01.07.09
Obstacle to Gaza assault
RG mail
POLITICS: Bush Plan Eliminated Obstacle to Gaza Assault
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45297
WASHINGTON, Jan 5 (IPS) - Until mid-2007, there was a serious
political obstacle to a massive conventional war by Israel against
Hamas in Gaza: the fact that Hamas had won free and fair elections for
the Palestinian parliament and was still the leading faction in a
fully legitimate government.
But the George W. Bush administration helped Israel eliminate that
obstacle by deliberately provoking Hamas to seize power in Gaza. That
plan was aimed at getting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to
dissolve the democratically elected Hamas government — something Bush
had tried unsuccessfully to do for many months.
Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Palestinian parliament in the
January 2006 elections, and the following month, the Palestinian
Legislative Council voted for a new government under Hamas Prime
Minister Ismail Haniyeh. The Bush administration immediately began to
use its control over the “Quartet” (the U.S., European Union, United
Nations and Russia), to try to reverse the results of the election.
The Quartet responded to the Hamas victory by demanding that Hamas
renounce all armed resistance to Israel and even “disarm” before a
political solution was reached. That was in effect a demand that
Israel be allowed to use its military and economic controls over the
West Bank and Gaza to impose its own unilateral solution on the
Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration and the Europeans cut off all
financing for the Palestinian government, while Israel refused to hand
over to the Palestinian authorities the VAT and customs duties it
collected on behalf of the Palestinians under the Paris Protocol
signed with the PLO as part of the Oslo Accords.
When Abbas continued to resist U.S. demands for an end to the elected
government, both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told him at the United Nations in
September 2006 that they would not accept a Palestinian government
with Hamas participation.
Then Rice was dispatched to Ramallah in early October 2006 to tighten
the screws on the Palestinian president. She demanded a commitment
from Abbas to dissolve the Haniyeh government within two weeks, and
then accepted his promise to do so within four weeks, according to a
later U.S. State Department memorandum published in Vanity Fair
magazine.
There was one problem, however, with the U.S. demand: under Article 45
of the Palestinian Authority’s “Basic Law”, Abbas could fire the prime
minister, but he could not appoint a new one who did not represent the
majority party in the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Abbas failed to act on the dissolution promise, so the Bush
administration gave him a memo demanding that Hamas be given a “clear
choice, with a clear deadline” to accept or reject “a new government
that meets the Quartet principles”. The memo, published in part last
January in Vanity Fair, said that if Hamas refused that demand, “you
should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and
form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”
It further demanded that Abbas “strengthen his team” by bringing in
“credible figures of strong standing in the international community”.
That was a reference to the long-time director of Fatah’s paramilitary
forces, Muhammad Dahlan, who had long been regarded as the candidate
of the Bush administration and its allies. In April 2003, Yasser
Arafat had been under pressure from British Prime Minister Tony Blair
and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to name Dahlan as head of
Palestinian security.
In late 2006, Rice got Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates to agree to provide covert military training and money to
equip a major increase in Dahlan’s militia.
But there was another element of the Bush administration plan. It
encouraged Dahlan to carry out attacks against the Hamas security and
political infrastructure in Gaza, which were well-known to be far
stronger than that of Abbas’s Fatah faction. In a later interview with
Vanity Fair, Dahlan admitted that he had carried out “very clever
warfare” against Hamas in Gaza for many months.
Other sources said that Dahlan’s militia was carrying out torture and
kidnappings of Hamas security personnel.
Alvaro de Soto, then U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East
Peace Process, wrote in his confidential End of Mission Report that
the U.S. “clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and
Hamas…” He recalled that the “U.S. envoy” to a Feb. 2, 2007 meeting
of the Quartet in Washington had twice declared, “how much I like this
violence”, because “it means that other Palestinians are resisting
Hamas.”
That U.S. envoy was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The Bush administration seemed to want Hamas to know about its plan to
help Fatah use force against the Hamas organisation in Gaza. A Jan. 5,
2007 Reuters story datelined Jerusalem revealed an internal U.S.
document showing that the United States had pledged 86 million dollars
to “strengthen and reform elements of the Palestinian security sector
controlled by the PA presidency” and “dismantle the infrastructure of
terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza”.
When Abbas negotiated a new agreement with Hamas in Mecca in February
2007 on a Palestinian unity government, the Bush administration
responded by drafting a secret “action plan for the Palestinian
presidency” which threatened that the “international community” would
“no longer deal exclusively with the Presidency” if it did not go
along with U.S. demands, and that “[m]any countries in the EU and the
G8″ would “start looking for more credible interlocutors on the
Palestinian side who can deliver on key issues of security and
governance”.
The plan, dated Mar. 2, 2007, called for Abbas to “start taking
necessary action against groups undermining the ceasefire with the
goal of ensuring all armed groups within Palestine security
institutions in stages (between 2007 and 2008)…” It promised to help
Abbas to “impose necessary order on the Palestinian street” through
“superiority” of Fatah forces over Hamas, after which there would be
new elections in autumn 2007.
Again that U.S. plan was not kept secret but was leaked in April 2007
by the Jordanian newspaper Al-Majd. That could only have happened if
Jordanian intelligence services, which cooperative very closely with
the United States, made the decision to leak it to the press.
Then, on Jun. 7, 2007 the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz revealed
that Israel had been asked to authorise the shipment of dozens of
Egyptian armoured cars and hundreds of rockets and thousands of hand
grenades for the Fatah security forces.
The leaked plans for a military buildup were an open invitation to
Hamas to take preemptive action. The day after the Haaretz story,
Hamas launched a campaign which eliminated the Fatah security presence
in Gaza in five days.
The day after the complete defeat of Dahlan’s forces in Gaza, Abbas
dissolved the Haniyeh unity government and named his own prime
minister, in violation of the Palestinian charter.
The rout of Dahlan’s forces was a predictable consequence of the Bush
administration’s policy. As the commander of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’
Brigades, Khalid Jaberi, told Vanity Fair’s David Rose, “We can only
conclude that having Hamas in control serves [the Bush
administration's] overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy
otherwise.”
But the Bush administration had not only accomplished its goal of
eliminating a Hamas-dominated government; it had also set up a new
argument that could later be used to justify an all-out Israeli
offensive in Gaza: that Hamas had mounted an “illegal coup” in Gaza.
That was the term that Rice used on Jan. 2 in justifying the Israeli
operations against Gaza.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition
of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
(END/2009)