I would rather be alone

I had a hard time imaging that the Palestinian elections would take place. Up until the first ballot I kept waiting for Fatah to pull a “rope a dope” move that would facilitate the postponement of the elections. It was no great shock that Hamas won the election decisively but what the shocker was that Fatah did not act to save itself politically. There was great pressure brought to bear on Abbas within his own party to cancel the elections and there were rumours that the anarchy that was so pervasive in the West Bank and Gaza leading up to the elections was actually orchestrated by Fatah elements opposed to the elections at this time. From the Jerusalem Post:

Shocked and embarrassed was the best way to describe the mood at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv on Thursday after the top brass learned of the final outcome of the Palestinian Authority elections and Hamish’s unexpected landslide victory. But after the shock wore off, senior officers began wondering how the IDF had totally failed to predict what appeared in retrospect to have been clear from the outset - and pointed their fingers in one direction, at Military Intelligence.

In line with the recent Palestinian polls, MI officers, as well as Defense Ministry and Foreign Ministry officials, had for the past month predicted that Hamas would win somewhere between 30 percent to 40% of the vote, but that the ultimate winner would be Fatah.

"We slipped up," a member of General Staff told The Jerusalem Post Thursday. "What is most amusing is that the United States listened to us and our predictions, and in the end we were wrong." But not everyone thought the mishap was amusing. One senior Defense Ministry official said the army had clearly failed in its job to accurately "read" the Palestinian street. The mistake, the official said, showed that MI was "out of touch" with what was really going on in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

"What this mistake shows," the official said, "is that the IDF is not on top of things and is out of touch with what is really going on in the PA territories." Other officers tried to downplay the error and, in an attempt to do damage control, said a Hamas victory was taken into consideration by the defense establishment as one of many possible scenarios. To back up the claim, one officer recalled chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz's speech on Sunday at the Herzliya Conference, in which he said: "Fatah will win, Hamas will win, or anarchy will win."

As glad as I usually am when company joins me in my misery I would rather not have chosen this group to share my ignominy as it bodes very poorly for the future.