Despite our earlier castigation of people on the right who are gloating because they’ve been insisting on the popularity of terrorists for years, we do want to point out that a Hamas victory was relatively easy to predict. We were certainly confident enough to predict a Hamas victory on the eve of the election, and not because we had access to any kind of cutting-edge polling data. 66 regional seats and 66 national seats – the regional seats were between individuals and the national seats were between parties. In the regional elections, Fatah disorganization meant that multiple Fatah candidates were running against single Hamas candidates. There were plenty of predictions that Hamas could sweep the regionals, but nobody drew the obvious conclusion – if Hamas was running 35% to 45% against Fatah nationally, regional sweeps would be overwhelming. We understand why media outlets are all shocked – shocked – by the Hamas victory. Willful ignorance, after all, is hard to give up. But we don’t understand why the scenario was never even considered by Israeli intelligence
Even our pessimism regarding the Palestinian public’s willingness to give up on its genocidal intentions, however, wasn’t enough to convince us that Fatah would lose in national voting. We thought that the best argument that the Left would have after the election would be that “the Hamas victory doesn’t mean that Palestinians love terrorism – it was because of Fatah disarray regarding regional seats.” Jonathan at the Head Heeb was already hinting at that argument yesterday, when exit polls showed Hamas winning the regionals but losing the national polls. Turns out, he had to kind of take that back when it turned out that Hamas won on the national level too. Poll after poll after poll has shown that the Palestinian public supports terrorism – why is it so “shocking” that they elected terrorists?
[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
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