Well…getting any negotiations going between the Israelis and the Palestinians just got a whole lot more complicated.
GAZA CITY (CNN) — Masked gunmen have been photographed posing at the desk of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as Hamas consolidated power in Gaza after defeating the rival Fatah faction.
Hamas overtook the presidential compound in Gaza City on Friday, throwing large framed photos of late president Yasser Arafat and Abbas to the ground.
Photographs taken by journalists in the compound showed one gunman with his foot on a photo of Arafat, the founder of Fatah. Another photo showed three masked gunmen at the president’s desk, with their rifles pointed in the air.
Reuters reported that one of the fighters picked up the phone and jokingly pretended to be speaking with the U.S. secretary of state saying: “Hello Condoleezza Rice. You have to deal with me now, there is no Abu Mazen anymore.” Abu Mazen is another name for Abbas, also the Fatah leader.
I remember when Yasser Arafat was considered a murderous terrorist. Now he seems like a reasonable man. With Fatah in charge of the West Bank and Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip we have no way of restarting the peace process.
The immediate strategy seems to be to impose sanctions on the Gaza Strip and to help Abu Mazen in any way that we can. Abbas has dissolved parliament and installed an emergency government.
Rice, in Washington, said, “We fully support him in trying to end this crisis for the Palestinian people and give them an opportunity for a return to peace and a better future.”
This mess has spiraled so far out of control that I’m not sure what the best move is for American foreign policy at the moment. I think one thing is clear though. If Fatah is able to reassert their authority, they will need real tangible gains to maintain that authority. No more lip service. No Palestinian government can stop the resistance if the status quo is really a steadily deteriorating condition for the Palestinian people. The people elected Hamas because of Fatah’s corruption and ineffectiveness. They will elect more leaders that refuse to renounce violence if they don’t see real achievements from Fatah. And that’s the only choice: Fatah or Hamas. Because no other faction has the muscle to do anything.
And with the Palestinians now territorily divided between the two parties, we can no longer even dream of negotiations between them and the Israelis. This is bad.
It’s like something out a fucking vonnegut novel: it just keeps getting more absurd and hilarious in the incredibly depressing way that Vonnegut mastered.
I mean this:
Just insane. Absolutely incredible. Ridiculous. Hilarious. Something out of the blackest comedy of errors ever, so dark it makes “Happiness” look like the “Howdy Doody Show.” Bush foreign policy makes Inspector Clouseau look like a genius.
And you’re right, WTF can the US do? In their (our) efforts to protect and strengthen Israel by humiliating and terrorizing the Palestinians, we’ve done just the opposite, the same way our invasion of Iraq toppled someone who should have been our greatest ally against al Qaeda.
What a mess.
More on U.S. strategy here.
we need to be like norway.
ignore the rest of the world and focus on our own country.
But Inspector Clouseau was a genius.
a genius by accident most of the time.
I miss peter sellers. He would have been, if not a great president, a very funny one.
“A cleu. I em looking for a cleu!”
How’s that fit with the headline? White House Seems Ready to Let Hamas Seize Gaza.
This deserves to be highlighted on its own:
Yes, the State Department is really on top of the situation. “So, roughly how many people do live in the Gaza Strip, Mr. McCormack?” “Oh, hundreds of thousands … maybe millions … I don’t really know…”
Allowing Bushco to paint an even more extreme picture of the whole region, and providing further justification for all manner of things.
All of this has absolutely no real effect on negotiations with Israel and the “peace process”.
There can be no movement toward peace in I/P until the US puts pressure on Israel to negotiate in good faith.
Yes it does, because you could make me President tomorrow and now I would have no way of restarting the peace process. The two-state solution is officially dead for the immediate future.
The two-state solution is a chimera.
Imposing extreme economic sanctions, ie, holding back pretty much ALL the economic support previously given to the Palestinian government prior to the election that put Hamas in the majority and in charge of that government, is how this situation came about in the first place. We didn’t like who they elected, so we cut off the funding that held their entire infrastructure together. Gaza is one of the most densely populated bits of land in the Middle East, and they are almost wholly dependent on outside aid to keep their economy running and people fed.
It apparently never occurred to the US or Israel to give Hamas a chance to take on the responsibility of governing and dealing with their neighbors as a duly elected government should — and see if they were up to the task and able to transform themselves into a real voice for the Palestinian people. Instead, Israel locked the borders down and Bush left the people to starve.
It seems we only favor democracy in the middle east when people elect the leaders we want them to. And it looks as though Hamas has come to the conclusion that democracy and diplomacy are just not working anymore.
Two things:
1) I basically agree with your assessment of the short-term history here, but I don’t think Hamas was ever really committed to democracy and diplomacy.
and
2) It’s nice when people get to vote and we tend to think popular support confers legitimacy. But no political party is legitimate until it renounces violence against other parties, and against neighbors.
We would have had every right to not recognize or work with the Nazi Party after 1933. Their electoral success did not confer legitimacy.
Having said that, the victory of Hamas offered an opportunity for them to be ‘tamed’ into self-serving bureaucrats. Instead, we gave them no reason to participate in electoral politics in the future and assured a civil war.
Negotiations! Negotiations over what? How much stolen land the Palestinians will agree that Israel can keep? How much stolen water? How many laws Israel is allowed to break? How do these negotiations work? Israel takes and the Palestinians give? What does Israel give that is theirs to give? What does Palestine take that does not already belong to them? What are the Palestinians bargaining for? A little bit of justice? A little bit of freedom? Can you have compromises on basic human rights? What do the Palestinians have to bargain with? Where is their strength, if no one allows them to demand their basic rights, if we don’t stand with them in support of their basic rights, including the right — the legal and moral obligation even — to defend themselves? Would we stand back and demand that slaves renounce their right to defend themselves and negotiate with their slave-owners for their freedom? Would we allow others to negotiate compromises on behalf of the slaves without their consent? Would we demand that those negotiations be practical? What sort of practical compromises would we expect the slaves to make in exchange for their freedom? Partial freedom? Freedom every other day? Only some of the freedoms that other people take for granted? Paying for their freedom? Could we reasonably expect slave-owners to give up their slaves just because the slaves asked for their freedom?
The United States and Israel have been starving to death the Palestinian people as punishment for electing Hamas. That is wrong. The United States and Israel have been openly arming and paying elements of Fatah in the hopes of causing civil war and destroying the democratically elected government of Palestine. That too is wrong. What positive outcome could have been expected from this situation? If these corrupt and collaborationist elements of Fatah had won this battle, would you have cheered? Would that have been a good and just thing in your estimation? I think not.
It might be considered that Hamas easily crushed these Fatah traitors because they did not even have the wider support of Fatah, much less the support of the desperate citizens of Gaza.