Israel: Is it yes or no?

Editorial

Elections tend to be decided on a basket of issues or personalities. Pinpointing a single reason why Stephen Harper, for example, won the last Canadian election implicates a range of issues – from Liberal party corruption and mismanagement typified by the gun registry overruns to the number of things that Harper and his party did right during the election campaign.

Any human endeavor is difficult to trace to a single motivating factor. Elections, in which millions of people make judgments based on diverse criteria, are even more impossible to neatly explain.

So it was when Hamas won the Palestinian election in January. International observers, including in these pages, noted that although most well-known worldwide for opposing Israel's existence, Hamas was known among Palestinians as a provider of social services that the corrupt Fatah government had failed to deliver.

While there has never been a great deal of silver lining in the dark cloud of the Hamas victory, some have concluded optimistically that the destruction of Israel was not the primary motivating factor for Palestinian voters this year. And while a range of public opinion polls – which in authoritarian societies are notoriously undependable – indicate varying degrees of acceptance for Israel's presence in the Middle East, it is probably safe to say that the destruction of Israel was only one, and perhaps not even the paramount, policy concern among most Hamas voters.

Unlike a general election, where countless issues compete for attention, a referendum focuses explicitly on one concern. This is why the announcement by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he would hold a referendum on recognition of Israel and moving toward a lasting peace could be the best indicator of Palestinian attitudes.

If it goes ahead – and the Hamas parliamentary government thinks it shouldn't – the referendum could bring the six-decade-old issue of non-recognition of Israel to a head. It could also be the most clear evidence yet of a maturing democracy in the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian and Arab elites have scapegoated Israel and Jews for at least 60 years. Palestinian citizens have been weaned on anti-Zionist rhetoric and total rejection of the Jewish presence in the Middle East.

With the Palestinian president advocating recognition and the Palestinian prime minister probably advocating rejection, Palestinians may have the best chance in decades to demonstrate their genuine attitude toward Israel's existence. It may be a painful debate, but it could be the catharsis that offers a glimmer of hope.

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