A
Setback For The Bush
Doctrine In Gaza
By Ali Abunimah
15 June 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
The
dramatic rout of the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian militias in Gaza
by forces loyal to Hamas represents a major setback to the Bush doctrine
in Palestine.
Background
Ever since Hamas won the
Palestinian legislative elections in the occupied territories in January
2006, elements of the leadership of the long-dominant Fatah movement,
including Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his advisors
have conspired with Israel, the United States and the intelligence services
of several Arab states to overthrow and weaken Hamas. This support has
included funneling weapons and tens of millions of dollars to unaccountable
militias, particularly the "Preventive Security Force" headed
by Gaza warlord Mohammad
Dahlan, a close ally of Israel and the United States and
the Abbas-affiliated "Presidential Guard." US Deputy National
Security Advisor Elliott Abrams -- who helped divert money to the Nicaraguan
Contras in the 1980s and who was convicted of lying to Congress in the
Iran-Contra scandal -- has spearheaded the effort to set up these Palestinian
Contras. (This background has been extensively detailed in a number
of articles published by The Electronic Intifada in recent months).
Abrams is also notorious for helping to cover up massacres and atrocities
committed against civilians in El Salvador by US-backed militias and
death squads.
Two recent revelations underscore
the extent of the conspiracy: on 7 June, Ha'aretz reported that "senior
Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip have asked Israel to allow them to
receive large shipments of arms and ammunition from Arab countries,
including Egypt." According to the Israeli newspaper, Fatah asked
Israel for "armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing RPG rockets,
thousands of hand grenades and millions of rounds of ammunition for
small caliber weapons," all to be used against Hamas.
From the moment of its election
victory, Hamas acted pragmatically and with the intent to integrate
itself into the existing political structure. It had observed for over
a year a unilateral ceasefire with Israel and had halted the suicide
attacks on Israeli civilians that had made it notorious. In a leaked
confidential memo written in May and published by The Guardian this
week senior UN envoy Alvaro de Soto confirmed that it was under pressure
from the United States that Abbas refused Hamas' initial invitation
to form a "national unity government." De Soto details that
Abbas advisers actively aided and abetted the Israeli-US-European Union
aid cutoff and siege of the Palestinians under occupation, which led
to massively increased poverty for millions of people. These advisors
engaged with the United States in a "plot" to "bring
about the untimely demise of the [Palestinian Authority] government
led by Hamas," de Soto wrote.
Despite a bloody attempted
coup against Hamas by the Dahlan-led forces in December and January,
Hamas still agreed to join a "National Unity Government" with
Fatah brokered by Saudi Arabia at the Mecca summit. Dahlan and Abbas'
advisers were determined to sabotage this, continuing to amass weapons,
and refusing to place their militias under the control of a neutral
interior minister who eventually resigned in frustration.
A setback for United
States and Israel
The core of US strategy in
the Southwest and Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine,
and Lebanon is to establish puppet regimes that will fight America's
enemies on its behalf. This strategy seems to be failing everywhere.
The Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan. Despite its "surge"
the US is no closer to putting down the resistance in Iraq and cannot
even trust the Iraqi army it helped set up. The Lebanese army, which
the US hopes to bolster as a counterweight to Hizballah, has performed
poorly against a few hundred foreign fighters holed up in Nahr
al-Bared refugee camp (although it has caused death and
devastation to many innocent Palestinian refugees). Now in Gaza, the
latest blow.
Israel's policy is a local
version of the US strategy -- and it has also been tried and failed.
For over two decades Israel relied on a proxy militia, the South Lebanon
Army, to help it enforce the occupation of southern Lebanon. In 2000,
as Israeli forces hastily withdrew, this militia collapsed just as quickly
as Dahlan's forces and many of its members fled to Israel. Hamas is
now referring to the rout of Dahlan's forces as a "second liberation
of Gaza."
A consistent element of Israeli
strategy has been to attempt to circumvent Palestinian resistance by
trying to create quisling leaderships. Into the 1970s, Israel still
saw the PLO as representing true resistance. So it set up the collaborationist
"village leagues" in the West Bank as an alternative. In 1976,
it allowed municipal elections in the West Bank in an effort to give
this alternative leadership some legitimacy. When PLO-affiliated candidates
swept the board, Israel began to assassinate the PLO mayors with car
bombs or force them into exile. Once some exiled PLO leaders, most notably
Yasser Arafat, became willing subcontractors of the occupation (an arrangement
formalized by the Oslo Accords), a new resistance force emerged in the
form of Hamas. Israeli efforts to back Dahlan and Abbas, Arafat's successor,
as quisling alternatives have now backfired spectacularly.
In the wake of the Fatah
collapse in Gaza, Ha'aretz reported that Israeli prime minister Ehud
Olmert will advise President Bush that Gaza must be isolated from the
West Bank. This can be seen as an attempt to shore up Abbas whose survival
Israel sees as essential to maintaining the fiction that it does not
directly rule millions of disenfranchised Palestinians. A total collapse
of the Palestinian Authority would expose Israel's legal obligation,
as the occupying power, to provide for the welfare of the Palestinians
it rules.
What now for the
Palestinian under occupation?
Abbas has declared a "state
of emergency" and dismissed Ismail Haniyeh the Hamas prime minister
as well as the "national unity government." The "state
of emergency" is merely rhetorical. Whatever control he had in
Gaza is gone and Israel is in complete control of the West Bank anyway.
Haniyeh in a speech this
evening carried live on Al-Jazeera rejected Abbas' "hasty"
moves and alleged that they were the result of pressure from abroad.
He issued 16 points, among them that the "unity government"
represented the will of 96 percent of Palestinians under occupation
freely expressed at the ballot box. He reaffirmed his movement's commitment
to democracy and the existing political system and that Hamas would
not impose changes on people's way of life. Haniyeh said the government
would continue to function, would restore law and order and reaffirm
Hamas' commitment to national unity and the Mecca agreement. He called
on all Hamas members to observe a general amnesty assuring any captured
fighters of their safety (this followed media reports of a handful of
summary executions of Fatah fighters). He also emphasized that Hamas'
fight was not with Fatah as a whole, but only with those elements who
had been actively collaborating -- a clear allusion to Dahlan and other
Abbas advisors. He portrayed Hamas' takeover as a last resort in the
wake of escalating lawlessness and coup attempts by collaborators, listing
many alleged crimes that had finally caused Hamas' patience to snap.
Haniyeh emphasized the unity of Gaza and the West Bank as "inseparable
parts of the Palestinian nation," and he repeated a call for the
captors of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston to free him immediately.
The contrast between Abbas'
action and the Hamas response is striking. Abbas, perhaps pushed by
the same coterie of advisors, seems to be escalating the confrontation
and doing so when there is no reason to believe he can prevail. Hamas,
while standing firm and from a position of strength, spoke in a language
of conciliation, emphasizing time and again that Hamas has a problem
with only a small group within Fatah, not its rank and file. Abbas,
Dahlan and their backers must be surveying a sobering scene -- they
may be tempted to try to take on Hamas in the West Bank, but the scale
of their defeat in Gaza would have to give them pause.
Both leaderships are hemmed
in. Abbas appears to be entirely dependent on foreign and Israeli support
and unable to take decisions independent of a corrupt, self-serving
clique. Hamas, whatever intentions it has is likely to find itself under
an even tighter siege in Gaza.
Abbas, backed by Israel and
the US, has called for a multinational force in Gaza. Hamas has rejected
this, saying it would be viewed as an "occupying force." Indeed,
they have reason to be suspicious: for decades Israel and the US blocked
calls for an international protection force for Palestinians. The multinational
force, Hamas fears, would not be there to protect Palestinians from
their Israeli occupiers, but to perform the proxy role of protecting
Israel's interests that Dahlan's forces are longer able to carry out
and to counter the resistance -- just as the multinational force was
supposed to do in Lebanon after the July 2006 war.
Wise leaders in Israel and
the United States would recognize that Hamas is not a passing phenomenon,
and that they can never create puppet leaders who will be able to compete
against a popular resistance movement. But there are no signs of wisdom:
the US has now asked Israel to "loosen its grip" in the West
Bank to try to give Abbas a boost. Although the Bush doctrine has suffered
a blow, the Palestinian people have not won any great victory. The sordid
game at their expense continues.
Ali Abunimah
is cofounder of the online publication The Electronic Intifada and author
of One
Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
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