Palestinian Elections… "Baqun"

In the aftermath of the October 7 operation, which the Hamas movement named the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the Israeli response expanded to encompass collective retribution against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, ultimately becoming a war of displacement and extermination. The National Authority in Ramallah adopted the demand for international protection and raised a one-word slogan — “Baqun,” We Remain — to break the Israeli savagery backed by certain Western states and to resist the ethnic cleansing aimed at driving the population toward the Sinai desert. Had Egypt and Jordan not taken a firm stand in support of the National Authority and its president Mahmoud Abbas behind this slogan — which remains in force across all political and international forums and gives shape to the Palestinians’ daily life — events might have taken an entirely different turn.

This is what we witnessed in the local and municipal elections held recently in the West Bank and in one city in the Gaza Strip: Deir al-Balah.

Deir al-Balah, the Survivor

It was toward this city that human waves converged from Gaza in the north and from Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south, following the campaigns of systematic destruction. The city was transformed into a dense human mass of survivors pressed together, and despite the bombing and destruction visited upon it, the sheer weight of its people triumphed over the war of extermination.

The city takes its name from the monastery founded by Saint Hilarion, who died in 372 AD — the first Christian monastery in the Gaza territory, surrounded by a forest of palm trees. After its Canaanite name, “al-Daroum” or “al-Daron,” it became Deir al-Balah, and has never ceased to appear, living, on the map of humanity since the fourteenth century BC, as its cultural remains, its fortress and the tombs of those who founded, inhabited and built it so compellingly attest.

The National Authority’s insistence on holding to the geographical unity of Palestine made organizing elections in this city the only option it was possible to wrest from the president of the “Peace Council,” Donald Trump, in order to demonstrate that the two-state solution process remained alive.

This partial victory secured by the slogan “Baqun” on our soil now forms the foundation upon which the electoral processes aimed at regenerating Palestinian legitimacy this year are being built.

A Constitutional Dilemma

The internal debate has swelled without subsiding around the presidential decree amending “Law 23” of 2025 on elections, the substance of which is the following provision: [candidates on a list must acknowledge their acceptance of the local elections within that list and their commitment to the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, to its national political program, and to the relevant decisions of international legitimacy].

On this basis, the factions of political Islam and the nationalist left — Hamas and the Popular Front once led by Dr. George Habash — united in refusing to participate in the elections, while certain Palestinian elites continued to challenge their legitimacy and to dismiss their significance.

This debate is not new, however, and the amendment amounts to nothing more than the correction of a previous strategic mistake made by the National Authority, which had allowed, in general elections since the nineteen-nineties, the participation of extremist forces that had declared war on the Oslo Accords and worked toward the overthrow of the Authority itself, whose actions they never ceased to brand as treasonous — a goal they continue to pursue today, on the strength of their absolute rejection of the national program proclaimed in 1988 and of the “Palestinian Declaration of Independence.” Since the Palestinian political situation has not yet reached the maturity required to proclaim a constitution — which would constitute the primary reference for the legitimacy of any elected authority — it is the reference of the “Declaration of Independence” and the recognition by the majority of the world’s states of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative that remain the legal and constitutional foundation, until such time as a constitution for the State of Palestine can be adopted.

The Results

With party and faction lists absent from the municipal elections, the weight and role of families and clans grew substantially, as the active frameworks of Palestinian society, their capacity for influence strengthened in parallel with the weakening of the Authority and its security apparatus during this period. This did not, however, conceal the affiliation of the electoral lists with one or the other of the two poles, Fatah or Hamas, against a backdrop of retreat and erosion among the independent forces outside this vertical divide. And while the results in Deir al-Balah and the West Bank went in favor of Fatah, the measure here is less the winner than the turnout rate, which reached 56% in the West Bank compared with 53.7% in 2017, meaning that the boycott call did not reduce participation despite the extreme weakness from which the National Authority suffers under Israeli occupation and its repressive and humiliating measures alike.

Another reading suggests that Fatah — which suffers from a decline in its organizational performance and in the performance of its cadres within the Authority’s apparatuses and ministries — was not so much the driving force as the popular Fatahi current itself, which predates the organization as the movement’s genuine base. This current remains powerfully present in all configurations of the Palestinian scene, whatever the gravity of the organizational difficulties afflicting the Fatah movement and the failings of its apparatus.

The most important question is not Fatah’s victory, but the capacity of the National Authority, under the most intense pressures, to make good on its slogan “Baqun” — a slogan that keeps the most extremist government Israel has ever known awake at night and demonstrates its failure in the project of ethnic cleansing and displacement it had openly proclaimed.

As for the elections in Deir al-Balah — which represents the link between the West Bank and Gaza, and stands as the living model of the survivors of the genocide, of the “Baqun” of the Gaza Strip — the contest was for fifteen seats on the municipal council, with four electoral lists taking part. The “Nahdat Deir al-Balah” list, close to Fatah, won six seats; the “Mustaqbal Deir al-Balah” list took five; the independent “Peace and Construction” list secured two seats, as did the “Deir al-Balah Tajma’una” list, close to Hamas.

The importance of reviving the electoral process, whatever its gaps and shortcomings, lies in the fact that it remains the only path to reactivating the Palestinian political system and enabling the citizen to exercise the right to vote as an integral part of the right to self-determination — all the more so since this year is also expected to see, before its end, the elections of the National Council and the Legislative Council, as well as presidential elections.

If the National Authority succeeds in completing the most dangerous and complex phase of the electoral process, the ship of Palestine may yet find its berth in the port of Gaza.