PALESTINE: The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary election was not the landslide the figures for seats suggest.
According to the final count, Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, won 74 seats in the 132-member Palestinian legislative council while the secular Fatah party won 45 and the smaller parties and independents took 13.
However, an examination of the number of votes won by the main parties shows that Hamas took 45 per cent and Fatah 41 per cent, and that there was a difference of only 30,000 votes between them.
Hamas's strategists may be proceeding cautiously because they understand that the movement's solid support on the ground is only slightly greater than the popular backing Fatah enjoys, despite its failure to bring peace and independence to the Palestinians and its poor record in government.
The reason the spread is so wide is that Hamas fielded one candidate for each seat, whereas there was one official Fatah candidate and multiple Fatah-linked independents for each seat in every constituency. The Fatah vote was divided among several candidates whereas the Hamas vote went to a single official candidate. If Fatah had followed the Hamas strategy, it would have taken 54 seats to 59 for Hamas, a figure well short of a majority.
Since Hamas did not want to form a government, but sought the social ministries, Fatah would almost certainly have been asked to form a "national unity government" in coalition with Hamas and the small parties. This would have been far more acceptable to Israel and the international community.
Results were quirky. Hamas won all the seats in the mixed Muslim-Christian districts of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ramallah, with the exception of five seats reserved for Christians. These were taken by Fatah, prompting Palestinians to joke that Fatah had become a "Christian party".
In Qalqilya, a West Bank town of 40,000 that is surrounded by Israel's eight-metre wall, both seats were won by Fatah in spite of - and perhaps because of - the fact that in last year's local elections Hamas won control of its municipal council. In Nablus, a stronghold of Fatah's military wing, Hamas won five of the six seats.
All nine seats went to Hamas in Hebron, a very conservative city where 500 aggressive Israeli settlers live among 200,000 Palestinians. The northern West Bank town of Jenin, battered by Israel during its 2002 offensive, was split between Hamas and Fatah, and in the tough town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, all three seats went to Fatah.