Palestinians Say Israel Targets Militant Candidates

Palestinian presidential candidate Bassam Salhi was arrested Friday by Israeli officers as he tried to enter Jerusalem to meet with supporters. (AP)

HALHUL, West Bank -- Ali Mahmoud Akel, a 40-year-old prep school headmaster and activist from the radical Muslim group Hamas, sat with a group of friends outside a hardware store and explained why he was running for town council member in the first local Palestinian elections in 28 years.

"We have a municipality that has not had elections since 1976, and we need new blood, young blood," he said in fluent English.

But even though Hamas, officially known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, is fielding candidates in an election for the first time, Akel and many others are not running under the party's banner, fearing they could be targeted by Israeli security forces, which consider Hamas a terrorist organization and have conducted an aggressive campaign to arrest and kill its members. Furthermore, Akel said, in Halhul and many of the other 25 West Bank towns where council elections are scheduled for Dec. 23, a candidate's family and tribal affiliations are more important than his political party.

Akel's security concerns were highlighted Friday when four members of Hamas running in elections in Dahariya, a town of 30,000 residents in the West Bank about 20 miles south of Jerusalem, were arrested at 3 a.m. by Israeli soldiers, according to the head of the local elections committee, Hatem Naser.

Israeli border police also arrested a Palestinian presidential candidate, Bassam Salhi, at a West Bank checkpoint on Friday as he attempted to enter Jerusalem to meet with supporters. Another candidate in the Jan. 9 Palestinian Authority presidential contest, Mustafa Barghouti, was detained and allegedly beaten by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint on Wednesday. Israeli military officials said Barghouti provoked a confrontation by refusing to show his identification papers.

The incidents underscored Palestinian concerns that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would limit their ability to conduct fair elections, a problem that Palestinian leaders have used as a reason for canceling elections and holding on to their elective offices, in some cases decades beyond the expiration of their terms.

"This is the kind of negative interference we don't need -- we need freedom of movement for all the presidential candidates," said Hanan Ashrawi, an independent member of the Palestinian parliament.

"It took a lot of effort to get an inclusive democracy and multi-party system and to get people to participate in something hopeful rather than destructive," Ashrawi said. "If Israel starts arresting people based on their political affiliation, that would distort the results of the elections and serve the interests of extremists."

Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, denied that Israel was interfering in Palestinian elections. He said no Islamic candidate would be targeted because of political affiliation, adding: "As long as they are running for office and are not involved in terrorist activities, we are not going to get involved."

But Palestinian candidates would not be allowed to campaign in East Jerusalem, home to about 222,000 Palestinians, Gissin said, because under Israeli law the city was "the sovereign capital of the state of Israel, the whole of it."

Most countries, including the United States, do not recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, saying that the city's final status is to be determined in negotiations. Michael Tarazi, an attorney with the Palestine Liberation Organization, said there was no internationally recognized law that bans Palestinian candidates from campaigning in East Jerusalem.

Following the death last month of long-time Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Palestinian analysts said new, democratic elections were critical to forming a stable, legitimate government, stemming both internal violence and attacks against Israel, and revitalizing Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

The day after Arafat died, President Bush also called for elections: "We'll hold their [Palestinian] feet to the fire to make sure that democracy prevails, that there are free elections," adding that much depended also on "Israel's willingness to help them build a democracy."

While most attention has been focused on the presidential campaign to select a successor to Arafat, 26 localities in the West Bank are scheduled to have their first local elections in almost three decades. Under Palestinian law, the two week campaign season in advance of the vote officially began Thursday.