Results

Well the votes were counted and Hamas came out winners with 23 of the 51 seats on council. Fatah got 18 and PFLP got a respectable 5 as the third placed party. I didn't actually make it out to campus for the announcement, although I did hear that the Hamas supporters were celebrating elsewhere anyway to avoid potential confrontation.

Speaking of which...

Few major events at the University of Birzeit (graduations, final exams, student elections) escape the close attentions of the Israel Defense Forces (sic), which, in its unstinting efforts to protect the Israeli public from the "terrorists" who come here to study such things as Architectural Engineering, English or Commerce, decided to make a brief appearance too yesterday.

As is the usual practice, six jeeps stopped along the road which runs along the bottom of the university (the Uni is at the top of a hill) and, since it was lunch time, some of the university's male population raced down there and begun to throw rocks before too long. This gave the army a pretext to begin shooting rubber bullets, which got everyone's attention on campus - well, that and a couple of explosions (it really is like theatre, including the large audience that assembles to watch). After a few more minutes of this, the army suddenly started firing automatic weapons (machine guns), which is when things started to get a little hairier, automatic weapons being far less discriminating with regards to where the bullets end up. There is also an army protocol with regards to their use, so they have to be threatened in a certain way before they start spraying them around. However, thankfully they left soon after that, which gave the already excitable electorate even more reason to march around chanting.

As for the results, I don't think anyone is terribly surprised. Prior to the Fatah victory last year, which was widely seen as piggy-backing the sympathy over Arafat's death, Hamas had won the previous ten years. Aside from the US opposition -> Hamas support factor, one person told me they voted Hamas, even though they voted for Fatah in the general elections, because they didn't like the hooligan-style antics of the Fatah party on campus. (This included one member bringing a gun on to campus last summer and threatening students, leading to the closure of the campus as a safety measure and then due to protests).

I don't know if there were any celebrations last night, but campus has returned to normal today, and the continuing hot weather certainly doesn't encourage spending too much time in the sun.