…help them win the election. Over at Thoughts from Kansas, ScienceBlogling Josh has a post about who and what are responsible for the current civil war in the West Bank and Gaza. In any discussion of the Middle East, all sorts of things will be claimed, but there is one awful historical fact: American and Israeli pressure on the Palestinian Authority to change their electoral system helped Hamas win the 2006 elections.
The original electoral system that Palestinians had was completely proportional. If a party won forty percent of the votes, it received forty percent of the seats in parliament. The party that received a plurailty (if none received a majority) would be invited to form a governmen; if it failed, then the next largest party would get a chance to form a coalition, and so on. It was just like the Israeli system (funny, that). Before the last election, there was considerable pressure brought to bear on the Palestinian Authority to change its system.
Under the new system, half of the seats would be proportional, and half would be district-based. The idea was that Hamas might win a popular vote (or at least achieve a plurality), but Fatah would be far more organized and pick up most of the district-based seats. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. Hamas received 44.45% of the vote, while Fatah received 41.43% of the vote. When you look at how the other parties did, it’s not clear that Hamas would have been able to form a coalition (the PFLP and Hamas aren’t exactly ideological soulmates), particularly with Fatah waiting in the wings.
However, Hamas cleaned up in the district-based voting, turning what would have been under the old system a two seat plurality into an unassailable eight seat majority in the new system (Hamas won almost 70% of the district-based seats).
Oops. Or to put this another way, the majority of Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas.