Men are Not Angels in Palestine

The capacity of men to do evil should never be underestimated. That's why our founding fathers when drafting our Constitution were vigilantly concerned about the power of the masses to run over the rights of minorities. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison wrote:

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents.

There is perhaps no better example of Madison's concern regarding the potential of a "tyranny of the majority" than the most recent election of Hamas as the ruling party of the Palestinian authority. Absent the significant checks and balances instituted by our Founders, elections for elections sake do little to ensure that a nation will respect human freedom, in fact such elections as we have seen, can be used to desecrate such freedom.

The American founding experience is unique because the government they formed protected minority rights and institutionalized that concept through a Bill of Rights, regularly held elections, and a popularly elected chief executive. The electoral process in Middle Eastern countries has no such regularity with elections being the form by which dictators like Saddam Hussein gained power only to never call another election again.

The concern of both Israeli and American leaders should be whether this same practice will hold true for Hamas' government. Is this terrorist-loving party the new long-term rulers of the Palestinian Authority, like Yasser Arafat? Or will there be another scheduled election whereby the Palestinian people may toss out Hamas if they so choose? In my opinion, the systematic protection of minority rights through regularly scheduled elections with due process and a written constitution should be the goal of U.S. foreign policy for all nations in the Middle East. A goal which we should be willing to fight for if the ruling party fails to schedule that next election.

Conservatives showered skepticism on former president Woodrow Wilson and his concept of the League of Nations, less for its promotion of democracy than its naivete. Men are not angels, and the governments which keep the order and preserve rights for the majority and minority must reflect that by ensuring that regularly scheduled elections happen, and that parties elected by democratic means do not become dictators.