Creating a new recruiting ground for al Qaeda pt4: Palestine

[Watser?]

After the hugely successful operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, the US in a close joint venture with Israel and the EU has opened a new recruiting ground for al Qaeda fighters. After cutting the Palestinian territories and especially the Gaza Strip off from the world following the election victory of Hamas - which itself followed years of stagnation, corruption by the Fatah regime and total unwillingness on the part of the Israelis to grant even the slightest concession, facilitated by the US - the US and their Arab allies decided on a plan to undermine the Hamas government:

On April 30, the Jordanian weekly newspaper Al-Majd published a story about a 16-page secret document, an “Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency” that called for undermining and replacing the Palestinian national-unity government.

The document outlined steps that would strengthen Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, build up Palestinian security forces under his command, lead to the dissolution of the Palestinian Parliament, and strengthen US allies in Fatah in a lead-up to parliamentary elections that Abbas would call for early this autumn.

The Majd document is based on a Jordanian government translation of a reputed US intelligence document that was obtained by the newspaper from a Jordanian government official. The document, an official at the newspaper said, was drawn up by “Arab and American parties” and “presented to Palestinian President Abbas by the head of an Arab intelligence agency”.

Along with this Abbas' security forces were given weapons by the Israelis and the Egyptians and a number of Fatah fighters were allowed into Gaza from Egypt.
Hamas however proved a tougher nut to crack than expected and refused to give way. Of course Abbas and the choir of Israel, the US and the EU screamed bloody murder at that. A coup by Hamas they called it. Abbas wasted no time in executing a coup of his own: he dismissed the government and installed a government of his own choosing. The US, EU and Israel were delighted and immediately decided to renew aid to the Palestinians (to Abbas' Palestinians that is):

And lest there be any doubt, these NGO sources spelled out the political content of this:

The plan of course is to pummel the Palestinian people into submitting to the will of 'the international community'. This has been the Israeli plan for years: make the US, the EU and the Palestinians themselves do their dirty work. Hamas after all is a terrorist organisation that should be fought by all means necessary. The EU and US may think they are fighting terrorism this way, but the whole thing will only have the same effect as the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and the brilliant scheme to use Sunni Jihadis to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon: it will recruit more desperados as new fighters for al Qaeda. In Gaza, but also in the West Bank:

The western press frames the West Bank as Fatah territory and the Gaza strip as Hamas territory. This obfuscates the fact that Hamas had won the election in all metropolitan centers in Gaza and in the West Bank. There certainly is majority support for Hamas in the West Bank too. Most of Hamas voters were secular. Hamas will therefore abstain from implementing any non-secular measures. Unlike written in the portraits in the major western press, Hamas is a political movement, not a religious one.

Giving "aid" to the West Bank and Abbas while further isolating Gaza is now supposed to "teach" the Palestinians that subjecting to the western will can result in something "positive", while objecting to it is punished by life in an isolated Ghetto. The "West" seems to think that after having received and resisted such lessons for 60 years, the Palestinians will have to "understand" it this time.

The U.S. and the EU are urging Israel to give additional support to Abbas by removing some of the 240 road blocks in the West Bank and by releasing withheld tax money owned by the Palestinians. Having watched Israeli politics for a while, I doubt that any of this will happen in more than symbolic doses.

Instead the pressure on Gaza will intensify even more with water and energy deliveries to be stopped every once a while at will and for trumped up doubtable reasons. Pressure on the Palestinians in the West Bank may get lifted a tiny, tiny bit, only to be reapplied as soon as another pretext can be found.

If this was not understood before, it is now more than evident that Abbas is just a puppet controlled by the "West" and working against the interest of his people. He will fail to gain anything relevant to them. The Palestinians are certainly not dumb. They can see everyday that Abbas does not deliver for them. Even if he now will get some money, his Fatah government will only return to its usual incompetence and corruption and little will reach the people.

The "West" seems top believe the Palestinians are dumb. They are not. Within a month or a year the Abbas government will fall.

If by then Hamas still exists, it will replace him. If Hamas, through Israeli "targeted killings", is headless by then, new upcoming salafist Islamic movements will take over and the West Bank and Gaza will turn into an anarchic hell. This would give a pretext for Israel to further colonize and ethically clense the West Bank and reoccupy Gaza.

Not only that: the US and EU have now openly lost every semblance of being impartial in the conflict and are seen as accomplices. They will pay the price while Israel reaps the fruits...

[Watser?]

Here's a cartoon (I was just gonna post the cartoon, but it won't let me )

[viscousmemories]

I've been hearing bits and pieces about this on NPR over the last few days, but I still don't get exactly what's going on right now. What I've gathered is that Hamas overthrew Fatah, and that in response the US has lifted sanctions against the Palestinians. Are you saying we've only lifted sanctions against the Palestinians who aren't aligned with Hamas, or is there something else going on entirely?

[Stormlight]

Originally Posted by Watser?

Here's a cartoon (I was just gonna post the cartoon, but it won't let me )

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, really. This whole thing is fucked up.

[Watser?]

Originally Posted by viscousmemories

I've been hearing bits and pieces about this on NPR over the last few days, but I still don't get exactly what's going on right now. What I've gathered is that Hamas overthrew Fatah, and that in response the US has lifted sanctions against the Palestinians. Are you saying we've only lifted sanctions against the Palestinians who aren't aligned with Hamas, or is there something else going on entirely?

Hamas has taken over the Gaza Strip, but if they hadn't I'm sure Fatah would have. There was definitely a plan to do that.

And yes, you (the US), us (the EU), we are all going along with the fiction that sanctions against the Palestinians are lifted because there is a 'moderate' government now, but the fact is there was still a legal government that has now been dismantled by Abbas and a new one installed in an unconstitutional way. And yes, Western aid will flow exclusively to the Fatah-administered West Bank and not to Gaza.

[Watser?]

Here is some insight by Juan Cole:

The Situation in Gaza

I have been traveling and not able to spend as much time as usual scanning the news, but of course have followed the events in Palestine with dismay.

It is to be expected that a lot of comment in the United States on these events will be rife with racist attitudes and polemical dismissals. The Palestinians have long been demonized by the Western media, apparently for not going along quietly with their expulsion from their homes, the large scale theft of their land, and their reduction to an almost slave-like status of statelessness. Palestinians are not intrinsically more violent than anyone else, not essentially less able to administer or govern than anyone else. Few countries have not had civil wars or at least major civil conflicts. The question should be not "Why are Palestinians like that?"-- which is a racist question-- but what social and economic factors are driving the present conflict?

Why is it that so little analysis is offered of why things have developed as they have? Isn't anyone interested in the important differences between Gaza's economy and that of the West Bank? Gaza is much poorer and much more isolated from the world. Is it any big surprise that its population is more radicalized and might be drawn into supporting Hamas?

The Gazan population is being thrown into more misery by an Israeli blockade of electricity, fuel and even food. (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that it will be a humanitarian blockade; if you believe that, I have a bridge over the River Jordan you can purchase inexpensively from me). UNRWA is warning against the blockade. With an unemployment rate of 50% and widespread malnutrition, caused by the ordinary everyday Israeli pressure on Gaza, the territory's population can't take much more extra deprivation without an immense human toll being exacted.

It seems obvious that Hamas will be overthrown in Gaza, jointly by Mahmud Abbas, Israel and the United States. But it seems unlikely that Mahmud Abbas will gain any genuine authority there if that is how he comes to power. And, the events of the past few days have driven a nail into the coffin of Bush's "democratization" program for the "Greater Middle East." The Haniyah Hamas government had come to power in free and fair elections, but was immediately boycotted, starved of resources, and actually often simply kidnapped by the Israelis; and is now being put out of office in a kind of coup. The people of the Arab world are not blind or stupid. If this is what the "Greater Middle East" looks like, it will too closely resemble, for their taste, the colonial 19th century, When Europeans dictated government to Middle Easterners.

If Bush and the Israelis couldn't live with a Hamas electoral victory, they should have exluded Hamas from running a year and a half ago. The Egyptians don't let explicitly religious parties contest elections, and a similar rule could have been made in Palestine. Holding an election, having people win it with whom you won't deal, and then overturning the election with militias, is a recipe for violence and instability. That's what happened in Algeria in the early 1990s, and it caused untold suffering.

The Israelis may be sighing a sigh of relief that the Palestinians are busy fighting one another for the moment. But what has happened is not good for Israel in the medium to long term, since I suspect it signals the end of the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. And, if you don't have a two-state solution, ultimately the likelihood is that Israel will be stuck with the Palestinians as citizens. The world is not going to look the other way forever as they are kept stateless, poor, landless and hungry.

Sadly, the world is pretty good at looking the other way. What is getting clearer though is that without a viable Palestinian state, the Jewish state of Israel will not be viable in the long run either.

[Watser?]

Here's some more analysis:

Gaza: Another Mess Made in U.S.

Coming, as he does, from Fox News, Tony Snow is obviously a deeply cynical fellow, but this takes some beating: Asked to comment Wednesday on the bloodbath in Gaza, he answered: “Ultimately, the Palestinians are going to have to sort out their politics and figure out which pathway they want to pursue — the pathway toward two states living peaceably side-by-side, or whether this sort of chaos is going to become a problem.”

Everyone following the conflict in Gaza knows full well that the reason for the violence is not that Palestinians have not “sorted out their politics” — they’ve made their political preferences abundantly clear in democratic elections, and later in a power-sharing agreement brokered by the Saudis. The problem is that the U.S. and the corrupt and self-serving warlords of Fatah did not accept either the election result or the unity government, and have conspired actively ever since to reverse both by all available means, including starving the Palestinian economy of funds, refusing to hand over power over the Palestinian Authority to the elected government, and arming and training Fatah loyalists to militarily restore their party’s power. Unfortunately, after three days of some of the most savage fighting ever seen in Gaza, that strategy now lies in tatters. Fatah is, quite simply, no longer a credible fighting force in Gaza, where it has long been in decline as a credible political force.

...

The rout has been complete in Gaza, forcing Abbas to accept Hamas’s terms for a new truce. Gaza, as Abbas aides have said bluntly, “is lost.” Another spectacular Middle East debacle for the Bush Administration’s trophy cabinet. Hundreds of Palestinians have died and thousands more have had their lives ruined by the brutal arrogant folly of Rice, Abrams and company. Hamas is in power because the Palestinian people wanted it there, and no amount of economic strangulation or proxy warfare has altered that fact. It didn’t have to go this way; this was the route that Washington chose, believing it would prevail.

The administration’s response when Hamas was elected in January 2006 echoed Brecht’s mocking of the East German leadership in 1948: “The people have lost confidence in the party? Well, then, why not dissolve the people and elect another?”

And here is some comment on that analysis:

In “Gaza: Another Mess Made in U.S.,” Rootless Cosmopolitan’s Tony Karon likens the defeat of Mohammad Dahlan’s U.S.-backed Preventive Security Services to an earlier American intervention from decades ago: the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. His analysis is brilliant, but in truth Karon may have understated the breadth of the defeat — if that’s possible.Fatah, once the Palestinian national movement’s most prestigious political current — the birthplace of its greatest leaders — has been shattered. But the defeat in Gaza did not mark the end of Fatah — it was simply the coda for what has been happening to the movement over the last two years. The bloody fight that ended last week was not, as widely reported, a civil war between Hamas and Fatah. It was a showdown between the paid militia of a highly unpopular Fatah commander and the forces of a united and popular movement that had already overwhelmingly defeated Fatah through free and fair elections in January of 2006.

Hamas is not without its faults, but despite breathless accounts in the American press suggesting that Gaza has now been taken over by “terrorists,” Hamas has in fact retained its popularity while Fatah is riven by divisions. In Gaza, as Charles Levinson who covers the Middle East for London’s Sunday Telegraph wrote on Friday in his blog, Conflict Blotter, “Compared to the past week things now feel blissfully peaceful. It seems many who write me think we should fear Hamas now that it is in control, but the reality is that the big threat to foreigners and journalists down here is not and never was Hamas.”

[Watser?]

Missing Links has the view from the Arab newspaper al Quds al Arabi (Arab Jerusalem):

We don't think the basic aim [of the US, Europe and Israel] is the application of the decisions of international law...or the alleviation of the suffering of nine million Palestinians in the territories and the dispora. Rather the aim is the protection of the Jewish state and the conversion of the Palestinian Authority in its new form into another border army, on the model of South Lebanon. And that's why we feel skepticism about this unprecedented generosity--unprecedented as to the manner of it, and and as to its amount and its timing. Because it is clear that the first priority of the emergency government and of the security force that it is re-structuring, will be a coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

That gives an indication of how Fatah is now seen in Arab eyes, a bunch of collaborators to the Israeli occupation. And let's not forget what happened when Israel withdrew from Lebanon: the SLA didn't last half a day against Hezbollah.
Meanwhile Bush keeps pronouncing his support for Abbas and calling him 'moderate', thereby undermining him even more in Palestinian eyes. Support from Bush is as good as the kiss of death in Middle East politics by now.

[Clutch Munny]

Bush, Olmert praise Abbas as 'president of all the Palestinians'

[Watser?]

I wonder who is the least popular with his own people right now, Bush, Olmert or Abbas? I'm guessing Olmert, but Abbas will probably be a close second. So Bush isn't doing so badly after all, eh?

[Watser?]

I keep reading stories that the Hamas 'coup' in Gaza was not a failure of US/Israeli policy, but a trap that was set for Hamas, which makes it easier for Israel to divide and rule and reduces chances that there will ever be a viable Palestinian state to virtually zero.
Here's one:

Contrary to the many claims that the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip represents the failure of US and Israeli policies in Palestine, the violent civil infighting that has dominated the Gaza Strip over much of the last year and a half and that led directly to the Hamas coup of June 2007, marks yet another major foreign policy victory for the occupiers. Hamas will never be allowed to remain in power in Gaza so we must fear for the future of that tiny, desperately overcrowded strip of land and its 1.4 million inhabitants; additionally, Abbas ­in order to maintain his role as "Good Guy"- will have to accede to the dictates of Israel and the United States or suffer the same fate as his predecessor, Yassir Arafat.

Western nations are standing by in silence as the deadly siege of Gaza and the dismemberment of the West Bank continue unabated. What we are witnessing in full view each day are unprecedented steps taken by the world's only superpower and its favorite client state, Israel, to ensure the death of a nation. While friction between the two key political factions in the occupied Palestinian territories has long undermined the smooth functioning of internal affairs, it was the direct, cynical involvement of US and Israeli policy-makers in these affairs that guaranteed the breakdown of internal stability and paved the way for the Hamas "coup" in Gaza.

Media reports have been careful to leave out important facts leading up to the coup such as that Hamas was the legitimate, democratically elected ruling party in the Palestinian territories following the January 2006 Palestine Legislative Council elections; that it was the US-Israeli dismissal of those election results that fueled the civil infighting between Hamas and Fatah; that obvious US backing of Fatah against Hamas helped create popular mistrust of Fatah increasing Hamas' popularity in Gaza and leading directly to Hamas' takeover of the Fatah military apparatus in the Gaza Strip. In other words, there were real and understandable reasons for the coup. But in the end, Hamas' seizure of the power it should have had in the first place ends up serving the interests not only of Mahmoud Abbas and the warlord Muhammad Dahlan. It also provides the perfect opportunity for US-Israeli policy in the region to move forward with even fewer objections, if that is possible to imagine, than have heretofore been made. Who will stand up for a "terrorist organization that seeks the destruction of Israel"? The line has been beaten into our heads with every mention of the word "Hamas" for years. We should not expect a change in the behavior of the American public or of other western audiences until, when Israel is mentioned, we immediately say to ourselves, "a terrorist state that seeks the destruction of Palestine." Seeks and is succeeding in it.

Here's another:

A planned result ?
Mohammed Dahlan, seemingly politically unfazed by the recent events, said in a Reuters interview that Hamas "fell into a trap" laid by Israel when it took control of the Gaza Strip. There isn't any elaboration on how the trap was set, and certainly there isn't any indication of Dahlan's role or that of anyone else in particular.

According to the Palestinian Pundit there already is a US/Israeli plan to attack the Gaza Strip:

This news item appeared today in the reputable Al-Akhbar paper in Lebanon.

It says that the decision for decisive action against Hamas in Gaza has apparently been taken at many levels involving local and outside powers. The military component of the plan will be what Olmert will outline to Abbas, Abdullah and Mubarak next Monday in Sharm El-Sheikh, in Egypt.

Western and American sources in Cairo have revealed the existence of a draft joint U.S.-Israeli plan which will be proposed in that meeting. The plan includes political and military measures to force Hamas out of Gaza. Olmert will be pressing his Arab counterparts to let him carry out a "limited" military strike in Gaza to destroy Hamas' "infrastructure" and to end its control in Gaza. Simultaneous with that military operation, Israel will be targeting Hamas' leadership and both its political and military cadres.

An Egyptian official said that Egypt and Jordan are unlikely to agree to the plan. Western sources said that Cairo is concerned that such Israeli intervention would increase tension along Egypt's borders.

Israel's Radio stated that Olmert has proposed that a Saudi official attend the forthcoming summit to convey the impression that the Arab world stands behind Abbas. It is worth noting that the Saudi king will be in Cairo on Monday.

[Watser?]

Meanwhile Hamas still has a few tricks up its sleave, according to Missing Links:

Egyptian paper: Documents show Dahlan was working with AlQaeda with the idea of blaming trouble on Hamas

Hamas has turned over to the Egyptian authorities substantial parts of the intelligence information that fell into its hands when it overran the headquarters of Fatah-controlled security headquarters in Gaza on Thursday, according to what sources told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masriyoun. This is the first reported use of the information in question, which has been a topic of speculation.

This strategy seems to have delivered at least some results with the Egyptians, claims Missing Links today:

The article in Al-Masriyoun, detailing intelligence information that sources said Hamas had turned over to Egyptian authorities (see prior post), appeared on the morning of Saturday June 23. This morning, the Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar reports that the head of Egyptian intelligence Omar Suleiman phoned Haniyya later that day and asked him to go easy on the revelations because it was a problem for Egypt.

...

The picture seems to be of a two-track process, with Mubarak continuing the US-mandated attack on Hamas, while the man who more likely actually runs things, Omar Suleiman, works the levers of power to try and bring Hamas back into the diplomatic process, in exchange for two things: (1) Hamas not further embarassing Egypt with the intelligence-leaks; and (2) the diplomatic boost of having an important conciliation meeting with Hamas and Fatah in Cairo, embellished diplomatically by the presence of representatives of Saudi Arabia, Syria and the EU.

This could be an important fly in the ointment for the US-Israel strategy of further isolation of Hamas.

[Watser?]

The 8 Fallacies of Bush’s Abbastan Plan
Tony Karon

“Hello, Condoleezza Rice,” the Hamas gunman joked, speaking into the President Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen)’s phone from the Palestinian Authority president’s chair in his abandoned Gaza office. “You have to deal with me now, there is no Abu Mazen anymore.”

Never a truer word spoken in jest, and all that…

But the Bush administration doesn’t get the joke. Bush and Condi would now have us believe that in fact some kind of opportunity has arisen to promote “peace” between Israel and the Palestinians by starving the Gazans and ignoring the political party in which Palestinian voters placed their confidence 18 months ago, while pumping cash into a new authoritarian regime under U.S. tutelage headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. The Administration has “no good options”, the New York Times tells us, although the truth is that’s only if you accept the limits set by the Administration’s extremists who have ruled out the obvious option — talking to Hamas. (Gasp!) Spare me the adolescent rubbish about not being able to talk to people who don’t recognize Israel — Mahmoud Abbas’s own Fatah movement only did so in 1998, five years after the Oslo Accords were concluded. (The U.S.-backed Iraqi government, by the way, is led by a coalition whose basic political platform includes non-recognition of Israel.) Hamas has made clear ever since winning the election that it wants to engage with the West, most recently in a New York Times op-ed from a key adviser to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
What Hamas Wants - New York Times

Veterans of the peace process, such as Rob Malley and Aaron David Miller, simply roll their eyeballs at the Bush administration’s apparently bottomless capacity to believe its own delusions despite all countervailing evidence.
Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller - 'West Bank First': It Won't Work - washingtonpost.com

But Paul Woodward makes a persuasive case that this was not merely an ad hoc response — the rapidity with which the new policy fell into place was a sure sign that it follows a script long in the making in the White House Mideast policy shop of Elliot Abrams, seasoned veteran of Reagan’s Dirty Wars in Latin America during the 1980s.

...

So, What’s Going to Happen?

Mark Perry makes it clear:

The United States will fail to deliver. Some money will trickle in, but not nearly enough. The little that does trickle in will be spent unwisely. Israeli may remove some outposts, but only a few, and the settlements will continue to expand and settler roads will continue to be built and Palestinians will continue to die. Israelis will die too. A Palestinian security guard will be trained and it will march smartly through the streets of Ramallah. If it should exchange fire with a militia led by Hamas it will just as smartly be defeated. And if there is an election in “Fatahstine,” (i.e. the West Bank) Hamas will win, while at the White House, Tony Snow will talk about how the outcome was engineered in Tehran. And nineteen months from now, in the waning days of the Bush Administration — with American foreign policy in tatters — Elliott Abrams and Keith Dayton will proudly stand alongside a smiling President Bush as he honors them, the newest recipients of the Medal of Freedom.

The Oslo process was in trouble when Bush came into office in 2001, but it might have been saved had the Administration heeded the voices warning of the consequences of its malign neglect. But what Bush has allowed, and even encouraged on his watch has been the effective demolition of the Palestinian Authority’s institutions. He has left both Israel and the Arab world in far greater danger than was even conceivable when he took office, starting a fire that could burn for decades. With only another 18 months ago, it seems that in the West Bank and Gaza, he and his crew are determined to pour kerosene on the flames.

(Rootless Cosmopolitan » Blog Archive » The 8 Fallacies of Bush’s Abbastan Plan)

[Watser?]

The release of BBC reporter Alan Johnston has changed things somewhat. It has shown that Hamas is very much in control of the Gaza Strip and will not allow any lawlessness like there was under the PA's rule. It has also demonstrated that Hamas is willing to make deals and able to enforce deals. All of this will be lost on Israel and the Bush administration, but the British are impressed and the UN might be too:

Israel may not like it, but there are signs that some people in influential positions in the West are changing their view of Hamas after everything it did to release Alan Johnston.

For the new British foreign secretary, David Miliband, it amounted to a change of tone. He welcomed the part played by Hamas, and mentioned its prime minister, Ismail Haniya, by name.

Opening

Others go much further, believing that the policy of isolating Hamas because it will not recognise Israel or renounce violence, is looking threadbare, not least because it seems to play into the hands of the extremists.

A group of British parliamentarians has signed a motion in the House of Commons calling for engagement with Hamas.

The mood was summed up in the final despatch sent back to the UN by its Middle East envoy, Alvaro De Soto, before he retired earlier this summer.

He wrote that Hamas "can potentially evolve in a pragmatic direction that would allow for a two-state solution - but only if handled right".

Long after Alan Johnston gets back to his family in Scotland, the Middle East will still have intractable problems.

His release brought joy to his family and friends, and all the people around the world who supported him while he was a prisoner, but it will not create any political miracles.

But it might provide an opening, and there are not many of those in the Middle East at the moment.

link

[Watser?]