Disregarding concerns from Israeli officials, President Bush pushed for Palestinian elections in early January 2006.
A White House spokesman made it clear meanwhile that President Bush wanted the elections to go ahead as scheduled, and for voting to take place in East Jerusalem. Mr Bush saw the elections as a step forward in his vision of a two-state solution to the conflict, the spokesman said.
Despite pre-election polls that showed Fatah comfortably in the lead, many observers were concerned about Hamas’ strength and potential for victory if the election went ahead.
Posing a question which is exercising several Western governments, a senior Israeli official said last night: “What are the international community going to do if Hamas wins the election? Are they going to deal with them when several countries proscribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation?”
Four days before the election, Scott Wilson and Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported that the United States was actively interfering in the Palestinian election.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Bush administration is spending foreign aid money to increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority on the eve of crucial elections in which the governing party faces a serious challenge from the radical Islamic group Hamas.
The approximately $2 million program is being led by a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But no U.S. government logos appear with the projects or events being undertaken as part of the campaign, which bears no evidence of U.S. involvement and does not fall within the definitions of traditional development work.
U.S. officials say their low profile is meant to ensure that the Palestinian Authority receives public credit for a collection of small, popular projects and events to be unveiled before Palestinians select their first parliament in a decade.
In this instance, USAID was doing the traditional work of the Central Intelligence Agency (meddling in foreign elections), and the work was coordinated by “a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who worked in postwar Afghanistan on democracy-building projects.” The episode was another example of how traditional intelligence operations drifted away from the CIA and towards the Pentagon during Bush’s second term. In any case, the USAID program didn’t work, and may have backfired, as Hamas won a plurality of the vote and a majority of the seats. The Bush administration immediately began plotting to reverse the result of the elections. For a complete recounting of the Bush administration’s efforts, please see David Rose’s exposé in the April issue of Vanity Fair. Here’s the teaser:
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
In fact, the administration’s dirty covert war in Gaza resulted in total humiliation. Hamas defeated Fatah over a week of fighting in June 2007, and took complete control of the Gaza Strip.
Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.
Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.
The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”
Israel’s reaction to the January 2006 election was different in kind. In June, Israel simply arrested a significant portion of the Palestinian government:
Israeli troops rounded up dozens of ministers and MPs from the Palestinians’ ruling Hamas party today, while pressing a military campaign in Gaza meant to win the release of an Israeli soldier held by Hamas gunmen.
An Israeli military official said a total of 64 Hamas officials were arrested in the early morning round-up. Of those, Palestinian officials said seven were ministers in Hamas’ 23-member Cabinet and 20 others were MPs in the 72-seat parliament.
In August, the Israelis arrested the Palestinian Speaker of Parliament and launched a military incursion into the Gaza Strip. But it was not until ten months later, when Hamas kicked Fatah out of Gaza, that Israel began a blockade of the strip in earnest. Their goal was explicitly to undermine Hamas’s ability to govern.
After the takeover, Israel sealed its border crossings with Gaza, on the grounds that the Fatah forces had fled and were no longer providing security on the other side. Israel, like the United States and the European Union, lists Hamas as a terrorist group and will not deal with it.
Israel also decided to press Hamas by admitting to Gaza only the minimum amount of goods required to avert a hunger or health crisis among its 1.5 million people, and prohibiting most exports. Israel contends that its approach is working.
“Hamas’s popularity is suffering, because it cannot deliver,” Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Thursday. A combination of military pressure, diplomatic isolation and economic leverage “is leading to an erosion of their strength,” Mr. Regev said.
At this point, I think we should recap and summarize what I’ve gone over so far:
1. In January 2006, President Bush ignored the concerns of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority (under Fatah) and insisted on elections in the occupied territories.
2. In tandem with this policy, the Bush administration spent approximately $2 million dollars (administered through USAID) to bolster the Fatah Party in the elections.
3. When Hamas won the elections, Israel simply arrested members of the new government, while the US sponsored a guerrilla war against it.
4. When Hamas won the guerrilla war, Israel responded with a blockade of Gaza designed to provide the ‘minimum amount of goods required to avert a hunger or health crisis.’ The idea was to convince Gazans that Hamas was incapable of governance.
Now, these are all facts that help contextualize what is going on in Gaza today. The US and Israel have spent the last three years trying to figure out a way to recover from the elections of 2006, where the Palestinian people (in a relatively clean election) elected Hamas to represent them. Every step they’ve taken so far has been somewhere between ineffective and counterproductive. With time running out on the Bush administration, Israel has taken this little window during the transition to wage open war on the people of Gaza and to destroy all vestiges of government (including mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations) in the Strip.
The United States imposed an unwanted election on the Palestinian government, attempted to dictate the outcome of that election (and failed), then supported a civil war against the new government (and lost), while the Israelis simply arrested members of that government, imposed a blockade on their people, and then sought to outright murder members of the ruling party. Finally, they invaded their territory and so far have killed nearly 800 civilians in an act of undisciplined and inexcusable violence.
At the same time, throughout all of this, the Israelis have continued to allow new settlements to be built in the West Bank. The response from Hamas has been to refuse to turn over a kidnapped soldier and to lob rockets at communities in Southern Israel.
If you think the world believes our propaganda about this conflict, you’re dead wrong. And if you think our actions have not incited a new generation of people with a desire to get revenge, you’re dead wrong, too.
thanks for providing this compilation. i’m off to explore all the links.
Also available in orange.
.
Article in Vanity Fair
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever … [links are mine – Oui]
≈ Cross-posted from my diary — Israel Deliberate Targeting of Refugees ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
No one who supports Israel in the current crisis will care. Or they will insist you are lying. Or most of all you will be called an anti-semite for your troubles.
Which is really ironic considering the Arabs are a Semitic people.
Which isn’t to say that I prefer HAMAS, as I most assuredly do not. But Israel and the US created the conditions which allowed Hamas to flourish in the Occupied Territories, and now to cover up for that mistake they are committing another one — the mass slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza as collective punishment for Hamas’ electoral victory. It would be considered a farce if the human cost to so many innocent people was not so high.
BUT Hamas HAS tried to become a political party. AND negotiate with Israel for final borders and recognizing an Israeli state, read my comment….follow the links.
They showed they could stop suicide bombings and rockets but were never recognize for their effects to move to a final solution.
an unfortunate choice of words there at the end.
Have you been reading all the articles on moving all arabs out of Palestine? Or listening to some of the Israeli politicians.
What words signify the same meaning?
hyperbole isn’t helpful. It’s driving the killing on both sides.
What is driving the killing is that Israel refuses to sit with the Unity government and discuss the resolution of core issues: Jerusalem, borders, and refugees.
And that is my conclusion after daily reading of every Israeli newspaper for over 3 years.
It is worse than that, Mattes. As BooMan describes in this very post, Israel, along with the United States, made a decision and took action to foment a civil war and destroy the Unity government and set up the corrupt and feckless men of Fatah as their puppet government. Well, they succeeded in the first part of their goal, but the rest did not exactly turn out the way they planned it.
The evidence that Israel does not want a solution that will require them to compromise on their long-term goals, and are willing to wait and work (including committing mass murder and destruction) to create the right circumstances is overwhelming.
OK….I’ll use the words, “final resolution” instead of “final solution” for the outcome.
…I think the Hamas politicians were really to sit down with the Israelis to forge a “final resolution” soon after elected, but Israelis wanted complete surrender.
Well, sort of. In the beginning in 2006 they said their focus should be on public services, infrastructure, etc. – in other words, the things they have always done very well since the earliest days of the organization before they even thought about making it their task to oppose the occupation. At that time they were just a bunch of uber-religious fundies providing religious, medical, educational and other services that were desperately needed by the people and not being provided adequately by anyone else.
They said it was fine with them if Fatah wanted to work on a two-state settlement while they took over internal matters. I am guessing that was a face-saving way for them to accept the idea of a two-state solution without having to participate in it. Later they began making explicit statements that they would accept a two-state solution with Israel existing inside the green line, and they have repeatedly expressed their acceptance of that since then.
Of course, this is not what Israel wants to hear, therefore “common knowledge” that Hamas does not accept any settlement with Israel, does not accept Israel’s existence, blahblahblah.
That’s as I remember it. 5-6 months after taking office they started talking about 1967 borders and a 10 ten ceasefire. If you followed my diaries at daily kos, I blogged it as it was happening.
Yes, they have talked about a hudna – a ten year cease fire, and as I recall they have also talked about even longer cease fires, up to 50 years. I believe this is their face-saving way of accepting the two-state solution with Israel.
I do not not follow Kos, but I will look up your blogs on this. Should be very interesting.
Kudos BooMan, how is your post received at the Orange place?
and,
let’s not forget Fatah and Arafat were once called terrorists
But
as I posted elsewhere, this war is not about rockets being launched from Gaza into Israel.
This Israel war for Gaza is about Gaza’s oil fields.
Take a look at the maps in this link.
How amazing that this is never mentioned as one of the causes of this war.
Thanks, BooMan, for an excellent, fact-based summary.
Why more West Bank Settlements?
Fri Jun 02, 2006
Why? Does Israel continue assassinations?
Fri Jun 09, 2006
IDF and Co. History of Collective Punishment http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/30/163043/096/998/231897
U.S. Policy Toward the Middle East
Aug 01, 2006
Meanwhile in Gaza…3720 dead, wounded?
Aug 06, 2006
Killings and beatings continue in Gaza & West Bank
Aug 22, 2006
Root Causes-Terrorism & Labeling
Sep 02, 2006
West Bank Expansion- New Settlements
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/4/123929/4639/379/242694
Israeli Peace Initiative UPDATED.
Apr 04, 2007
Senior Hamas official: Suicide bombers ruined past peace bids
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/17/201912/851/1013/324429
Hamas Leader accepts Israel along side Palestine
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/10/9137/07268/825/344965
How Hamas was trying to control the rockets:
Qassam rockets endangering Peace Initiative in Israel
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/12/18597/5691
Conclusion? Hamas was ready, but Israel wanted more land..and more $$$ military aid.
BooMan, I DO have to quibble with one minor point. The Israeli government has not ALLOWED the building new colonies (I prefer this more accurate term), and the expansion of existing ones, it is instrumental in planning, land-confiscations, building, and populating them, offering attractive incentives to induce Jews to live in them. The idea, of course, is and has always been to establish facts on the ground that will obviate withdrawal, including squeezing Palestinians into smaller and smaller, more and more isolated enclaves, making life untenable. And that is, in part, what the wall is about as well.
Israel’s practice of creating a fait accompli by establishing “facts on the ground” goes back to the pre-state period.
to be frank, I have not followed settlement policy closely over the last three years. I do not know what the government is doing in the way of incentivizing further settlements, but I do know they have done so for 25 years.
It hasn’t really changed much. And the wall is not really about protecting Israelis, of course, any more than the current atrocity in Gaza is about rockets. If the wall is in any way effective in reducing attacks on Israelis then that is a side benefit. All one has to do is look at the path of the wall, and understand how it negatively affects nearly every aspect of Palestinian life.
They continue to blossom.
If aren’t you one of the people we are voting for in the blog awards?
oops..WHY
how the world can believe Israeli officials who kill hundreds of Palestinians and call Hamas “murderers”.
Typical tactic of real assasins and murderers – to commit crime than scream that you killed murderers. However Israelis seem to be more interested in eliminating Palestinian children and women.
And the world is watching Palestinian holocaust and doing nothing.
Well, the U.N. DID order a cease fire – which they will never enforce.
Great job.