As Israel tallies vote, Palestinians eye historic polls

As weary Israelis count votes from yet another tight election, Palestinians are beginning to prepare for their first polls in 15 years juggling both hope and despair.
For surveyor 23-year-old Abdulhameed Mwas the upcoming parliamentary and presidential polls will be the first time he has ever had a chance to vote.
“We need new faces,” he said. “We want to see some results for the Palestinian cause.”
As Mwas waited for lunch in a felafel restaurant in the small village of Al-Walaja, he added he hoped a new leadership would work to improve the economic situation in the impoverished Palestinian territories.
The hamlet of stone homes and narrow roads is built on a hillside lying partly in Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem and partly in the West Bank. It is surrounded by Israel’s separation barrier, which splits it from farming land and a nearby spring.
Mwas’s colleague, Muayed Odeh, 22, was less upbeat, saying said he had no faith in the upcoming vote.
“There is no point,” he said.
The army frequently blocked the village’s sole entrance, making it feel like “a cage,” he said. A new parliament would accomplish “absolutely nothing” to improve the situation.
UNITING PALESTINIANS:
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared in January that parliamentary elections will be held on May 22, followed by historic presidential polls in late July.
“We are looking forward for our own elections to renew the legitimacy of the Palestinian political regime,” Jibril Rajoub, a senior official in Abbas’s Fatah faction, told AFP.
He voiced hopes of uniting Palestinians behind “one clear cut political plan, the emergence of a Palestinian sovereign independent state”.
The Palestinians broke ties with the US adminstration of former president Donald Trump, who was a key ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But they are hoping that under President Joe Biden long moribund peace talks with Israel seeking to create a coveted two-state solution may be restarted.
After initial scepticism among Palestinians, a new poll released this week showed some 61 percent of voters expect the parliamentary polls will indeed go ahead.
“Everyone is taking it seriously,” pollster Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah told AFP.
“Three months ago the perception was that there would be no elections.”