Arafat’s Fatah Wins Big in Historic Vote

Yasser Arafat’s coattails were long enough to sweep a solid majority of candidates from his Fatah political movement into the first elected Palestinian self-governing council, partial returns showed Sunday.

As results trickled in throughout the day from Saturday’s vote, a clear pattern emerged of Fatah’s slates of candidates doing well in virtually every district of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel Television predicted Sunday night that Fatah slate candidates, and independents identified with Fatah, will hold 65 of the legislative council’s 88 seats.

Only in Bethlehem, where Palestinian leader Arafat triumphantly attended Christmas Mass just days after Israeli troops withdrew from the town, did Fatah stumble badly. Not a single candidate on the faction’s slate was elected in the town where Jesus was born. But a Fatah independent--the charismatic Salah Tamari, a military commander in Lebanon during Israel’s June 1982 invasion--was the highest vote-getter.

Even more important for Arafat, candidates who returned to the territories after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their 1993 peace accord made a strong showing. Arafat had hoped to see the longtime activists acknowledged by voters.

In Jerusalem, Ahmed Korei, one of the architects of the Israeli-PLO accord, appeared to have secured one of the seven district seats. At least two other candidates from the Fatah slate for Jerusalem appeared to have won, including a woman, Zahira Kamal.

Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, the Fatah loyalist who ran as an independent in Jerusalem, appeared to have been the highest vote-getter in the district, according to partial results. The fiery Ashrawi--who has clashed with Arafat over terms of the accord and human rights--served as spokeswoman for the Palestinian peace delegation to the 1991 Mideast peace conference in Madrid.

Intisar Wazir, widow of Arafat’s slain lieutenant, Khalil Wazir, was elected in Gaza City. Wazir, who was social affairs minister in the Palestinian Authority until resigning to run for office, is the only woman who has served as a minister in the authority.

Four other Fatah slate candidates won seats in the Gaza City district, which will have 12 representatives in the council. But Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a septuagenarian nationalist who is critical of Arafat and the peace agreement, was the highest vote-getter in Gaza City.

Ballot counting was hampered by what Muhammad Shtayyeh, the director general of the Palestinian Election Commission, called “logistical problems” that included about 40 ballot boxes from the West Bank town of Hebron going astray and polling officials who worked through the night Saturday giving into exhaustion Sunday and temporarily suspending their counting.

But by early evening, election officials declared that the voter turnout was 74% in the West Bank and 85% in the Gaza Strip. In some Gaza districts, turnout was as high as 90%.

With all the presidential ballots except Jerusalem’s counted, Arafat garnered 88.1% of the votes, and his only rival, 72-year-old social worker Samiha Khalil, got 9.3% of the vote. The election commission said about 2.6% of voters cast blank ballots for the presidency of the council.

The high voter turnout, the strong showing for Fatah and his own ringing endorsement from the voters have transformed Arafat from guerrilla-leader-cum-strongman to a democratically elected leader with a mandate from his voters for his peacemaking efforts with Israel, Palestinian and Israeli analysts agreed.

“The high turnout, particularly in Gaza, which is a stronghold of the Islamic Hamas movement, reaffirmed the marginalization of Hamas and the other traditional opposition parties in Palestinian politics,” pollster Khalil Shikaki said.

Israeli commentators predicted Sunday that Arafat will be a tougher negotiator now, as he and Israel prepare for May talks on the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they also predicted that Arafat will feel he can more aggressively combat terrorism and move forward on the peace talks.

The largely peaceful and orderly conduct of the elections also undercut Arafat’s critics in Israel and gave him greater legitimization in the eyes of the Israeli public, Israeli analysts said.

“For years, [Israeli opposition leader] Benjamin Netanyahu has said that you can only make peace with a democratically elected Arab leader,” said Joseph Alpher, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel and Middle East office. “It is very hard for Netanyahu to make a case now that he can’t negotiate with Arafat. Arafat now is arguably the most democratically elected leader in the Arab world.”

The more than 600 international observers in the territories for the vote said they visited 99% of the polling stations and found few irregularities. “The elections for both the council and the president of the Palestinian Authority . . . can reasonably be regarded as an accurate expression of the will of the voters on polling day,” the observers said in a joint statement issued Sunday afternoon.

But their endorsement--which noted a lack of balance in the Palestinian press during the campaign and some interference by Arafat’s provisional government in the process--sounded restrained compared with the gushing reviews offered Sunday by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and some Israeli editorial writers.

Peres, convening the regular weekly meeting of his Cabinet, said Arafat has shown leadership capability and has proved he is able to run a successful democracy. Peres called Arafat on Saturday night to congratulate him on his victory.

Even Yediot Aharonot, a mass-circulation Hebrew daily more likely to throw darts than flowers at Arafat, tipped its hat to Israel’s former Public Enemy No. 1 in its lead editorial Sunday.

“We welcome the results” of Saturday’s election, the paper said. “The election was a referendum approving the peace process with Israel, a test of Arafat’s leadership and a demonstration of the will of the Palestinian people to establish democratic rule in its country. Victory in this election, therefore, is threefold: Peace is victorious, Arafat is victorious and democracy is victorious.”

There were some, however, who continued to carp. Leaders of the opposition Likud Party slammed the elections as a sham and predicted that Arafat will continue to rule dictatorially in the territories.

And one particularly ugly incident marred the otherwise quiet elections. In Sallem, a village near the West Bank town of Nablus, a 31-year-old polling official was shot to death Saturday night after the polls closed, allegedly by a 25-year-old Palestinian police officer who was angered when the worker asked him to leave the station so ballot-counting could begin. The officer was arrested and in custody Sunday.