Palestinians Vote in First Election

In a peaceful display of national pride, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip turned out in large numbers on Saturday to vote in their first election for a self-rule government. But fear and anger kept many from polls that were guarded by Israeli soldiers in the contested cities of Jerusalem and Hebron.

Early, unofficial returns--read over the Voice of Palestine radio even as some polls remained open extra hours for last-minute voters--showed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat winning the presidential vote by an expected, overwhelming margin.

Arafat’s greatest victory, however, was not his apparent landslide but the large turnout of voters, particularly in the Gaza Strip, where his self-rule government has been running affairs for nearly two years.

Despite calls for a boycott by Islamic groups and secular opposition parties, and their refusal to field candidates, Palestinians of all political persuasions chose to cast their ballots.

The high turnout after only two weeks of campaigning seemed certain to legitimize Arafat’s policy of negotiating Palestinian statehood in stages with Israel.

“It is a great feeling to participate in elections, and I hope they will lead us to a Palestinian state,” said Nawal Asmar, 36, who voted at a nursery school in the West Bank village of El Ram.

By early this morning, with 80% of the vote counted, unofficial results showed Arafat capturing 85% of the vote.

After the balloting, the Israeli government announced that it will allow exiled members of the Palestinian National Council--the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legislature--to enter autonomous areas to vote on Arafat’s promise to eliminate articles in the Palestinian charter that call for the destruction of Israel.

Under the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, Arafat agreed to have the articles amended within two months of the elections. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres has said he will stop the peace process if this is not done.

Most members of the council who are still in exile, however, are opponents of the peace accord, and it is not clear that Arafat can garner the two-thirds majority he needs to amend the PLO’s charter.

His hope is that they will change their minds about the peace process once they return to Palestinian-ruled areas and talk with the kind of average Palestinians who turned out to vote on Saturday.

The voting for president of the ruling Palestinian Authority and an 88-seat legislative council generally went smoothly, and the election took place without major outbreaks of violence under the watch of hundreds of international observers.

However, international and Israeli observer groups complained about police interference--including some reports that officers were photographing voters--in Jerusalem, the most sensitive polling spot for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The election day mood was festive in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho and other towns under Palestinian control, where the Palestinian Central Election Commission said 65% to 85% of registered voters had cast their ballots into red-and-white padlocked boxes.

But East Jerusalem, home to most of the capital’s Palestinian residents, looked like an armed camp around post offices, where Israel had insisted that Palestinian residents vote as if by absentee ballot.

Thousands of Israeli police and border guards supervised barricades there with batons and Galil rifles, scuffling repeatedly with irate Palestinians.

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Israeli officials said the 4,000-member security force was meant to prevent clashes between Palestinians and right-wing Jews who did not want them to vote in the city they claim is Israel’s capital alone.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and other election observers accused the Israelis of using the deliberate show of force to keep East Jerusalem residents away from the polls.

“I don’t think there is any doubt they are doing everything they can to intimidate the voter,” Carter said. “I have no doubt that the aim is to reduce the size of the vote in East Jerusalem.”

Under the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, the two sides are to enter into negotiations over Jerusalem and other outstanding issues in the final phase of peace talks set to begin in May.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state. They claim that Israel wanted a small voter turnout to weaken the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem in future negotiations.

After the Jewish Sabbath ended Saturday night, several thousand religious Jews and members of Israel’s right-wing opposition demonstrated in Jerusalem’s Zion Square under a banner reading “All Hands in Defense of Jerusalem.”

There were no reports of violence there, although the demonstrators burned a Palestinian flag--an unusual twist since it traditionally has been Palestinian demonstrators who burned the Israeli flag in protest of the 28-year occupation.

Casting his ballot in Gaza City on Saturday, Arafat called the election the beginning of “a new era.”

“It is the first legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian people. This is the foundation for our Palestinian state,” Arafat said.

Arafat, who forged the peace agreement with then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, is certain to defeat his only challenger in the presidential race, 72-year-old Samiha Khalil, a grandmother and socialist activist from Ramallah.

Israel Radio reported early today that Khalil was receiving less than 10% of the vote.

Voters interviewed at the polls said they see the 65-year-old Arafat as the father of the peace process that brought Palestinian rule to the West Bank and them to the election booth.

“I voted for Arafat,” said Hazem Amad, 55, in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina. “There must be one leader, otherwise we are like sheep without a shepherd.”

In the El Arrub refugee camp, outside the city of Hebron, 50-year-old construction worker Ibrahim Muhammad, referring to Arafat by his nom de guerre, agreed: “Abu Ammar is the only one, the only leader. . . . Abu Ammar chose the way, and we are behind him 100%.”

Hebron, with about 400 Jewish settlers and 120,000 Palestinians, is the only Palestinian city in the West Bank still controlled by the Israeli army. There, and in East Jerusalem, voter turnout was less than 40%.

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Despite the heavy presence of soldiers patrolling the streets of Hebron, it was the site of the most serious violence of the day: A 16-year-old Palestinian youth reportedly stabbed a 15-year-old girl who lives in the Beit Hadassah Jewish compound in the heart of town.

The assailant was believed to be a member of Hamas, one of the radical Islamic organizations that refused to participate in the elections. These groups hold that Israel should be destroyed and replaced by an Islamic, Palestinian state.

Jewish settlers responded to the attack by beating Arabs and smashing a Palestinian car.

Before the attack, settlers strolled through the streets of Hebron’s shuttered marketplace under the protective guns of Israeli troops and the hate-filled stares of Palestinians.

“The elections are not the problem. The problem is the whole [peace] process, which I see as a catastrophe,” Noam Arnon, spokesman for the settlers in Hebron, said as he walked from morning prayers to Beit Hadassah. “It is not within our abilities and not our role to interfere with these elections.”

In Jerusalem, would-be voters said Israeli police, not settlers, were the biggest obstacle on the way to the polls. Some said they refused to submit to the “humiliation” of showing their identity cards to young Israeli soldiers to get by. Others declined to vote “under occupation.”

“I registered to vote because I wanted to be counted,” said Abed Lappan, 42, a university professor. “I support Arafat and the peace process, but I am boycotting the process of voting in the post office. It means that Israelis do not recognize the land of Palestinians. Jerusalem is the land of Palestinians.”

Many East Jerusalem Palestinians apparently stayed away from the polls out of fear they would lose the rights and benefits--such as health insurance and freedom of movement--they have as residents of the Israeli-controlled city. Members of the opposition Likud Party tried to fan those fears with leaflets passed out Saturday, voters and election observers said.

Carter tried to reassure the registered voters in East Jerusalem that he had a commitment from Peres that they would not be punished in any way for voting, but many people had already been scared off when police reportedly took photographs of Palestinians on their way to the post office.

After complaints by Carter and other observers about the photographs and heavy police presence, Israel withdrew some of police, and polls stayed open late in Jerusalem.

Times researchers Batsheva Sobelman and Summer Assad contributed to this report.