Defending the model parliament: defending democracy or the state?

First among the defenders of the model parliament was the women’s movement itself, although the attack was not anticipated and thus no response had been considered. This is perhaps telling in the sense that the model parliament was considered an NGO project that had little to do with the political dynamics, for example between nationalists and Islamists, that had been volatile on a number of occasions since the early 1g80s.

From the standpoint of the Palestinian Authority, however, it was less the Islamist vision than their power and strategy that caused concern. In this view, the attack on the women’s movement was a smokescreen attacking the Authority itself, ⅛a the women’s movement, by associating it with the immorality of the West. In the closing model parliament session in the West Bank town of Ram­allah, the assembly waited until the district governor arrived to open the session with a message from President Yasser Arafat. The governor gave a statement upholding freedom of thought and expression as crucial to Palestinian democracy and affirmed the President’s support for women’s rights and legal reform 'as long as they do not contradict shari'a∖ a direct reiteration of the ambiguous endorse­ment of the 1994 Women’s Charter.