As irony would have it, democracy is now the biggest threat facing the so-called peace process between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. This we have learned from the press reports and media spins that preceded and followed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's photogenic visit to President George W. Bush's ranch in Texas this week.

Both the Americans and the Israelis are concerned, deeply concerned that is, by the specter of the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council that are scheduled to take place on July 17, just a few days before Sharon's planned expulsion of all Jews from their homes, farms, businesses, synagogues and graves in Gaza and northern Samaria.

According to the polls, Hamas, which won some 70 percent of the seats in the recent municipal elections in Gaza, will do quite well in these elections ? winning at least a third of the legislative seats. Fatah sources acknowledge that, if anything, the polls have severely underestimated Hamas's support base. They believe that if the elections are held on schedule, Hamas will win a majority of seats in the PLC.

Recent weeks have brought on a steady drumbeat of statements by top IDF officials and Palestinian sources that Fatah is planning a major terror offensive in June in a bid either to force a postponement of the elections or to increase public support for PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas's party ahead of the poll. Senior Fatah officials told The Jerusalem Post last Saturday that they wished to postpone the July elections in order to prevent a Hamas takeover, and the Israeli government, like the Bush Administration, is praying for their success.

The thing is, both the US and Israel are largely responsible for the current political realities in the PA ? where not only are all major political parties also terrorist organizations, but the relative popularity of each party is directly proportional to the volume of terror attacks it has carried out. It was the Bush Administration that first lumped the January 9 elections for PA chairman together with the January 30 general elections in Iraq for a transitional constitutional assembly, as well as with last month's anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon as evidence of a wave of democratization in the Middle East.

This conflation of these events has made it difficult for the general public to understand just how different the situation in the PA is from that of Iraq and Lebanon. As events in the latter two advance the goals of the global war on terrorism, the events in the PA work to its detriment.

In Iraq, the electorate was given the chance to choose its leaders freely, with its former dictator Saddam Hussein in jail and his Ba'ath party defanged, delegitimized and barred from competing in the elections. Not only were Iraqis empowered to speak out freely against the former regime, they have also bravely exposed the roles played by the former regime's allies ? the UN, Jordan, Syria and Iran ? in prolonging Saddam's grip on power and in fueling the insurgency in the aftermath of his fall.

So, not only was the Iraqi dictatorship destroyed before the Iraqis went to vote, the international and regional systems that were allied with the dictatorial regime and allowed it to continue to rule were also delegitimized in the eyes of the Iraqis.

In Lebanon, where the fate of democracy remains much more unclear, last month's mass protests against the Damascus-backed Lebanese government and the effective Syrian occupation of Lebanon were not simply a result of domestic frustration with the status quo. The Lebanese would never have taken to the streets if former prime minister Rafik Hariri's assassination had been greeted with a yawn by Paris and Washington. The protesters were responding to what they sensed to be a change in the momentum of events, and this is what allowed them to express their political desires in public. For the first time in years, it seemed that the Syrian mukhabarat and Hizbullah terrorists were on the losing side, and so they were suddenly fair game.

The situation in the PA couldn't be more different. Abbas ran for office as Arafat's heir apparent, pre-anointed by the White House. Neither Fatah chief and imprisoned mass murderer Marwan Barghouti nor Hamas challenged him. The other candidates were pro forma ? lacking funds and access to the media (both controlled by Abbas) that were necessary to raise any sort of challenge to Arafat's deputy of more than 40 years. And yet, despite the open field, Abbas's campaign was marked by vote fraud and voter intimidation.

Its endemic corruption ? which included keeping polls open an extra three hours and busing PA militiamen from poll to poll to vote multiple times ? was overshadowed only by Abbas's embrace of master terrorists and attacks on the "Zionist entity" to prove his bona fides as Palestinian leader.

The Palestinian election experience, then, is in no way similar to the Iraqi elections or to the Lebanese anti-Syrian protest movement. Whereas in both Iraq and Lebanon, terrorists such as Hizbullah, and terrorist-supporting regimes like Jordan and Syria and Iran, are seen as part of the problem, among the Palestinians the opposite is the case. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians believes that it was terrorism that forced Sharon to move to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza and northern Samaria, expel all Jewish residents and declare a cessation of offensive operations against terrorists throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The terrorists themselves have been promised protection from the PA regime, which has put out the red carpet and the gravy train to make them feel welcome in the "newly reformed" PA militias, rather than keeping its word to Israel and the US by casting them out of its ranks and imprisoning them for murder. Continued...