This is the third in a series of blog posts on the forthcoming Palestinian elections from the freelance journalist and blogger Laila el-Haddad, who lives in Gaza City. Laila's blog, Raising Yousuf, is named after her two-year-old son. You can read her second post here, and her first here.
It's crunch time. With four days left until the big day, post-prayer in Gaza this afternoon saw dozens of election rallies and "festivals" complete with colourful (if tacky) banners, fervent partisan politicking, folk music, revolutionary songs and dabke dances.
Things are getting heated between the frontrunners, Hamas and Fateh, who have been exchanging blows over credibility over the past few days. I guess even in battered Gaza one cannot escape the deluge of dirty election politics.
Meanwhile, another suicide bombing by Islamic Jihad, the only group boycotting the elections, rocked Tel Aviv yesterday.
There was no immediate response in Gaza, but unmanned Israeli drones menacingly circled the skies last night, whirring incessantly like large mosquitos above my head.
Though they are armed with missiles, mostly, I think, they are used to intimidate - to say "we are never far away". They are particularly eerie in the dead of night when the only other noises are an occasional car screeching past or late-night election poster-plasterers (all the cats were killed off accidentally by the municipality's ill-placed rat poison last year).
I don't think the bombing is likely to disrupt the elections. It's simply not in Israel's interest for this to happen. Israel is more worried, I think, about the prospect of the more popular and mainstream Hamas sweeping the polls (the group is evading the "terrorist group" charge by running under a different name - the Change and Reform List).
In the northern part of the Strip, young guard Fateh icon Mohammad Dahalan tried to rally a crowd of 20,000 in a last-ditch effort to win the northern Gaza districts.
"Are you going to allow Hamas to take the north as they say they will?" he asked, to defiant cheers of his supporters. He added that Hamas should apologise to Fatah for calling the 1996 elections "treason", and "admit" that the Fatah plan - negotiations based on the Oslo Accords - ultimately triumphed. "The PLC is not Hamas, the PLC is not Hamas," they chanted.
Hamas held a large (very green) afternoon rally of its own in Gaza City - so large, in fact, that most streets in the city had to be shut down because of the sheer numbers in attendance (50,000 at the very least). But it exerted little effort at firing back, except to remind voters of its "clean record" in newspaper ads.
Everything seems to hinge on these elections some way or another, from the resumption of negotiations to the receipt of foreign aid, to relations with the US to security on Gaza's streets.
It represents I think a real turning point for Palestinian politics as well. Of course, where we will turn to is a different matter.
There are really so many critical contingents to play to, so many promises to fulfil. And it seems, so little hope of fulfilling them. There are some 7000 Palestinian prisoners stuck in Israeli jails, closely monitoring the elections. They form one of the major interest groups.
And, of course, there are the ever-neglected refugees, waiting desperately for a solution to their 58-year-old problem. They make up nearly two thirds of Gaza.
But the rest, the ones who are rotting in squalid camps outside of Israel with no future and no hope, actually can't vote in the elections (unlike the Iraqi elections, I might add).
That includes my husband who, though he is now a physician in the US, cannot visit me here in Gaza, and cannot vote, because he holds a Lebanese Palestinian refugee permit and cannot exercise a right to return.
Then there's the ever-volatile issue of East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hope to claim as their future capital (we forget sometimes that all these elections are taking place despite the fact that we have no official state yet).
Amid the infighting and politicking, East Jerusalemites - very few of whom, it seems, will be voting - feel alienated and apathetic.
Fatah is trying to use this to their advantage.
"Remember, we are not the ones that compromised on Jerusalem, like some other party," shouted one Fatah man provocatively as he led a demonstration through Gaza City yesterday - a reference to arch rivals Hamas's call to move ahead with elections despite early Israeli threats to ban electioneering there.
Local human rights groups have done their best to keep the campaigning "fair" and the parties in line with the election laws.
They announce infractions in press releases, scolding parties as though they are schoolchildren who have misbehaved. "Fatah Asks Gaza Municipality to Provide Staff to Participate in an Election Rally" declared one prominent human rights group in a recent email update.
Apparently, this is an infraction of article 59-3 of election law No. 9 of 2005. Wow. I didn't even know there was a section 3 of article 59 (I guess that answers the question of the pollster who came to my door asking how familiar I was with the new election law).
The reality is, Israel will have to accept to the status quo, whatever that is. Most likely, it will be some sort of Hamas-Fatah coalition, but this all depends on how the final votes play out.
After all, this is the same government that once referred to Yasser Arafat as a terrorist with whom it could not negotiate (after which it negotiated with him before relegating him to a terrorist again).
As usual, nothing makes sense here. And somehow, in the end, everything does.
