WILLIAM MEHLMAN

If elections were synonymous with democracy, we would owe Adolf Hitler and Yasser Arafat at least half an apology. Ineradicable blots on the face of humanity though they were, they were both elected to their respective offices quite democratically.

The same could be said of Hezbollah, the Iranian-financed, Syrian-enabled terror organization that won all 17 contested south Lebanese seats in that country’s first parliamentary elections in decades. Ditto Hamas, Hezbollah’s Palestinian compadre in murder and torture, whose looming victory in the originally scheduled July 17th elections for the Palestine National Council, compelled PA President Mahmoud Abbas to postpone the election until 2006.

The elections in Iran did not have to be postponed because none of the mullahs who rule that radical Islamic roost was in the slightest put off by the first round victory of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as president and of course were delighted by the subsequent landslide victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline mayor of Teheran who won the runoff in a landslide.

The defeated Rafsanjani, let it be understood, had been labeled a “moderate” by a Western world whose unyielding quest for Islamic “moderates” with whom it can “deal,” makes Diogenes’ search for an honest man look like an exercise in sloth. As the old saying goes, if you can’t find a “moderate,” invent one. That suits the mullahs just fine. If it’s elections the West chooses to dwell on while Iran completes the enrichment of its plutonium, well then, give them elections. It was Ali Khamenei’s spokesman who put these Iranian elections into their proper context. “Freedom, democracy and stupidities of this type,” he averred, “cannot be carried over in any part and these concepts are out of spirit with the principles of Islam. Islam always spoke with the sword in hand and I don’t see why now we should change attitudes and talk with other civilizations.”

It is their participation in elections that is rapidly transforming Hamas from a blood-spattered killer and crippler of women and children into a “political party,” a “player” in the jaundiced eyes of the real-politicos. And who can count the number of “elections” Robert Mugabe has won in Zimbabwe? Had the Mafia been astute enough to follow the electoral path, the Dapper Don would have been addressing Rotary Club luncheons instead of ending his days in prison.

What all this underscores is the obvious fact that elections, divorced from a moral and ethical framework, however “democratic” they might be, have as much relevance to democracy as a symposium on chastity in a bordello. And where sovereign states are concerned, that framework must include freedom of speech, the press, religion and personal physical movement, the civilized treatment of women, concern for the rights and safety of minorities, racial and ethnic equity, the right to a fair trial and laws codifying and protecting all those rights. Above all, the litmus test of any democracy is its tolerance and acceptance of the “other” in its midst.

The Arab world has yet to satisfy any of these criteria. Nowhere does the application of “democracy” to describe its political posturings – elections included – appear as oxymoronic as in its 57-year denial of the slightest measure of tolerance and acceptance to its most “significant other,” Israel. And nowhere is that fact more tragically illustrated than in the Palestinian context..

The thought of a “democratic” Palestine living side-by-side in peace with its Jewish neighbor, as envisioned by President Bush, is reduced to gibberish by anybody who spends 10 minutes exposed to the material gathered, translated, published and rebroadcast by Israel’s Palestine Media Watch, the aptly named watchdog that monitors Palestinian radio, TV and the press every day of every year. The venom, the calumny, the hatred, the demonization, the threats of annihilation directed against Israel is incessant, deafening, almost beyond conception. And it comes from every direction – the mosques, the markets, the schools, the kindergartens, the internet, even the board games and the crossword puzzles. Goebels and Streicher at their malevolent best never achieved this degree of saturation. Most egregious of all, it emanates from a Palestinian leadership that is boldly attempting to convince the world, most particularly the U.S., that its election pretensions have some relation to democracy and democratic behavior.

What head of any state calling itself civilized would publicly proclaim the existence of its democratic neighbor – the one with whom it is expected to share peaceful borders – the “greatest crime in human history.” Those were the exact words of Mahmoud Abbas on the occasion of Israel’s 57th birthday in May. To Mr. Abbas, of course, it wasn’t the 57 anniversary of Israel’s independence, but “Nakba” or “Catastrophe” Day, an official Palestinian holiday marked by black attire, sirens, special mosque services and other signs of public mourning. Can President Bush really conceive of this confidante of Yasser Arafat, certified holocaust denier and paymaster for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes, creating a legitimate democracy prepared to live in peace with a neighbor whose existence he’s characterized as a “crime,” no matter how many elections he presides over?

Echoing Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s prime Minister, Mr. Ahmed Qurei employed the Nakba Day inversion of Israel’s independence celebration to declare that “our wound is still bleeding 57 years later.” “Our people,” he added, “will never forget. The generations will never forgive.” The last word on the subject was appropriately left to Hamas, the PA’s newly minted “political” partner. Hamas took the occasion of Israel’s 57th birthday to label it a “cancer” and to promise to continue bombing buses, hotels and cafes “until the liberation of the last inch of our land and the last refugee returns to his home.”

If prosaic venom doesn’t convey to the White House and the State Department the “democratic” spirit of the Palestinian leadership’s “Nakba” perspective on life alongside Israel, perhaps some poetic venom might help. For that, there is hardly a better source than Palestinian poetry icon Mahmoud Darwish. The following excerpt from his much loved, widely memorized 1988 poetic address to his Israeli “others,” “Passing Through Passing Words,” pretty much says it all:

“Take your names and get out…
Don’t pass among us like flying insects
Take your bony skeletons
Collect your illusions from abandoned holes and get out…
It’s time to get out
Reside where you will, but not among us
Die where you will, but not among us
Ours is the past here
And the present and the future
Ours is the world here
So get out of our soil
Our earth, our sea
Our wheat, our salt
Our everything
Get out of all memory
And remove with you, your dead. "

The forced evacuation of 9,000 Israeli Jews in 25 thriving communities in Gush Katif (Gaza) and northern Samaria makes Darwish’s depraved poetic rantings read like prophecy -- even to the extent of the Sharon government’s plan to exhume the graves of the terror victims buried in those communities.

Mahmoud Abbas had it half right. The world is indeed being asked to bear witness and give consent to a monumental crime -- not the birth of Israel, but the crime being devised against Jews in the land chosen for them by God. It is the perversion of democracy and everything it has ever stood for, the “Nakba” that could haunt us to the end of our days

William Mehlman chairs AFSI in Israel .