Mousa Abu Marzook, The Guardian, August 16:
While Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is busily courting Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas as a “partner for peace”, successive voices continue to speak out against efforts to sideline the democratically elected Hamas government. As the Britain’s Commons foreign affairs committee concluded on Monday, this strategy is counterproductive and doomed to fail, for the simple reason that the support of the Palestinian people is unmistakably lacking. Abbas’s party does not democratically represent the Palestinians, yet what is in effect now a dictatorship in the West Bank is being welcomed by Israel and its western allies. The duplicity of this situation is shameful. Israel and its allies were quick to dismiss Hamas and the national unity governments and isolate both, and are now equally as quick to welcome an illegally formed self-proclaimed government for the Palestinians. Is this democracy?