I like it ... but Hamas and PLO will never voluntarily agree to give up the control they have over their local populations. If the sheiks were to create militias to fight the PLO in the West Bank, the situation will quickly degenerate into a Beirut scenario with Israel just trying to contain the spillover of violence into their own territory.
No Jews in the West Bank would be safe from the resulting carnage.
Could the PLO effectively fight local control - especially if democratically elected? Neither PLO nor Hamas are particularly popular among the Palestinians, there just isn't a whole lot of choice.
Both Hamas and the PLO are pretty effective at one thing ... eliminating the competition. Anyone who they deem a threat to their control is immediately accused of being a 'Zionist Sympathizer' and publicly shot to send a message.
Not too many local chieftains or sheiks are going to stand against them.
You might be surprised:
SUMMARY
The Palestinian local elections held May 13 showed that Palestinians voted for tribal and independent lists instead of political lists, giving serious cause for concern.
"Hamas, the
Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
boycotted the elections on the grounds that they were held in the West Bank and not the
Gaza Strip. Hamas
refused to hold the elections in Gaza in protest against the Palestinian High Court of Justice’s
calling off in September 2016 of the local elections that were scheduled for the next month, as well as in protest of President Mahmoud Abbas’ formation of the
Local Elections Court on Jan. 10 without consulting the Palestinian factions....
Yousef Tamiza, a campaign manager for the tribal
National Alliance list in the town of Idna in Hebron, in the south of the West Bank, told Al-Monitor that the National Alliance list won 10 out of 13 seats, and included an alliance of seven families in the city of Hebron, namely the Tamiza, Islimiya, Abu Jahisha, Khalawah, Abu Zeltah, Awad and Abu Asaad families. Independent lists won the other three seats.
Nashar said that in many of the West Bank governorates and villages, voters opted for independent and tribal lists because they are tired of the Palestinian parties and their political affiliations, which he said have a negative impact on the interests of citizens. Also, he added, voters have become convinced that partisan lists never implement their electoral programs....
Abdel Sattar Qassem, a professor of political science at An-Najah National University in Nablus, told Al-Monitor
that the victory of the tribal lists in many municipal councils in the local elections poses a threat to the Palestinian people because of the return of what he called "tribal reunification" at the expense of the national public interest. He attributed this to the people’s loss of confidence in political parties.
He told Al-Monitor, “There is a great leadership vacuum in the Palestinian arena — both socially and politically — and someone had to fill this vacuum, so families and tribes managed to do so.”
He added, “Tribes are a separatist social structure, not a unitary one. Each family works to preserve its own interests, regardless of the public interest, and this is why a great danger is lurking. Social and political division will come to affect individuals and families in one town, whereas it has been
until now only confined to Hamas and Fatah.”
The resurgence of Palestinian tribalism
*(the page doesn't exist anymore,however the text above is from that exact article that I've copy-pasted a year ago when it was available
post#408)
