The problems in Palestine get worse

Very bad news coming out of the Middle East and the Palestinian Territories in particular...

As mentioned in yesterday's post - Hamas militants have established complete control over the Gaza strip. Sacking important Fatah facilities and institutions. For those not too familiar with the Palestinian Territories (and where they lay in relation to the state of Israel) I provided a little map above: The Gaza Strip is the small orange strip on the left, the West Bank (where Fatah still holds sway) is the larger piece to the right, and Israel is inbetween.

Hamas has pretty much consolidated it's sole dominance in the Gaza strip and it hasn't wasted any time...enjoying it (for lack of a better word).

Hamas gives Fatah fighters amnesty, but killings continue

Hamas both mocked and reached out to its defeated Fatah rivals on its first day in full control of Gaza, offering them amnesty Friday but also rifling through President Mahmoud Abbas' bedroom, stripping a former Gaza strongman's home down to the flowerpots and throwing a Fatah gunman off a rooftop.

Safe in the West Bank, Abbas moved quickly to cement his rule there, after losing control in Gaza in a five-day Hamas assault on his forces.

He replaced the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, with Finance Minister
Salam Fayyad, a respected economist, as part of a new moderate government.

Hamas, overwhelmingly elected in a 2006 parliament vote, denounced Abbas' moves as a coup. Hamas' supreme leader, Syrian-based Khaled Mashaal, later said Abbas has legitimacy as an elected president and promised to cooperate, but warned Fatah against going after Hamas supporters in the West Bank.

The sparring made little difference on the ground: the Palestinian territories, on either side of Israel, are now separate entities with two governments — one run by Hamas and backed by radical Islamic states, and the other controlled by the Western-supported Fatah.

President Mahmoud Abbas (also popularly called 'Abu Mazen') - in the wake of the attacks and using the powers vested him as President - dissolved the troubled unity government (Hamas/Fatah) and created a new one made completely of Fatah officials.

Hamas had the gall to protest this act as a 'coup,' to which I reply: WTF!? Didn't you just get done with a 5 day campaign against Fatah in Gaza that ended with you completely usurping control of a very important part of the Palestinian territories?

Abbas received immediate pledges of support from Israel, the U.S., Egypt, Jordan, the U.N. and Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by phone that he would take steps to bolster Abbas. Officials in Olmert's office said he will consider releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax funds that was frozen after Hamas came to power.

Though the moderate government Abbas plans to appoint will have no say in Gaza, it stands a stronger chance than the Hamas-Fatah coalition it replaces of restoring foreign aid to the West Bank.

And this reveals one of the most frustruating parts in the US and Europes relations with the (then unified) Palestinian Authority.

They (Israel) will now consider unfreezing tax money (due the PA) frozen after Hamas came to power, they (foreign nations) will now restore foreign aid to the West Bank.

I was in Washington when Hamas was elected to power, and that was over a year ago.

In the interim what happened?

The PA was strapped for money, and its security forces (dominated by Fatah) were going unpaid, making for unhappy and sometimes non-working forces. Hamas certaintly didn't have that problem.

In addition our attempts to 'hurt' the Hamas-led PA has pushed the Palestinian people further into the embrace of Hamas and away from Fatah (who they increasingly see as corrupt). The US and Europe pushed the Palestinians (against President Abbas's wishes) continually for elections in the Palestinians, and it happened...Hamas won. And after having pushed hard for democratic elections, when the West didn't like the result it decided to punish, boycott, and withhold aid to the Palestinians unless Hamas agreed to concede to demands that it knew they would never agree to.

I am by no means an expert in the issues of Palestine. At most I am someone who just happens to follow it better than the typical person. So I defer the deeper and hevier analysis to others.

Hamas wins! Thanks to Us (M.J. Rosenberg on TPMCafe)

There is, no doubt, a whole lot of celebrating going on. For those more afraid of negotiations than of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or any of that violent crew, a collapsing Palestinian Authority with Gaza in absolute chaos with Mahmoud Abbas weakened almost to irrelevancy is a dream come true.

Gaza has fallen to Hamas. Abu Mazen's Fatah is on the run. Unless a United Nations force (like UNIFIL) steps in, a sliver of territory with a population of 1.4 million, a short drive from Tel Aviv will become a dagger aimed at Israel's heart and perhaps even an Al Qaeda staging ground. A humanitarian crisis of horrific
proportions is a certainty.

He's perhaps overblowing the "al-qaeda base" aspect as Hamas isn't too keen on al-Qaeda, but the rest is pretty insightful.

And he is right about who 'wins,' and about who is the happiest to see this turn of events.

The ones happiest to see Hamas take Gaza and essentially split the Palestinian Authority are those who would rather take a five foot suppository up their rear than have to negotiate with the PA.

These are the right-wing hawks in Israel and the right-wing neoconservative hawks in the US who dislike it when there is a moderate that appears to be a legitimate partner for peace (Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas - President of the now disunified PA). The hawks prefer military solutions and it is harder to get away with if presented with what is seen as a modertate partner for peace. But...now that there is no unified voice of the Palestinians, and Hamas is not seen as a good partner for peace. The hawks are very happy with that outcome.

So who does M.J. Rosenberg see as at fault for the current state of affairs?

The Palestinians, of course. But hardly theirs alone. As Nahum Barnea, Israel's finest journalist, put it today in Yediot Achronoth, "The US and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure. The Americans, in their lack of understanding for the processes of Islamization in the territories, pressured to hold democratic elections and brought Hamas to power with their own hands….

Since the elections, Israel, like the US, declared over and over that "Abu Mazen must be strengthened," but in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The
meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and
backslapping turned Abu Mazen into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the
Palestinian street."

The failures to which Barnea refers didn't start with the Palestinian elections either, not by a long shot. Back when Hamas was just a gleam in Sheik Ahmad Yassin’s blind eye, Israeli right-ringers were implementing a strategy to eliminate the authority of Palestinian moderates by building up religious extremists. These Israelis (some very high in Likud governments) believed that only supplanting Arafat’s Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.

I bet not many of you guys knew that the power of the Islamic relgious movements of Palestine (like Hamas) where vitaly built up with the help of Israel, who saw it as a way to not only counter secular and moderating Fatah who was pushing for negotiations. But soon those groups they fostered got very powerfull and began to cause a lot of death and mayhem in Israel itself.

The Israeli people, and the Palestinians are still feelings the ill effects caused by Israeli aid to the relgious extremists during the 80's (and its brought us to where we are today). But it did end up giving those hawks a bonus: Islamic radicals who it could plausibly say 'could not be talked to'

One wonders what kind of progress could have been made had Hamas never made it's entrace (or atleast wasn't as big a player as it has become).

I'll add that like there are Israeli hard-liners and (I would call them) radicals, Hamas reflects the hardline stance in the other camp. Like its counterparts among the Israeli hawks, Hamas is heavilly biased against any negotiations, prefering to 'push Israel into the Mediterrenean' and completely eliminiate it. That is why they too actively try and sabotage things when there seems to be a chance for negotiations to work.

It is certainly no coincidence that - historically - when progress is being made and negotiations are moving forward in a promising direction, the suicide bombings and rocket attacks all the sudden skyrocket. Which causes the desired effect: An Israeli crackdown that leads to tit-for-tat violence.

Progress is stalled, talks are sabotaged...

Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot, and it soon
was flush with funding and political support. The right-wing strategists devised
the theory of creating Hamas as an alternative to Fatah because they believed
that Muslim Brotherhood types would devote themselves to charity and religious
study and passively accept the occupation. They certainly would never put Israel on the spot by offering to negotiate.

Likud governments even deported Palestinian advocates of non-violent resistance (most notably, the Ghandian, Mubarak Awad) at the same time that it was doing everything it could to build the street cred of fanatics who, a few years later, would proclaim themselves Hamas, dedicated to Israel’s elimination.

The pro-Hamas tilt accelerated in 1988 when Yasir Arafat himself announced that he favored the two-state solution and that previous PLO demands that Israel be replaced by Palestine were, in his words “caduq” (inoperative).

An Arafat committed to two-states struck terror in the hearts of the settlers and their allies who were and are determined to hold on to the West Bank forever. Their worst fears were realized when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres repudiated this craziness and decided to engage with the PLO in order to strengthen it vis a vis Hamas, which was by the time Rabin came to office exceedingly powerful thanks in large part to the Israeli right’s support.

On how we pushed the Palestinian people towards Hamas:

There was another way we might have gone. We could have welcomed Hamas’s participation in the election as a sign that Hamas was implicitly accepting the
Oslo framework (which it was), insisted on the complete cessation of violence,
and then used carrots and sticks to encourage the Hamas-run Palestinian
Authority to mend its ways. But we offered no carrots, just sticks. And we
didn’t even make much of an effort to strengthen Hamas’s arch-enemy, President Mahmoud Abbas, with Congress hastening to impose redundant and insulting conditions even on aid that was to be sent through him.

It was all fun and games, politics as usual. Meanwhile, Hamas looked better and better to a people whose salaries were not being paid, thanks to the US sponsored international boycott of the PA, and whose schools and hospitals were collapsing.

Today it is almost amusing to contemplate the professions of horror on the part of
right-wing Israelis (and their neocon friends) who scream “bloody murder” about
an outcome they helped effect and actually welcome.

The name of their game was, is, and always will be making sure that Israel has “no partner” with whom to negotiate. Their worst fear is of Palestinians like Mahmoud Abbas who is a credible negotiating partner.

Indeed. I've alredy quoted his piece a little too much, so I'll end with that and urge you to give the whole post a read if this issue really interests you.

Takeover of by Hamas Ilustrates Failure of Bush's Mideast Vision

A good piece that details how things went wrong:

The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration.

The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first
step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule
legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the
unchallenged power in Gaza.

After his reelection in 2004, Bush said he would use his "political capital" to help create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term. In his final 18 months as president, he faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.

"The two-state vision is dead. It really is," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who was once an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

A good read.

RoundUp

US administration debates new Iran Strategy (AFP via RawStory)

Another article about the internal debates ongoing between those proposing negotiations with Iran as the only solution, and the hawks pusing for military solutions. Lets hope the sane people prevail this time...

The Fucked up state of the Islamic world OR They are all pissed off these days

Juan Cole gives a good roundup of his own that serves to highlight how messed up things are right now throughout the Islamic world. Not much to be happy about for the US...A lot of anger being fomented and directed at us. Some of it unjustified but there are always those who play on dislike for America and a predisposition to believe the worst about it, to pass on false propaganda.

But people believe it because we have such a bad image over there.

Some Funny

Top Ten President Bush Global Warming Solutions

10) Instead of "Partly sunny," have weatherman say "Partly cloudy"

9) Stop using Air Force One for Texas barbecue runs

8) Replace dangerous CO2 in the atmosphere with more eco-friendly CO1

7) Encourage people to walk more by distributing free Dr. Scholl massaging gel inserts. Are you gellin'?

6) Watch Al Gore movie one of these nights instead of "Dukes of Hazzard"

5) Bob Barker's free. Get him workin' on it

4) Send more troops to Iraq

3) I dunno, tax cuts for the rich?

2) Reduce hot air emissions by cancelling "The View"

1) Resign


The Late Show with David Letterman

I'm partial to number 1 haha!!

OK then, that's all for today. Go out and do something already!...Why you still reading?........Leave!!