Hamas arrests Fatah leaders in Gaza

A week of bizarre tit-for-tat arrests of leaders of the opposing Palestinian movements culminated with the arrest of 15 Fatah leaders, taken from their homes in Gaza, by Hamas forces on Friday.

Those arrested yesterday included three Fatah-affiliated district governors, as well as the two highest Gaza representatives of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the officials said.

A spokesman for Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, declined to confirm the number or the identity of those taken into custody, but he did confirm that the arrests were a response to Fatah's seizures of "Hamas political leaders" in the West Bank.

The two Palestinian organizations have engaged in a bitter and often violent rivalry for several years, culminating in Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza one year ago. Fatah's power in Gaza was largely erased and it was left in control only of the West Bank.

Both groups have periodically carried out arrest sweeps targeting rivals in the territories they control. Several of the men arrested by Hamas on Friday had already been seized in the past and later released.

Hamas initiated the crackdown after a July 25 explosion in Gaza killed five Hamas members and a 6-year-old girl. Hamas blamed Fatah for the deaths and responded by arresting male members of the organization. Fatah denied responsibility, and launched it's own roundup of Hamas men in the West Bank in retaliation.

In all, it is estimated that both sides have seized about 200 of the other groups members, although neither side will reveal an exact number or the identities of those they are holding.

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Bush launched civil war in Gaza

That explosive claim is the heart of this Vanity Fair exclusive. This pull quote graf from David Rose ought to whet your appetite, drop your jaw, or both:

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, David Rose 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.

Muhammad Dahlan, identified as Fatah’s long-term “heavy” in Gaza, and privately called “our guy” by Bush himself, is fingered as BushCo’s proxy in this, a pro-Zionist? pro-stupidity, for certain head-shaker that even neocon stalwart David Wurmser denounces, in the story, as anti-democratic. (Wurmser resigned from the State Department a month after Dahlan’s Gaza coup was launched.)

Dahlan, the story details, has a long history as a “heavy,” arresting Hamas people, on behalf of Fatah, as early as 1996. And, this isn’t anything new. He personally knows Bill Clinton as well as George Bush; he also knows George Tenet, under the Clinton Administration portion of Tenet’s CIA tenure.

This isn’t all Dahlan’s fault, though. He says he warned the Bush Administration that Fatah wasn’t ready for the January 2006 parliamentary elections:

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

We all know the end result. Hamas won the elections, as Bush was even more criminally stupid in Palestine than in Iraq in presuming a democracy could be started from the top down.

It’s a long story, but hugely worth your reading.

The State Department, understandably, has refused to comment.

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Annapolis: The 1 1/2 state solution

Let’s be honest. Even if Annapolis did propose to solve anything, the “solution” it offered would be from the U.S.-Israeli point of view. And that point of view is, bluntly, the 1 1/2 state solution.

Now, that phrase, “1 1/2 state solution,” can be understood in one of two ways. The first way would be that Israel doesn’t want a fully independent Palestine for quite some time. That may or may not be the case, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

No, the U.S.-Israeli 1 1/2 state solution is the solution of only recognizing Mahmoud Abbas’ rump Fatah Palestinian government in the West Bank. That’s been the “solution” both countries jumped on ever since Palestinian Hamas won a free parliamentary election in January by a smashing margin.

For years, Likud-based governments in Israel have deliberately puffed up Hamas’ psychological profile in order to make it easier to demonize Palestinians in general. Labor, the times it’s been in coalition, has basically gone along for the ride.

Well, guess what, Likud? That’s now blown up in your face.

George W. Bush has been all about democracy promotion in the Middle East, ignoring clear evidence, such as Algeria’s late 1990s election, that free elections in the Middle East are most likely to elect Islamicist parties.

Well, guess what, W.? That happened in Palestine and it’s now blown up in your face.

But, it’s not just W. Way too many Democrats, let alone Republicans enthralled by end-time prophecies of the Christian Religious Right involving red heifers, temple rebuildings and Jewish conversions, are under thrall of Zionist strains in Israeli politics and Zionist-grounded Jewish-American political action groups such as AIPAC.

Until these shackles are shaken off, Middle East peace conferences are going nowhere.

I’m not excusing past terrorist acts by Hamas, as wingers are wont to claim left-liberal dialogue about Palestine and Israel does. Nor am I excusing Yassir Arafat’s post-Oslo lack of statesmanship. I’m simply stating the fact that anything short of a full two-state solution is bound to fail.

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Democracies in the Middle East — Big Schmuck McCain flubs it

The Schmuck Talk Express™, John McCain, claimed today that Israel is the only freely elected democracy in the Middle East.

Ignoring our puppet state in Iraq, and ignoring the fact that he’s dissing such beloved allies as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Big John is making just a little mistake or two.

Mistake one: Lebanon. (Nice to know all his Senate years got him a lot of foreign policy knowledge.)

Mistake two, which both Republicans and most Democrats keep trying to shove under the rug: Palestine. Hate Hamas all you want, they won an election. Oops.

What is all boils down to is that the Bipartisan Foreign Policy Establishment in the U.S. is all in favor of free elections when it elections the people we think it should.

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The Middle East: just waiting out the ineffectual and counterproductive Bush administration

Throughout the Middle East, there seems to be a degree of resignation in the air – a sense that Gaza will suffer for the remainder of the Bush administration, and once he is out of the way, the dialogue will commence. The next administration will talk to Hamas, and so will the Israelis. "They'll have to," said Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian human rights activist "because they'll have seen that Hamas can deliver."

The looming end of the Bush regime underpins the political thought throughout the region. The political leaders of the region are looking forward to the end, preparing for change, and readying themselves for the coming dialogue.

Throughout the region, the disdain is virtually palpable, even among people like Dr. Sarraj, who consider themselves friends of the United States. The aura of just waiting it out does not bode well for any future Bush administration initiatives where the Israel/Palestine dilemma is concerned.

This sense of resignation and time-biding offers context for Condi’s recent embarrassingly inept trip to the region. (We know it was a failure because we didn’t hear anything about it.) The trip was such a flop that the tepid response by the Saudis that they might consider attending a U.S. sponsored summit was hailed as a significant development.

One Egyptian diplomat put it about as bluntly as possible "No one likes American policy."

The Israeli’s are equally critical:

A senior Israeli official sat silently for several seconds after he was asked which negotiating approach was most likely to lead to progress in peace talks with Israel's Arab neighbors. Then he laughed and, in flawless English, suggested to a colleague that he must not have understood the question. "I don't see any promising pathway," he said. "There is a huge gap between the rhetoric and what people believe."

The Israeli government understands that to have peace with Syria "means giving back the Golan Heights," the strategic high ground that Israel seized in 1967, and "we're willing to discuss it," he said. But with Bush insisting "from the Oval Office" that the U.S. won't talk to Syria, nothing can be expected. "The Syrians really want to talk to the United States," the official said. Even among government officials in Iraq there's little embrace of Bush policy, and surprising expressions of distrust.

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, with three decades in clandestine service, sworn to protect the Jewish state from enemies such as Hamas, now speaks aloud what was unthinkable until recently. “It is time to negotiate with the movements leaders.” (The leaders he now advocates dialogue with are the same leaders Mossad has made a policy of targeting for assassination.)

The Hamas takeover of Gaza in June effectively split the Palestinians into Gaza, controlled by Hamas, and the West Bank, politically dominated by the more secular Fatah party and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his appointed prime minister, Salam Fayad.

In response, the White House has rolled out what it calls a "West-Bank-first" strategy. (Without batting an eyelash that the strategy was “Gaza First” right up to the moment it blew up in their faces.)

The “new” approach envisions financial, political and diplomatic support for Mr. Abbas and Fatah. The thinking is that life can be improved in the West Bank to such a degree that support for Hamas will evaporate in both the West Bank and Gaza. Simultaneously, Washington maneuvers to work with Israel to isolate Hamas further, while refusing to talk to the leaders.

"I don't say we should talk to Hamas out of sympathy to them. I have no sympathy whatsoever for Hamas. I think they are a ghastly crowd," Mr. Halevy says. "But I have not seen anybody who says the Abbas-Fayad tandem is going to do the job."

Mr. Halevy says defeating Hamas politically is unrealistic, given its enduring popularity among Palestinians. Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian parliamentary elections last year.

"The danger is that they will not be defeated, that they will become more despairing...and they will no longer feel constrained by anything, because there is nothing left for them to hope for," he says.

Then he said something that truly gives me hope. When the former Mossad chief finally “gets it” there is reason to rejoice. "We don't need their recognition," he says. "We are a sovereign state...They need us to recognize them. The shoe is on the wrong foot." (Really, who cares whether Hamas recognizes Israel or not?) We're dealing in issues which are existential to free society," Mr. Halevy says. "When you look around for potential allies in this war, sometimes you have to settle for strange bedfellows."

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Rice and Gates are off to the Middle East on a Salvage Operation

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will leave on a highly unusual joint mission to the Middle East. They leave with three objectives, and low expectations.

They need to persuade Iraq’s neighboring states to do more to help stabilize the country, they need to counter the growing influence of Iran in the region, and they hope to get some significant motion going on the development of a peace plan between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Lofty goals, but not likely to be very successful. The United States has little or no credibility in the region. The U.S. has caused massive death and instability in Iraq, and strengthened al Qaeda; they have also failed to calm the strife in Lebanon, bolster the Palestinian Authority, or bring pressure to bear on Syria.

Quite the contrary – U.S. policies have fanned the flames of Sunni extremism, and strengthened Iran. Those are the two things that cause the greatest consternation among the moderate Arab countries, because those are the two entities that threaten their grip on power.

Also not playing well to the locals is U.S. support for the ill-fated Israeli war against Hezbollah last summer. Continued attempts to undermine the popularly-elected Hamas in the Gaza strip. "The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas." Couple that failed strategy with United States’ continued support for Mubarak in Egypt, it pretty much puts the lie to claims that the United States “fosters Muslim democracy.”

The leaders of friendly states have lost faith in the Bush administration and do not believe he will deliver on his promises. Therefore, they are reluctant to risk anything for Bush. “Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

One needn’t read Runes to see other signs of discord in the administration.

On the eve of the trip, unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times that Washington believes Saudi Arabia has been unhelpful in Iraq by not supporting Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government. The administration publicly disavowed the report, but said that Saudi Arabia could do more to help. The leaked complaint seems unlikely to make life easier for Rice and Gates when they arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, early in the trip.

Pentagon and State Department officials said the trip is intended to reassure Arab leaders that the U.S. will uphold its security commitments in the region, and meanwhile, Arab diplomats in Washington resolutely maintain that they need more than reassurances. They have heard a lot of proposals and reassurances, but they have not seen a clear plan for peace or security in the region. The U.S. promises a more active role, but consistently fails to deliver. Arab diplomats in Washington voiced skepticism – anonymously – that the trip would be fruitful.

More than what Rice and Gates say on the trip, “[P]eople will be monitoring the debate in Washington. Everybody is watching that very closely and then will draw their own conclusions.” said one anonymous diplomat.

“There is no clarity,” another diplomat said on condition of anonymity, because he didn't want to disagree publicly with the administration. “The trip in and of itself is not important. What’s important is that the administration commit to dealing with the substantive issues.”

Rice and Gates have their work cut out for them. With 18 months left in office, it will be difficult to reshape the way the region sees the United States, said William Quandt, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, who as an aide to President Jimmy Carter helped craft the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

“I don’t think they have a real strategy that has much chance of working,” Quandt said. Gates, who joined the administration in December, “may be able to calm things down a little. But that won’t change the course.”

The two Secretaries will attend meetings together in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then they will part company. Gates will visit “other gulf states” and Rice will head for Israel and the Palestinain territories to meet with Mahmood Abbas and Israeli leaders. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to the popularly-elected Hamas, which now controls Gaza, but Rice has steadfastly maintained that there will be no dealing with the Hamas, which is the U.S. classifies as a terrorist organization.

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Bush gives al Qaeda its boogeyman

I don’t think I could say it any better than Gary Kamiya:

Jihadists need their American boogeyman as much as Bush needs his Islamist boogeyman. By fighting them in the wrong way and on the wrong terrain, we have inadvertently allowed them to claim the heroic mantle of nationalism and anti-Americanism. When the U.S. occupiers leave, Osama bin Laden and his ilk will groan in despair. ...

By conflating jihadists with militant, religiously oriented national liberation movements like Hamas, Bush has not only undercut the support we might otherwise have received from Arab populations for police operations against genuine jihadists, he has helped to create toxic new forms of anti-Western extremism. … The irony is that without our help, the jihadists would be struggling to survive. As Gilles Kepel, a French expert on radical Islam, argues in "The War for Muslim Minds," very few Muslims, no matter how radical, support al-Qaida. "Beyond the circle of Bin Laden and Zawahiri and their supporters and admirers ... the majority of Islamists and salafists, let alone most of the world's Muslims, no longer see the commando action carried out by 'the umma's blessed vanguard' against the twin towers and the Pentagon as fulfilling the promise of jihad," Kepel writes. "On the contrary, after the first few seconds of enthusiasm for this blow to America's 'arrogance,' most Muslims saw the massacre of innocents on Sept. 11 as opening the door to disorder and devastation within the house of Islam."

The suggestion that we now leave a bunch of fanatical mass murderers alone may strike most Americans as cowardly and morally contemptible. But what we want are results, not self-righteous campaigns that make matters worse. Bush's righteous war has failed. To leave jihadists alone is not to appease them. It is to plan their isolation and eventual extinction more precisely.

Kamiya goes on to worry about what could happen if al-Qaeda gets established in Gaza or Lebanon.

I’m not that worried about that. I suspect that Egypt would give tacit assent to Israel cracking down in Gaza and that Syria, where a majority is Druze or Alawite or otherwise non-Sunni, that Assad would do the same in Lebanon. (Another reason why it’s absurd for Bush to think AQI is getting support from Damascus.)

Cross-posted at Socratic Gadfly and Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus.

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Let us hope...

In the wake of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, senior Hamas leaders have vowed to work their influence to free kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Johnston was snatched off the street by gunmen on 12 March, and has not been seen or heard from since, although his wellbeing has been claimed by the Army of Islam, the group that has claimed responsibility for his abduction.

"We have started taking practical steps to release Alan Johnston." Hamas leaders said in a statement released yesterday. Ousted Prime Minister Esmail Hamiya, echoing the sentiment that the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip was a positive development and offered the best hope forhis freedom. "From now on, there will be one legitimate armed forde. We will bring discipline and law to Gaza. It will thus be easier to gain the liberation of the British journalist Alan Johnston. His kidnappers will listen to us more closely."

The Army of Islam, which claims to be holding Johnston has demanded the release of several Islamic militants and the Palestinian-born cleric Abu Qatada who is imprisoned in Britain.

In the wake of the kidnapping, Hamas, trying to move toward legitimate governance from armed insurrection, severed all ties with the Army of Islam, and denounced the abduction. Hamas and Haniya have repeatedly called for his release.

May they be able to secure it soon.

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Civil War in Gaza

Oh where to even start. I have been trying all day to write something about the pressure-cooker in Palestine that has blown apart in the last few days.

Five years ago this month, the President of the United States made a Rose Garden speech, wherein he laid out a bold, vivid two-state vision for the Middle East. Israel and Palestine, coexisting side by side, their peoples living in peace and prospering together. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror." he declared back then.

That vision was a mirage.

I certainly do not have the answers to this dilemma but I do know one thing beyond all doubt – a lot of it can be directly traced to the horrid policies of the Bush (mal)administration and the State Department that wasn’t.

United States policy overtly encouraged Israel to withdraw from the Gaza strip – not in and of itself a bad thing. But they also pressed for elections in both the Palestenian territory and Israel. Abbas won the election to replace Arafat as the President of the Palestinian Authority after Arafat’s passing in late 2004. He arrogantly allowed Hamas to run candidates to stand for legitimate election to parliament, thinking that he could defeat them at the polls.

He thought wrong.

So the Bush administration – on the heels of moving the goalposts in Iraq from WMD’s to fostering Democracy – decided that they didn’t much care for Democracy the way the Palestinians exercised it, because gosh-darnit, they picked the wrong leaders. Money and aid was cut off – a situation choreographed by Washington D.C. – in an attempt to strangle Hamas out of the political process.

This blew up in their faces most spectacularly. The attempt to make Hamas unpopular engendered hatred and pure, unadulterated resolve toward the west and by extension, the man they perceived as a marionette of western masters, Abbas. This week, the seething cauldron boiled over. Hamas and Fatah turned their guns on one another, and as it stands now, Hamas is in control in Gaza.

"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.

Abbas, whose bouts of vacillation have irritated U.S. officials, yesterday dissolved the Palestinian government in response to Hamas's takeover of Gaza. U.S. officials signaled that they will move quickly to persuade an international peace monitoring group -- known as the Quartet -- to lift aid restrictions on the Palestinian government, allowing direct aid to flow to the West Bank-based emergency government that Abbas will lead.

"There is no more Hamas-led government. It is gone," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the administration must still consult with other members of the Quartet. He said that humanitarian aid will continue to Gaza, but that the dissolution of the Palestinian government is a singular moment that will allow the United States and its allies to create a "new model of engagement."

The evolving U.S. strategy would let the Hamas-run Gaza Strip fend for itself while attempting to bolster Abbas as a moderate leader who can actually govern and deliver peace with Israel. The senior administration official noted that Gaza has no territorial issues with Israel, since there are no Israelis in Gaza, so the Hamas entity there would have no stake in potential peace talks concerning the border on the West Bank.

Referring to Abbas, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters yesterday that "we fully support him in his decision to try and end this crisis for the Palestinian people and to give them an opportunity to return to peace and a better future."

But analysts said yesterday that this strategy of dividing the moderates from the extremists -- which was the core of Bush's 2002 speech -- proved ineffective and may have led to the dilemma facing the administration.

So now, the government has been dissolved, and the Gaza Strip is under Hamas control. Fatah has retreated to the West Bank, and the Bush administration is still supporting Abbas. And a radical Islamic state, committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, exists literally on Israel’s doorstep.

No one has asked me, but if they did, I would say that it looks to my eyes like we should probably bow out. Every damned thing we have done has turned around and bit us on the ass. Beyond encouraging the “Quartet” to get aid and assistance flowing, and maybe send a check.

I am the least religious person you are likely to ever encounter, but I close with a prayer for peace. Besides, it certainly can't hurt. Oseh Shalom, Gaza.

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