Mid East Peace: Were 2006 Elections in Palestine Our Greatest Missed Opportunity and Can there be a Better Tomorrow?

Hamas’ attack was as barbaric as it was shocking. Like millions of fellow Muslims, my heart bleeds for all those innocent Israelis who were massacred, their grieving relatives, and those shell-shocked families whose loved ones have been snatched, as they desperately try to comprehend the calamity that has befallen them. 

Their pain and terror are perhaps unimaginable anywhere else in the world, but not in this region. Here, just minutes away in Gaza, up to 4,000 innocent Palestinians have departed this mortal coil as the ‘acceptable’ face of collateral damage in the wake of the vengeance unleashed by the Israeli Government. 

United by grief, the commonality of these two peoples is profound, and yet they live worlds apart, side-by-side. Invariably, it’s this commonality that humanizes the ‘other’ - the terror victims of the Hamas attack, and the terrorized victims of Israel’s reprisals. 

Over more than three decades and after many visits to that region, both before and after becoming a British member of parliament and government minister, the suffering of the people of Palestine and their extraordinary resilience struck me the most. As multiple international humanitarian organizations have consistently testified, the chronic inhumane treatment of the Palestinians is a violation of international law. 

It might explain why it feels like lives in the Middle East don't have equal value. Who can forget former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously telling Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes that the "price" of killing a reported 500,000 Iraqi children following the 1991 Gulf War and sanctions was “worth it”. Shocking words she would retract years later with an apology in 2020 just before her death.

However, in this ‘enlightened’ age, the third decade of the second millennium, does anybody really believe that the mass killing of Israelis and Palestinians is acceptable or a formula for lasting peace in the Middle East? 

Almost an octogenarian, yet the conflict in the Middle East has no plans to retire. It continues to pile yet more abject misery, death, and destruction on a sacred land for all the children of Abraham, blighted by far more pain than any human could or should ever have to bear. Still not satisfied, it now seeks to sow yet more discord, enmity and suspicion and to pit future generations of Israelis, Palestinians, Muslims and Jews against one another. 

Discussing UN's role in the Middle East with its then Sec. General Kofi Annan

As I lie in bed today (with Covid), with a sense of foreboding and helplessness, watching the current horrors unfold, I can’t help but wonder if there could have been another way and how many opportunities for peace have we missed? And I am drawn to the very sad conclusion that there was a time when we could have helped to create a fair, peaceful and prosperous future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. 

We in the West nurtured a glimpse of hope in the peoples of this land when we promised Palestinians we would help facilitate their elections in 2006, arguing democracy was the only solution. We crowed about the rule of law, human rights, ‘the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ The foundations of our own Western societies were offered to them as a near fait accompli, the quid pro quo being that all would play fair and of course respect the majority outcome. 

As an election Observer in Palestine

With other British parliamentarians, I marched to the West Bank during that seminal event and bore witness to a remarkable, near-flawless exhibition of democracy in action. With a turnout of around 78 percent, it was almost a third greater than in the US, UK and Israeli elections at the time. As the Palestinians in Jenin refugee camp proudly pointed out, they were at the top of the Arab premier league of democracies. Truth be told, they were probably the only Arab nation in that league. 

To see the likes of Fatah, Hamas (who had respected a ceasefire since 2004), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and others campaigning in a carnival atmosphere outside polling stations was a surreal sight. This was despite the unwelcome interference of the Israeli-occupied forces. I wrote about the extraordinary electoral fete for the New Statesman at the time. 

And our response to this truly seismic moment, one which few dreamed would come to pass – not just fair elections but truly first-rate elections? Well, we rejected the election of Hamas, pulling the rug as we snuffed out their impossible hope. Our hubris lay flat as we failed to ‘walk the talk’ and all but abandoned those prized and paraded Western values at whose altar we bowed. 

This, despite another observer, one of the world’s most respected international statesmen, former US President Jimmy Carter hailing the 2006 Palestinian elections as “a miracle”. However, western powers (and others) denied the results - not because they believed the democratic process was corrupt but because the democratic outcome was not to their liking. 

Dismissing the views of UK Parliamentarians is one thing but it's another thing to discount the judgment of the 39th President of the United States, the only global leader who had actually achieved peace in the Middle East - a peace which has stood strong for 45 years between Israel and Egypt. 

Indeed, President Carter’s success proves that land for peace is a formula that can work if there is an honest broker with integrity, and the actors prioritize the common human good over their personal political good. 

Dr Malik and then Prime Minister Gordon Brown speaking at a Humanitarian event in the UK Parliament

As a British MP and Minister, my own considerable unease at the election outcome could not outweigh my respect for the process and I wasn’t in the business of cheating a people, who had already been cheated their whole lives, of exercising their first-ever democratic right. 

As we know now it would be their last. 

Western inconsistency undermines our credibility. Either we support democracy or we don’t. Our approach, repeated with the subsequent Egyptian elections (2012), appears to be that we will support democracy as long as our favored son (there are few daughters) wins. Well, that’s not democracy, it’s hypocrisy and it has no place in the common values we share and espouse in the UK, US and the West more generally. It is this double-speak that erodes our standing still. 

Children enjoying election day in Nablus in 2006

 I believe to this day that in 2006 it was within our creative arsenal to deploy the diplomatic tools necessary to alleviate reasonable fears and make reasonable accommodations. What’s more, it was our moral duty to persevere. Even 50% of Israel's electorate wanted their government at the time to speak to Hamas.  People on both sides were ready to make the sacrifice because the prize of peace in their region, in their lifetimes, was too big and it demanded no less.

In reality, nobody knows what would have happened had Hamas formed that Government, perhaps things would be much worse, or perhaps we would today have a ‘Fatah/Hamas’ and Israel two-state solution (respecting the ‘quartet principles’) with Israelis and Palestinians living as neighbors with mutual respect. 

It is still not a pipe dream, President Carter is living proof. 

In the fog of unforgiving bloody conflict, it is difficult to envision a different tomorrow but we must still try and I believe it is still possible, although admittedly I am an avowed optimist. It was Lenin who said: “There are decades when nothing happens and then there are weeks when decades happen”. 

After all, who at the time would have thought Mandela and De Klerk would shake hands and apartheid come tumbling down; who would have thought Regan and Gorbachev would shake hands and the Berlin wall come tumbling down; who would have thought Rabin and Arafat would shake hands and bring hope to the Middle East; and closer to my home, who would have thought Trimble, Adams and Hulme would sign something called the ‘Good Friday’ Peace Agreement and then deliver real peace for Northern Ireland. 

These examples, and others, demonstrate that we do not live in a ‘zero-sum game’ world but a world where it is possible for both Israelis and Palestinians to get most of that which they seek while recognizing neither can have it all. 

Many commentators, including former Director of the CIA, General David Petraeus, argue that this is Israel’s 9/11 moment. If true then the Israeli Government (and world) should heed the painful lessons of the last few decades even if Petraeus himself may not.

Following that surreal and utterly horrific day back in 2001, the US rightly had the goodwill of friend and foe across the globe, united in grief, empathy and resolve. However, within just a few years of a strategy seemingly fueled by rage and vengeance, the doctrine of the 'War on Terror' was unleashed. This gave birth to water-boarding, a prevalence of black ops sites, pre-emptive strike killings, Abu Ghraib and of course the stain of Guantanamo. 

As a friend of America, it was heart-breaking traveling around the globe to find fellow admirers arguing its reputation had been soiled. It was no longer seen as a beacon of hope for democracy, justice and the global good, values to which they and their countries aspired. 

Worse still, it led to questionable wars in Iraq and ill-thought-out ones in Afghanistan. In the former, it strengthened Iran’s influence in the region and the latter, which spanned twenty years, resulted in the very people we kicked out returning two decades later more powerful. The girls we empowered with education, powerless as they were once more banned from schools.

But in times like these, even in our darkest hour, we can sometimes see a flicker of the brightest ray of hope. For me, one of the most powerful interventions came from Yaakov Argamani, the Israeli father of Noa Argamani who is currently being held hostage by Hamas. He didn’t ask for water, food and electricity to be cut off, or to bomb hospitals as collateral damage, instead, he said with moral authority:

“Let us make peace with our neighbors, in any way possible. I want there to be peace; I want my daughter to come back. Enough with the wars. They too have casualties, they too have captives, and they have mothers who weep. We are two people to one Father. Let us make real peace.” 

Gaza 1993 Oslo Peace Accord is announced. A younger Dr Malik sits with a family whose home had been bulldozed living in a tent, but with new hope.Exactly three decades earlier I found my own ray of hope while in Gaza, just as the Oslo Peace Accord was being announced in 1993. I was at the Islamic University (which since last week no longer exists), where we met with the most senior PLO official while Arafat was in Tunis and the main PLO delegates were in New York. On hearing of the Oslo Accord, an Arab journalist thrust a mic into a spokesman called Jabal’s face and asked, “People are saying the Oslo Accord is nothing, this peace is nothing and the PLO have sold out – what do you say to those charges?” Jabal composed himself and responded, “You’re right it is nothing, but the Palestinian people have never even been offered nothing before and we are going to take this nothing and make something with it.” 

I too pray with Brother Yaakov and Brother Jabal, almost against hope, that we can still make something out of what seems like ‘nothing’ right now. 

Ultimately, it’s history that may be our best teacher of hope. One of the worst terrorist atrocities perpetrated against the British in our living memory was the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, where 91 souls lost their lives. At the time it was HQ for the British Army and British Authorities during our Mandate of Palestine. 

The attack was carried out by a Jewish terrorist group, Irgun, led by a man called Menachem Begin. Begin would of course later become the prime minister of Israel and then would go on to make peace with Egypt – a peace that stands to this day and is surely a remarkable testament to the possible. 

Shahid Malik was elected as the Member of Parliament for Dewsbury in 2005 and became the first elected Muslim to be a Government Minister in the West, serving under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. 

His various Ministerial roles included, International Development Minister;  Justice Minister; Home Office Minister & Local Government and Anti-Extremism Minister. 

He also served as Chair of the UK Government’s Faith Consultative Council, a Board Member of the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, is a Patron of the Wiener Holocaust Library and Chair of the UK’s Muslim Hatred Monitoring Group, Tell Mama. 

Dr. Malik also served as Race Equality Commissioner for Great Britain, Equality Commissioner for Northern Ireland (as part of the ‘Good Friday’ Peace Agreement) and Vice-Chair of United Nations body UNESCO UK. 

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