Hanan Ashrawi, veteran Palestinian leader and representative on both the national and international stage, has announced that she will not be running in Palestine’s upcoming elections.
May 22 marks the region’s first election in fifteen years; courtesy of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential decree aims to “launch a democratic election process in all cities of the homeland,” including East Jerusalem.
Ashrawi defended her decision to resign from public office after citing a “lack of opportunities for women and young people,” and has instead opted to spend her time mentoring future Palestinian leaders. Her criticism towards the discriminatory and unequal nature of the region’s political organizations and institutions was reflected in the Palestinian Central Election Commission’s (PCEC) final list of candidates running for the parliamentary elections next month. The extensive list, first published at the end of March, features 1,389 candidates, of which only 405––nearly a third––are women.
Though these numbers reflect a hopeful change for the region’s political landscape, the PA’s electoral laws have made it difficult for independent candidates to break through the threshold of insurance payment of $20,000 and a minimum age requirement set at 28. Such barriers are counterproductive to a free and fair democratic process in that it excludes Palestinian youth most of whom have fiercely organized and mobilized efforts to spread awareness and encourage others to join their pursuit for liberation across all digital platforms. In addition to the extortionate insurance fee, candidates may have to resign from their jobs, if specified, which places women at a disadvantage in an existing turbulent economy with high unemployment rates that skew more towards opportunity for male workers.
As of 2018, more than 15,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained in Israeli prisons since 1997. Those who have been released back into society have recounted in detail their experiences at the hands of the Israeli security system. Their recollections come with the cost of revisiting scenes of harrowing interrogations and torture for the sake of publicizing ongoing Israeli violations inflicted upon the Palestinian people. Thus, these women compromise a valuable demographic that must be placed at the forefront in matters of protection, security, and progression opportunities. Given that Abbas’s decree in 2007 changed the previous combined national and regional vote system to a proportional, single-national vote system, the forthcoming candidates-much of whom are running independently-must emphasize the urgency of amplifying the female Palestinian voice moving forward.
The world does not look like what it did in 2006. Israel’s expansionist policies have prompted bloody clashes in the past decades, making martyrs out of activists and aggressors out of the regime’s most ardent dissenters. With a political stalemate between Gaza and West Bank, social and economic progress has been impeded for those whose lives exist on a dwindling thread; compounded with Israeli embargos and restrictions, the Palestinian people are being granted the chance to take back their destinies. Israeli fear mongering tactics cannot hold against the democratic processes that they claim to have solely inherited within the region.
Palestinians around the world––families and children exiled by either of the Intifadas, the Nakba, the calamity of the 1967 War––must resist the narrative that they are incapable of organizing their own futures and electing their own officials. Their women, who have taken to the public and political stage, will succeed graciously in the male-dominated world that has dictated their fate for much too long. Palestinian women have since won BAFTAs and nominated for prestigious literary awards; they have sufficiently proved that their place is rightfully in the public eye.