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.