By Dina Rashed, IOL Chicago correspondent

CHICAGO, July 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Palestinian Americans are holding elections in five major U.S. cities and in Canada to elect members to a national Palestinian American Congress, which will then be part of an International Palestinian Congress.

On Saturday, July 13, Chicago’s Palestinians will have their turn to elect seven members representing the city’s Executive Committee.

The Committee then, will internally elect one or more members to represent Chicago’s community in the International Palestinian Congress, said Saffiya Shillo, member of the ad-hoc committee formed in the last two months to organize the elections.

“The role of the committee is to reach out to all Palestinians in Metropolitan Chicago, to set a date for the election. We are not interfering with nominations or the results of the elections, and we are not dictating any issues,” said Shillo.

On a national level, a Palestinian American Congress has been in effect a decade ago. Chicago’s chapter, though, has existed since the 1980s, added Shillo, but has been highly inactive in the past couple of years.

Anis Barghouti, a senior official in the Palestinian National Authority’s Ministry of Planning and External Affairs, have been touring major U.S. cities in an attempt to reactivate the Congress and to organize the efforts of the Palestinian communities in the Diaspora.

His efforts came after a series of four conferences, held between 1997 and 2000, under the supervision of the Dept. of Expatriate Affairs of the Ministry of Planning that saw the need to further coordinate the efforts in North America, with those in Latin America, Europe and in Australia.

It has been decided then that reactivating the Palestinian efforts in the U.S. should only be part of a worldwide movement, and a proposal to create an International Palestinian Congress emerged.

Executive Committees of the cities of: New York, Houston, San Francisco, New Jersey, Chicago and Miami, in addition to Montreal, Canada will form the North America Congress.

Since the onset of the Intifadah in 2000, Barghouti has made trips to all these cities and met with various Palestinian groups. But his effort were intensified in the last two months as the situation deteriorated in the Palestinian land and the need to organize international efforts grew immensely, forming ad-hoc committees and pushing towards a speedy elections.

Despite his assurances that the PNA is only acting as a facilitator to the process and an observer in the elections, Barghouti’s efforts are facing mounting challenges from within the community. The hardest of them is an issue of distrust; that such Congress would not be autonomous over its decisions and would be controlled by the current leadership of the PNA in the Middle East, whose ability to represent all Palestinians is being questioned.

In Chicago, already, a number of Palestinian leaders pulled their support to the election and its ad-hoc committee. But Shillo hopes that more groups would join in as the process progresses.

Membership of the congresses is confined to Palestinians who are currently American citizens and not permanent residents. They are required to pay a membership fee of $25, then they would be eligible to vote.

At least 10 members of the Chicago Community are competing for the seven seats of the Executive Committee. They will serve for one year according to the current bylaws.