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Thursday, December 26, 2019

Hamas and Fatah keep accusing each other over Jerusalem and elections

The Palestinian election sham continues.

As I have been reporting, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah has been using its demands that elections be held in Jerusalem as an excuse to push elections off altogether.

Hamas has been calling Fatah out on this. A recent column in Hamas' Al Resalah says that, sure, Jerusalem is important, but by rights Arabs who live in Jaffa and Nazareth should vote as well, not to mention Palestinians who live abroad. Abbas' begging Israel for permission to hold elections in Jerusalem is a source of shame for Palestinians. If he wants elections, just do the elections where possible. "In the end, we affirm that the city of Jerusalem is the core of our Palestinian cause and should not be mortgaged to narrow factional interests as it is now used in the matter of elections," the article concludes.


The Palestinian Liberation Front, a recognized terror group that supports Mahmoud Abbas, responded on Voice of Palestine radio saying that when Hamas says that elections should be held without Jerusalem it means that they support Trump's Deal of the Century and the "occupation." It also said the PA leadership will continue its contacts with the international community to pressure Israel to remove obstacles to holding elections in Jerusalem.

Voice of Palestine also interviewed Palestinian official Adnan Ghaith who said that elections without Jerusalem would be a "stab in the side" of the Palestinian national project.

The official PA radio station continued on, with Adnan Al-Husseini, member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, agreeing that without Jerusalem there should be no elections.

How convenient that the person who has stayed in power for 15 years is unwilling to risk it all  with elections - and remember that his party lost the last elections.

The entire dysfunction of the Palestinian leadership is apparently not a topic of interest to the hundreds of Western journalists in the region.




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