Announcement of Voter Registration for Palestinian National Council (PNC) Elections

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Nov 11, 2011 Palestine
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Announcement of Voter Registration for Palestinian National Council (PNC) Elections

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following announcement was released by the Facilitation Office for a Civic Registration Drive, an independent civic initiative in support of national efforts for democratic Palestinian elections to the PNC.]

Public Announcement of a Civic Registration for Direct Elections to the PNC

By the spring of 2012 an internet register for the secure online registration of Palestinian voters everywhere will be completed and ready for use. Palestinians can then register themselves as well as assist others to register through a civic registration drive that will last for 6 months. For the first time it will become possible for every Palestinian, including the refugees in the shatat, to register for elections to the Palestinian National Council (PNC), and to participate in direct elections to the PLO parliament that represents the entirety of the Palestinian people. PNC elections have been officially announced, and are scheduled for the spring of 2012. This civic drive will help make these elections a reality.

The registration model was developed by university-based experts in internet security protocol and elections registration as a public service to the Palestinian people, the majority of whom are not included in the current voter register of Palestinians. The current voter register only covers Palestinians in the 1967 occupied Palestinian homeland, largely excluding Jerusalem, and was created by the Palestinian National Authority for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). The PLC is itself incorporated into the PNC, and represents Palestinians from the 1967 occupied Palestine inside of it.

Tools for disenfranchised Palestinians to prepare and carry out a voter registration in all locations are published on PalestiniansRegister, the website of the civic registration drive. The website also explains how every Palestinian can assist in registering Palestinians who have never had the chance to vote in democratic elections to the PNC.

Elsewhere on this website you will find details of Palestinian civic associations’ Campaign for Voter Registration, a decentralized but coordinated campaign building towards the reality of democratic PNC elections, where the voices of each are heard. The immense challenges facing Palestinians in their search for democratic national participation require the dedicated and concerted efforts of civil society to overcome these obstacles. All Palestinians, individuals and associations, can join the civic campaign for voter registration in order to create the first-ever register of Palestinian voters for PNC elections. All the skills, energies and resources of Palestinian society can come together across borders to contribute to this common goal.

The announcement of the creation of a civic mechanism for voter registration is launched today November the 11th, on the anniversary of the death of the late President Yasser Arafat, Chair of the PLO (Abu ‘Ammar). Forty years ago on November 13th 1974, his historic speech at the United Nations paved the way to the international recognition of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and confirmed international recognition of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, foremost the right to return to our homes and properties and our right to self-determination. Today’s announcement builds on this heritage of the PLO as a liberation movement that unites, represents and advances the rights of all Palestinians as one people.

It is understood that a directly elected democratic PNC is the most effective means to affirm and advance Palestinian rights, end internal division, restore and strengthen our national liberation movement, and reactivate the PLO on a democratic basis so that it can represent the will of the entire Palestinian people. Creating a comprehensive register of Palestinian voters is the necessary first step, and the responsibility of all Palestinians to ensure, because Palestinians outside the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have never had a voter register for PNC elections. Those inside the West Bank and Gaza are registered for PLC elections, and the PLC is incorporated into the PNC, representing that part of the Palestinian people in it.

Today’s announcement for the civic voter registration drive is a call for a unique collective Palestinian endeavour that must be accomplished through each Palestinian’s own contribution to the Palestinian national polity. This is neither a campaign nor a `project’ of an NGO funded by international donors, but instead a civic endeavour carried out by civil society to support its national institutions, funded and run entirely by Palestinian civil society. It is not an initiative of a political group or committee that has given itself the mandate to ‘rescue’ or rebuild the PLO. It belongs to all Palestinians, individuals, associations, parties, unions, coalitions and networks, whose skills, energies and resources must contribute in order to enfranchise all Palestinians. Every Palestinian voice counts, and each is needed.

Successful implementation of voter registration requires collective effort to be divided into two phases: a first six-month-period of preparations, beginning today, and a second six-month-phase, beginning in the spring of 2012, when the online registration of voters can actually start, and be undertaken in all locations where Palestinians are not yet registered to vote for the PNC. Public awareness and resources must be raised, and national and international protection and support engaged, in order to achieve a large online register of Palestinian voters.

The facilitation office of the civic registration drive was created by Palestinian individuals and groups as volunteers. It provides basic services and assistance to the registration campaign in order to ensure its success, including technical and logistical support with the set-up of the internet registration system in all locations, civic registration training, basic materials for public information and campaigning, and the search for national and international protection and support.

As safe and secure online registration for PNC elections will soon be possible for all Palestinians, we call upon Palestinians everywhere, in particular our disenfranchised refugees in the shatat and the youth and their associations in historic Palestine and outside of it, to assume an active role in preparation of online voter registration by:

  • Raising awareness in Palestinian communities in your area of the forthcoming registration, and the importance of the role of the PLO and of democratic elections to its sovereign body, the Palestine National Council;
  • Mobilizing public resources for the registration drive, including volunteers, facilities, equipment and funds;
  • Getting in touch with the civil association’s Campaign for Voter Registration in order to join.
  • Participating in logistical preparations and training for voter registration in your geographic area.


For enquiries about participation in organising voter registration, please contact: palestinians@palestiniansregister.org

 
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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412