Autocratic Strippers

Nakbah!!

Beleaf it or don"t - the most literate Arabs ever in World History (reckon Little Satan should get blamed for that too? LOL) have suicide bombed their own baby democrazies (your choice HAMAS Strip or Wester Bank) into something something resembling most of the failed nation/states in Arab League.

Autocrazy

A gov where like one cat has uncontrolled or unlimited authority over others;monarch or unelected cats.

Check the same cats 5 years on who dreamed up the Panty Police! 

A focus on the legal and educational fields shows a pattern of short-term accomplishments married to a worrying long-term trajectory. In its governing project, Hamas has succeeded to a degree, though progress has been slow. Civil society in Gaza continues to function, but in a context that places limits on political activity and opposition. Gaza now has a fully functional if imperfect judicial structure and an improvised system that can draft a modest amount of narrow legislation. And the Palestinians’ education system not only has been revived but it is one of the few quiet areas of coordination with the West Bank.

Yet, these accomplishments are based on an authoritarian foundation. Much of Hamas’s you know what agenda has been put on hold for now, but the political system is completely bereft of any mechanisms of accountability. The media and domestic NGOs are carefully controlled. Opposition parties can do what they like privately, but they remain restricted in what they can do openly or publicly. And the process of rebuilding the legal system has sometimes enabled and rarely obstructed the authoritarian characteristics of Gaza governance.

Entrenching authoritarianism offers Palestinians few options. A spate of unity agreements between the West Bank and Gaza—most recently a May 2012 accord—cannot obscure the reality that real steps toward unity have not been taken. There is no easy route out of Palestine’s plight, but it is difficult to imagine much change without some pressure from below. And that is worrying, since elections are very difficult to imagine at present. As long as Gazans—and all Palestinians—remain voiceless in their own affairs, it is difficult to see any path forward.

Since 2007, the West Bank and Gaza have come under what appear to be sharply different forms of rule. Gaza’s Islamist government has a counterpart in the West Bank that is an uneasy mix of technocratic rule under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and nationalist Fatah party rule under President Mahmoud Abbas.

For all the differences in detail, and perhaps in style, there is a marked parallelism between Gaza and what is emerging in the West Bank. In both places, Palestine seems to be entrenching a form of politics that has provoked uprisings elsewhere in the region. An Egyptian from the Mubarak years might find some eerie similarities in either half of the Palestinian polity. Even the resigned sarcasm of the inhabitants harkens to the Egypt of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Pic - "Neo Nakbah!"