Israel praised Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat for the smooth running of Palestinian elections over the weekend and called the results proof of support for the peace process.
At the same time, a Palestinian leader in Gaza declared less than 24 hours after the polls closed that Palestinian independence would be the next national goal.
Abu-Mazen chairman of the Palestinian central election committee, said the elected council would declare independence “within three years.”
With most of the ballots tallied Sunday, Arafat emerged as the clear victor in the race for the executive head of the 88-member Palestinian Council, which will include at least one former leader of the Hamas fundamentalist group.
As expected, Arafat, who received about 90 percent of the vote by the time most of the votes were counted, beat his sole rival, Samiha Khalil, a 72-year-old social activist from the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Arafat loyalists will also control the newly elected council. At least 50 of the legislators were members of his Fatah faction, including 10 who had served in his appointed interim Cabinet.
According to early election results, 26 of the Fatah members were elected in the West Bank and the other 24 in Gaza.
However, also elected to the council were Palestinian notables who are opposed to Arafat.
Most prominent among them was Haidar Abdul Shafi in Gaza, who served as head of the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 peace talks and later became a strong critic of what some opponents called Arafat’s authoritarian leadership. Also elected was Abdul Jawad Saleh, a former mayor of the West Bank town of El Bireh and critic of the peace process.
Although the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas officially boycotted the elections, it discretely ordered its supporters to cast their ballots in favor of opponents of the peace process.
At least one member of the elected council is a Hamas activist from Nablus.
Elections officials said results for nine of 11 West Bank cities showed Arafat winning with 88.73 percent of the vote to 11.27 percent for Khalil.
Khalil, however, expressed satisfaction about the outcome. She said she felt that she had collected enough support to make a point, “to raise my voice before the entire world.”
Official results were expected Monday.
An estimated 80 percent of the more than 1 million eligible voters cast their ballots Saturday, a day of sunshine that sharply contrasted the preceding week’s storms and flooding.
Hebron, a stronghold for Islamic fundamentalism, seemed to have low voter turnout. Confusion is Hebron over missing ballot boxes, which were later found, apparently delayed the official result of the elections.
Eastern Jerusalem also had low voter turnout. Only 30 percent of eligible voters there cast ballots, despite a decision to keep polls open for an extra two hours.
Palestinian election officials and members of the international 600-person observer force, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, complained that the heavy presence of Israeli security forces around post office branches where the voting was taking place and discouraged Arab residents from participating.
But the former president, who brokered the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty, the 1979 accord with Egypt, also congratulated Arafat on his “wonderful victory” and called the elections a turning point in the “history of Palestine and the Mideast.”
After the elections, the Jewish state urged Arafat to take the next major step by revoking the clauses in the Palestinian charter that call for Israel’s destruction.
Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who said the strong voter turnout sent a message to the Muslim militant opposition to stop its violence, called on Arafat to convene the Palestinian National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s parliament in exile, to revoke the clauses in its charter calling for Israel’s destruction.
According to the Israeli-Palestinian agreements, these clauses must be eliminated no later than two months after elections. Israel has said that a failure to do so would be cause for a freeze in negotiations.
Judging by initial results of the elections to the Palestinian Council, there seemed to be a majority for abrogation of the covenant clauses that call for the annihilation of Israel.
Peres said in an Army Radio interview that Israel would not obstruct a PNC meeting for this purpose and would allow all members, even those opposed to the peace accords, into the autonomous area.
“Theoretically, the permission applies to all [members], but I do not thing they would come,” Peres said. “We will not put any obstacles in the way of the gathering of the council.”
Rejectionist leaders Nayef Hawatmeh, of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and George Habash, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, announced in Damascus that they would not attend the PNC session, to be held during the next two months in Gaza.
Arafat was to draw up a list of some 100 PNC members for whom he want Israel to grant entry, Israel Radio said.
For the most part, the elections occurred without major incident, such as a large-scale terrorist act.
Security officials, however, warned that a terrorist attack by Islamic militants opposed to the peace accords was still highly possible.
The gravest elections-related violence took place the day after the voting, when a Palestinian election official was shot dead by a Palestinian security officer at a polling station in the rural Hebron area.
Apparently, 31-year-old Hashem Nasser asked the officer to leave the station so that the ballots could be counted, Israel Radio reported. An argument broke out and the officer fired his gun.
Also, in the Gaza Strip self-rule enclave, Palestinian Police Chief Bring. Gen. Ghazi al-Jabali said that “two to three people had been wounded in an exchange of fire” at a polling station there. Witnesses said supporters of one candidate feared that cheating was taking place during the vote count, and came armed demanding the ballot boxes.
On Saturday, a Jewish teen-ager was lightly wounded in the shoulder in a stabbing attack in the center of Hebron. The assailant, described by security forces as a Hamas activist, was apprehended.
Scuffles broke out between Jewish and Palestinian residents after the attack, and Israeli security forces were sent to the scene of the attack to separate the sides.
In addition, demonstrations by right-wing Jewish groups against the elections and government policy passed without incident.
Jewish settlers and their supporters made their presence known in Hebron, where they walked between the Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Jewish enclave in the center of town.
In Jerusalem, right-wing groups upheld their pledge to Israeli police not to disrupt voting in the eastern half of the capital.
Small groups of right-wing supporters, escorted by Israeli security forces, walked through parts of eastern Jerusalem in a demonstration of what was called a Jewish presence in the city.
A mass prayer was held at the Western Wall.
And a rally was held Saturday night in downtown Jerusalem.
Members of the Likud decided not to participate in the rally, reportedly out of concern that extremist views might be expressed.
The rally was held at the same site where, during a demonstration about a month before his assassination, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was depicted in signs in a Gestapo uniform.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
