SM, I think I can stand by everything I have written here, e.g. from “Honest elections” to “blocked it”, as insisting that NOBODY’s claim to be God’s chosen – whether racist or theocratic – can form the basis of any solution that can be expected to work. Banging on about what awful people Hamas are clarifies nothing.

In two states within Palestine, even if one is racist like the Hasbara crew active on this site and the other is theocratic, each state would need to accept that the other is based, within its own borders, on something objectionable to decent people worldwide who are stuck with this mess created by racists and theocrats and orchestrated by powers foreign to any part of Palestine such as USA, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

There do however have to be proper elections. Israel conducts them (and unlike Palestine doesn’t have to ask anyone else’s permission to do so) but in the rest of Palestine they don’t exist, for reasons explained for example at http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/10/palestine-presidential-parliamentary-elections-on-hold.html which doesn’t speak for any supremacists. If artificial states within Palestine are to be set up with world endorsement an electoral system of government is something the world has the right and responsibility to require. That and neither controlling the other.

EJ,

All I see is a litany of lame excuses. For Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank, as elections were due in 2010 they are now operating without a mandate from those whom they purport to represent.

As even half arsed African countries can manage a ballot, there is no lack of capability, just a lack of will, and I believe that in the case of Hamas, having brought misery on Gaza, is at serious risk of losing. However, they have been systematically executing opposition members under the guise of "collaboration", there is hardly anyone left to stand against them.