Can Palestinian elections still matter after the Gaza genocide?

After the devastation of Gaza, can elections really matter? Or does speaking about electoral lists, coalitions and parliamentary seats while Palestinians are still living through the consequences of genocide reveal how disconnected Palestinian politics has become from Palestinian reality? Palestinians are once again preparing for legislative elections, scheduled for 28 November, nearly 21 years after the last parliamentary vote. The prospect has raised two questions: Do elections matter at this moment? And why, after everything Palestinians have endured, should the same factions return to the scene? The frustration is understandable, because Palestinian political life desperately needs renewal. Its leadership has aged, institutions have decayed, accountability has almost disappeared and an entire generation has grown up without participating in a national election. But creating new factions will not necessarily solve this crisis. Palestinian politics already encompasses most of the major currents in society: nationalist, Islamist, leftist and liberal, alongside independents and civil society actors. A new name does not produce new politics. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters The deeper problem lies in how decisions are made, leaders renewed, disagreements managed, alliances built and political organisations held accountable. It lies, too, in whether Palestinians can turn their goals into strategies that survive changing circumstances. Yet this is exactly why elections matter. If they go ahead, they will come at a moment when the Palestinian political future is being actively redesigned. Who will govern Gaza? What will happen to Hamas? What role will the Palestinian Authority play? Who will represent Palestinians in future negotiations? And, most importantly, who gets to answer these questions? These issues are being negotiated now by Israel, the United States, Arab governments, international bodies and Palestinian actors themselves. Elections therefore belong to a larger struggle over who has the right to shape Palestinian politics. A wider struggle The Palestinian struggle against Israel has never been limited to the battlefield. Armed struggle is one expression of a wider conflict over whether Palestinians are allowed to exist as an independent political people, capable of deciding who represents them, building institutions and determining the terms under which they will live. Israel has repeatedly sought to set the boundaries of acceptable Palestinian politics. Although it has dealt with the Palestinian Authority for decades, it still claims the power to decide what kind of Palestinian politics can exist. Holding elections is an act through which Palestinians insist that the question of who represents them belongs first to them A leadership that administers Palestinians while remaining subordinate to Israeli security control can be tolerated. A political force that exceeds those limits is demonised as a security threat to be contained or eliminated. Elections, then, are not a performance staged to impress western governments, and Palestinians do not need to prove that they are democratic or politically mature enough to deserve self-government. Holding elections is an act through which Palestinians insist that the question of who represents them belongs first to them. The stakes of that principle became clear in 2006. The legislative elections that year were competitive and widely judged to reflect the will of Palestinian voters, with Hamas winning 74 of 132 seats and defeating Fatah. What followed exposed the limits of the international commitment to Palestinian democracy: the Hamas-led government was boycotted by the Middle East Quartet - the US, EU, UN and Russia - while Israel withheld Palestinian revenues. The problem was not that Palestinians had failed to vote properly, but that they had produced the "wrong" winner. They were free to choose, provided their choice remained within boundaries set elsewhere. That experience should make Palestinians suspicious of the argument that elections matter because they demonstrate political maturity to the international community. They already showed that capacity 20 years ago. The unresolved question is whether their choices will be respected when they produce outcomes that Israel or western governments dislike. Political erasure The immediate test of whether Palestinian choices will be respected is Hamas. The movement has already dissolved the committee through which it governed Gaza, and says it intends to contest the November elections. Palestinian Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh insists that it cannot run under its own name. Palestinians may decide that Hamas's military strategy failed catastrophically. They may punish it for the decisions that preceded the war, the consequences of those decisions or its record of rule. They may reject it entirely. But that judgment should belong to Palestinians. A military outcome imposed by Israel should not automatically become a political verdict on the weight of any Palestinian movement within Palestinian society. If Hamas has lost its constituency, elections can show that. If Fatah commands majority support, elections can show that. If Palestinians want independents, younger leaders or entirely new political forces, elections give them a way to demonstrate that too. The alternative is more dangerous. If Hamas is kept off the ballot and pushed out of Palestinian institutions, its loss of power in Gaza can quietly harden into political erasure, while Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are presented internationally as the only remaining Palestinian actors permitted to engage in politics. Palestinians would then move from one crisis into another: from destructive factional division to a restored monopoly over Palestinian representation by a single current. A political system is not renewed by eliminating competitors before voters have had the opportunity to judge them. The internal test Scheduling an election does not by itself make Palestinian politics free. Palestinian leaders themselves have spent years narrowing the political field, postponing elections, hollowing out institutions and repressing opponents. They cannot object to Israel defining acceptable Palestinian politics while reproducing the same logic internally. Elections must therefore be genuinely competitive and capable of allowing old factions to lose, new forces to emerge and voters to punish leaders who failed them. As the world fixates on Hamas, who will disarm the Israeli settlers storming West Bank villages? Read More » The weaker Palestinian political institutions become, the easier it is for others to design Palestinian governance from outside: to decide which Palestinians are acceptable partners, which organisations may participate, who should govern Gaza and what political demands must be abandoned before they are allowed into the room. Legislative elections will not liberate Palestine, end Israel's control or repair decades of factional failure. But they can reopen a space that has been dangerously absent: one in which Palestinians themselves determine the relative weight of their political forces. There is something deeply painful about discussing electoral laws, coalitions and parliamentary seats while Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank are still struggling to survive. Such questions can understandably seem like a luxury, even a distraction from a far more immediate reality. But Palestinians do not have the luxury of postponing politics until Israel's violence ends. The political order that follows a war is often shaped while the fighting continues, and abandoning that terrain only leaves others to shape it in their place. Preserving Palestinian political life, however mundane its mechanisms may appear beside the enormity of Gaza's destruction, is not a departure from the struggle for Palestinian survival. It is part of it. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.