The Hamas-backed bloc at Birzeit has swept the annual student elections in recent years, in a victory often regarded as a rare democratic bellwether for the entire West Bank.
But now fear of arrest, or in some cases rearrest, has smothered many open expressions of politics across the West Bank, where even casual discussions of support for Hamas can mean risking detention.
Qadura Fares, a longtime party grandee from Fatah who heads the authority’s prisoners and ex-prisoners commission, fretted that their perceived failures had emboldened their rivals.
Al Mughayyir, he added, is a place where Fatah traditionally counts on a large pool of support, but he feared rising settler attacks, sometimes witnessed or even joined by Israeli soliders, were undermining the authority’s policy security cooperation with Israel, and the body itself.
Fares described attending political gatherings in Ramallah, the de-facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, where he was surprised to hear secular and Christian participants expressing support for Hamas.
At the heart of Fares’s concerns was that Fatah’s decision three decades ago to enter into peace negotiations with Israel had ultimately done little to help the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank.
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