Never a dull moment...

Alright folks, here is the post that I have tried to avoid for the past few months. I'm surrounded by it everyday, but honestly I think you might have more information than I do. A cab driver brought it up with me in conversation yesterday while returning home from the grocery store. I read about it in the papers. My neighbors take the day off to go do their civic duty. What am I talking about? The elections... both Israeli and Palestinian.

A few days ago Israel held national elections and much to my surprise the voter turn out was the lowest it has been since sometime in the 1950's. This seems odd to me in light of the outcome of Palestinian elections, but the results of Israel's voting ended up somewhat favorable anyway so I'm not going to complain. The structure of the Knesset (Israeli congress) is not on the electoral system, which means if a certain party gets 1% of the popular vote, they get 1% of the available seats. This also means there are several parties to keep track of. The two big winners of this year, which together make up about 50% of the legislative body, are Kadima (in Hebrew means "forward") and Ha-Avoda (or "the job"... the labor party). These guys are centrist in their politics and compared to Hamas on the other side of the fence, they are a decent choice. I imagine that they will still pursue even more settlement pull-outs and move towards the two state solution. Way to go Israel.

As you probably know by now, the Palestinians are now officially under their Hamas elected leadership. Hamas won 44% of the Palestinian Authority's seats in January and just a few weeks ago put the elected officials in place. This came as a big surprise to the polls, the world, and even Israel... although I think that Israelis were significantly less surprised. The ideology of Hamas is hateful, uncooperative, and only marginally concerned with the development of their impoverished piece of territory. However, this is only a piece of the problem. I feel that with a recorded terrorist group in power they will soon see their own people suffer further because of pulled funding from around the globe. The West Bank was in a bad way to begin with, and Gaza was worse, but without the support of wealthier countries to help them get a stable infrastructure (good schools, food, and hospitals) all of their hateful politics will strangle any hope Palestine had of becoming a nation.

Obviously this summary is very condensed and the issues are much more complex, but I feel like I owed it to myself to write about it since I live here. We will see what becomes of it over the next year, but for now I am content to ignore them all and get back to creative writing.