University of Mary Washington professor who was official observer of the Palestinian election sees improved prospects for peace in the Middle East.

By MICHAEL ZITZ

Date published: 1/14/2005

The ascension of Mahmoud Abbas puts Israel on the spot, says a University of Mary Washington professor who was an international observer to the Palestinian Authority presidential election.

"This puts as much pressure on the Israelis as had been put on the Palestinians," said Ranjit Singh, a UMW political scientist and expert on Middle East politics and society who returned to the United States on Tuesday.

"The Israelis are put in the position of occupying the only Arab democracy now," Singh said.

Some might call Lebanon a democracy, he said, but that nation is dominated by Syria.

"The Palestinians are pretty much on the cutting edge of democracy [in the Arab world] right now," he said. "It puts the ball back into the Israelis' court."

He said the Palestinians have elected a leader widely considered to be a moderate--someone Israel has negotiated with many times in the past.

"They know him very well and he knows them very well," Singh said. "This is not someone who has a history of intransigence," as did the late Yasser Arafat, whom Abbas replaces.

Despite calls by some of the Islamic parties for a boycott, about 65 percent of Palestinian voters went to the polls.

"By American standards, that's not bad at all," Singh said. "If that's the final number, that's not too bad."

Abbas won by a landslide, getting 62 percent of the vote, perhaps in part because of the Hamas boycott. The independent who finished second got less than 20 percent of the ballots cast in the multiple-candidate election.

Mohammad Abu-Nimer, a political scientist at the American University in Washington, agrees the pressure is now on Israel, but contends that the idea of the Israelis occupying a Palestinian democracy is irrelevant.

"Whether it is a dictatorship, Marxist, socialist, whatever, it's the notion of rightful self-determination," he said. "Palestine is one of the last two or three nations on this planet that continues to be under occupation. I'm not sure you can measure becoming democratic by an election. There's more to it than a simple, one-day election. This election took place under occupation."

Date published: 1/14/2005