued to dispatch suicide bombers from northern towns such as Tulkarm and Jenin. The same day Aweis complained of her delays, a suicide bomber from Nablus slipped into Israel and blew himself up at a Tel Aviv eatery, injuring more than two dozen people.

Israeli troops will stay away from Palestinian towns in the West Bank for the next three days to avoid interfering in the election, Israeli media reported today. Israel Radio said the army would avoid staging military raids “except in cases of ticking bombs” or an intelligence tip of an imminent attack.

Palestinians rejoiced when Israel withdrew troops and Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. But the heaps of rubble where the Jewish settlements once stood now are seen by many as a sign of unmet expectations: Gazans had hoped that the pullout would lift their sense of being suffocated in their narrow seaside strip of territory.

Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said the elation over Israel’s unilateral pullout was bound to fizzle because the move has not allowed Palestinians to move with the degree of freedom they had hoped for.

Although Palestinians for the first time control an exit point to the outside world -- the Rafah crossing into Egypt -- Israel has cited security concerns in blocking the launch of bus shuttles that were to have provided a crucial link between Gaza and the West Bank.

“The mirage that Israel sold the world is that the occupation is ended. That’s not true,” Sourani said.

“Nothing really changed, but many illusions evaporated.”

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Ellingwood reported from Gaza City and King from Nablus.