PostGlobal hosted by the Washington Post poses a question for its readers that I think many here would find interesting to discuss:

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has said bread is more important than democracy, and he may be preparing to try to dissolve the Hamas-led Palestinian parliment. Does a leader have a right to bypass democratic institutions to ensure his people are fed and secure?

What we see now in the Palestinian Territories has been long coming ever since Hamas won the parliamentary election last year. Every attempt has been made — from cutting off funding to airstrikes to internal disputes — to make sure that Hamas cannot govern effectively (not that we know if it would have or not anyway). Abbas has been waiting for this moment.

However, it would be premature to say that he is circumventing democratic institutions. The Basic Law gives him the right to disband parliament and hold new elections. With so much fighting in the streets, thousands of people not being paid due to debt, and whatever there was of an economy now in standstill, Hamas is losing its popular legitimacy and new elections could certainly yield different results as Palestinians reevaluate the lives they are living now because of the choice they made.

After all, the point of elections is choice. While they alone do not make a democracy, it instills within the people an expectation that they have some sort of power over their own government and, in effect, their own lives. If they do not believe that having Hamas in power is in their benefit any longer, then they should be able to choose someone else. If Fatah truly is the moderate movement that it claims to be, then this could be a good thing.

It would be disingenuous for Abbas to take absolute power, though. It would discredit him completely as a “moderate.” I do not see how such a situation could turn out well, with Hamas fighting for its power back and the same corruption and ineffectiveness that transpired under Arafat returning. The end result would be that the Palestinian people have neither bread nor democracy.

Having spoken about the point of elections, the point of democracy in Palestine is to ensure political pluralism, thus creating effectiveness and ideological moderation. Even though Hamas was voted in — causing many to preach the doomsday scenario that democracy has wrought — the real sight to see is when they are voted out.

Hamas is part of a battle between international forces — those of Western civilization and that of Islamic uncivilization. To participate in democracy is to come within the restrains and moderation of civilization and to become beholden to the will of the people that it represents. Since it cannot seem to reconcile its domestic obligations with its international ones, such as the destruction of Israel, it has been forced into ineffectiveness. Its inability to moderate is costing its legitimacy, which can only mean death by ballot box. When Abbas disbands parliament and calls for new elections, Hamas will be rejected. By extension, so will the radical Islamist foreign policy that helped bring the current catastrophe about.