It doesn’t take a political scientist to know that elections under military occupation are not feasible and certainly do not achieve the goals of a free and fair vote. But when the issue of the absence of a political horizon was presented as a major source of continuing instability in the Occupied Territories, the Americans and the Israelis thought they had the magic solution: insisting that engaging with the current Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership could only take place once a long list of
