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The Democracy Game

(New Yorker) David Remnick - When the first intifada began in 1987, Islamic leaders were mostly concerned with spreading the faith, but when the rocks started flying, Sheikh Yassin, who would become the leader and the spiritual head of Hamas, recognized that a lot of his young men were getting involved. Yassin and his circle did not want to be left out, so Hamas was formed, and it became a player in the intifada. And then it became an immensely more important player in the second intifada, at the turn of the century. Hamas brought the weapon of suicide bombing into the game in the mid-nineties. What everybody is discovering is that to call elections "democracy" and to leave it at that is simplistic and even potentially dangerous. Even President Bush's guru on these issues, Natan Sharansky, who wrote a book that was very influential on Bush's thinking, said to me, when I was in Jerusalem last week, that the only way for this all to work is to create the conditions of democracy, and elections are only a part of that - and they're not necessarily the first part.
2006-02-24 00:00:00
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