RAMALLAH DISPATCH
From 'Strong Man' to 'Good Man'
Mahmoud Abbas sets out to be the un-Arafat.
RAMALLAH, West Bank--It is past noon on Friday, and the women packed in the municipal center here--some 1,400 by my rough count--have been waiting with diminishing patience for Mahmoud Abbas to make his scheduled 11:00 appearance. To keep them going, the mistress of ceremonies is breathing fire. "The way of Abu Mazen is the way of Abu Amr!" she says--or rather, screams--into the microphone, referring to Mr. Abbas and the late Yasser Arafat, respectively. "To Jerusalem we march in the millions!"
This goes on for another half hour, during which people in the audience approach foreign journalists to share their stories and opinions. One woman, who won't give her name, says she has three sons in Israeli prisons. Will she vote for Abu Mazen? "Yes, if he gets my boys out." Nadya, 29, from El Bireh, wants Abu Mazen to follow in Arafat's footsteps. "Any time someone needed medical treatment, Abu Amr paid for it from his own pocket, without going through any ministries." Samia, 40, a mother of seven from Nablus, says she hopes "all the money won't be spent on weapons any more."
"The women are widows," she says. "It's time for the women to have a rest. I want peace with the Jews. I don't want children getting killed anymore."
At last, the drum corps of a local youth movement strikes a march, announcing the candidate's arrival. Mr. Abbas comes to the podium dressed in his customary business suit, although he adorns it with a small scarf patterned like a kaffiyeh. He begins by saying he's ill and cannot speak for long. It's not just a personal remark: Lowering expectations is what Mr. Abbas's candidacy is largely about.
The speech itself is softly delivered and artfully constructed. Some of the rhetoric is fiery. "Allah loves the martyrs"; We will kick them [the Israelis] out"; "We have been suffering for 50 years and by Allah all this land will come back to us eventually"--referring to more than just the West Bank and Gaza.
But beyond the long-term promises Mr. Abbas issues three short-term challenges. "We won't allow any illegal weapons, and we won't allow people to be armed unless they are Fatah," he says. Fatah is Arafat's and Mr. Abbas's political party; the statement is a direct challenge to Hamas. "We need clean legal institutions so we can be considered a civilized society." Here, the reproach is of his famously corrupt colleagues in Fatah itself. "We need to make the law the leader in this country, and nobody can be above the law." The reference to Arafat couldn't be plainer.
So here is Mr. Abbas's political problem. He is Arafat's heir and owes his political existence to the party Arafat founded. Yet his success depends on repudiating much of Arafat's legacy--the cult of personality, kleptocratic government and terrorism--a legacy that has sunk deep roots in Palestinian culture. How to do so while remaining ideologically credible is the chief domestic test of his presidency.
It is Saturday afternoon, and in the Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City a streetside wake is being held for Fadi Abu Qamar, 21, who died earlier in the week in a "martyrdom operation" at the Erez border crossing into Israel. But Abu Qamar succeeded in killing only himself, and now his young face adorns posters plastered throughout the camp.
My translator is a second cousin of the deceased, and he invites me to meet Abu Qamar's mother, Umm Iyad, who lives down a filthy nearby lane with a gaggle of children. Although she is dressed in mourning, she doesn't seem especially grief-stricken. Did she know her son was planning to do this? No, but she had a sense he was going to do something. Is she proud of what he did? Yes, very. Does she support Abu Mazen? Only if he succeeds in returning the refugees to their pre-1948 villages and homes in what is now Israel.
Then she turns the questions on me. "Why does Sharon torture our children and our old women? We don't kill their children and old women, and if we do, it's not on purpose."
I have neither the heart nor the nerve to suggest the truth may be closer to the opposite. But one man who isn't under the same illusions is Sami Abu Zuhri, 38, the Hamas spokesman in Gaza City. Asked about the sharp decline in suicide bombings in Israel, he replies that "if the people of Tel Aviv were afraid to walk down Dizengoff Street, now the people of Sderot are leaving their homes." Sderot is an Israeli city that has been under repeated rocket fire from the Gaza Strip for the past two years.
There's some facile truth in the remark, but it disguises the fact that Hamas's rockets have killed only a handful of Israelis, whereas the suicide bombers killed hundreds. Indeed, even as we speak, the buzz of an Israeli drone can be heard overhead, a reminder of how men like Abu Zuhri were brought to heel.
Hamas is boycotting the election, ostensibly because it is being carried out under the rubric of the Oslo Accords, which it rejects and which brought the Palestinian Authority into existence. But that did not prevent Hamas from participating in municipal elections late last year, and word on the street is that the Hamas leadership has encouraged its supporters to vote for Mustafa Barghouti, the principal opposition candidate, in order to cut into Mr. Abbas's margin of victory.
"Hamas expected internal fighting would erupt within Fatah after Arafat's death, and this would benefit them," says Salah Abdel Shafi, a German-educated economist and scion of a prominent Gaza family. "When this didn't happen, Hamas started feeling the pressure." Mr. Abdel Shafi predicts Mr. Abbas will win big, even in Gaza. "There is an enthusiasm for Abu Mazen," he says. "During the past few years, people became passive. This was the problem with the militarization of the intifada. By definition it's the work of an armed elite, which leaves everyone else nothing to do but watch. With the elections, people again feel empowered."
But even if Hamas is losing its grip among Palestinians, it maintains its ability and will to terrorize. Asked about Mr. Abbas's insistence that Hamas disarm, Mr. Abu Zuhri says, "Whoever will be against the resistance will find himself in big trouble." Hamas, it should be remembered, is basically the Palestinian version of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which murdered Anwar Sadat in 1981.
It's Sunday morning. In Bethlehem, Khalid Abu Bussameh, 44, shows me the ink mark on his finger that's proof of his vote. "Fifty years fighting it is enough," he says in fractured English. Did he vote for Abu Mazen? "Yes. Abu Mazen good man." Is Abu Mazen a good man like Abu Amr. "Abu Amr strong man. Abu Mazen good man."
As the day wears on, it's clear the election will not go off without a hitch. Exit polls show Mr. Abbas winning with 60% to 70% of the vote. But turnout is modest, and in the afternoon the Central Election Committee decides to extend voting hours and allow unregistered voters to cast ballots. Presumably, the thinking is that a higher vote total will give Mr. Abbas's mandate a boost. But to more than one Palestinian observer this smacks of traditional Fatah chicanery, a bad start for a presidency that promises to play by the rules.
Still, to an outsider the election seems generally well-orchestrated, free from the usual forms of fraud, and a hopeful portent for the future. Nuha Nussleh, a political adviser to the U.S.-sponsored National Democratic Institute, tells me of getting up at 2:30 in the morning to dispatch 12 teams of election observers to polling places throughout the West Bank. In the afternoon, she drives to East Jerusalem to cast her ballot with her 11-year-old daughter, Zaynab. For a change, there are no problems getting through Israeli checkpoints. After casting her ballot, her daughter says she wishes she could vote too. "Soon enough you will," her mother replies.
One image strikes me as I travel through Palestinian territories. During the Arafat years, the image of the rais was always mounted over the backdrop of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. "A million martyrs to Al Aqsa," he used to say. Now the banner is of Mr. Abbas, but the backdrop is the rocky countryside of the West Bank. How significant the difference in iconography turns out to be in practice remains to be seen. But it bespeaks the distance already traveled.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
