After the long overdue death of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians are finally going to the polls.

Mahmoud Abbas, a close adviser to Arafat, seems to be the frontrunner. As the news article suggests, he is promising to end the violence; however, he wants to do it through a cease fire without denouncing military groups like Hamas.

This is the most troubling part about electing a leader so closely related to a regime that only had talk up its sleeve. You get more of the same: just talk. It seems likely that he will be elected, but for whoever eventually is, it will be best to judge them by their actions and not their words. Remember the last time Israel and the Palestinians spoke? It ended in Arafat rejecting outrightly the entire plan and collapsing several years of talks with several years of suicide bombs.

Will the new leader be the same? I hope not, though I wouldn’t put a penny on it. In the very least, we can say that the Palestinians are being given the ability to vote. Now we just have to work on that whole “biased media” and “political violence” problem.