Hamas’ takeover of Gaza: How much is US policy to blame?

A quick and dirty – albeit not particularly inaccurate – way of describing the current state of Palestinian affairs is that “the roadmap is dead.” On the flip side of that coin, one could agree with the pundits at the center-left Brookings Institution that the era of American hegemony in the Middle East is over. But as usual, even progressive scholars, bloggers and pundits are in disagreement on a key issue behind any discussion of Israel-Palestine conflict: How much of the mess is the US’s (or the Bush administration’s) fault?

George Washington University professor of political science and international affairs Nathan J. Brown, writing at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (.pdf) provides some critically-needed context for understanding the role US foreign policy in the region has played in the sudden bloodshed and mass chaos in the Gaza Strip, taken over a few weeks ago by the terrorist group Hamas. And as a direct result of this takeover, the Middle East is presently at a critical turning point, with the violence in Gaza effectively splitting the Palestinian Territories and creating a radical Islamist state on Israel’s border.

Brown explains that “One month before the most vicious round of intra-Palestinian fighting in Gaza, Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, testified before Congress, seeking to justify American intervention on the side of Fatah using the terms that have grown familiar over years of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. He explained that the United States sought to back the legal presidential security forces—which were working to meet Palestinian obligations under the Road Map—against the forces of disorder. The statement may have made sense according to some logic followed in the US capital, but it was utterly disconnected from realities in the region.

Fatah—as much if not more than Hamas—bears deep responsibility for the deepening chaos in Palestinian society. And American policy has deepened that chaos in some fundamental and absolutely deliberate ways. There is no peace process for Hamas and Fatah to fight over. The Road Map was already anachronistic when it was announced in 2003 and is pursued seriously now by none of the concerned parties. Even General Dayton’s description of the legal situation was simply wrong: the Palestinian constitution was amended in 2003 at American insistence to make internal security a cabinet and not a presidential responsibility. While officials spoke of peace and order, American policy in effect—and sometimes by design—supported the political disintegration of Palestinian society and the slide toward civil war.

According to Martin Indyk, director of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Hamas has its work cut out for it in governing Gaza, and it is far from clear they will be able to restore order in even a minimally competent manner. Writing in the July 2nd issue of Newsweek International, he goes overboard trying to downplay the obvious dangers inherent in the fine balancing act involved here:

Israel does not want to strangle Gaza’s residents, but it will not tolerate Qassam rocket fire from the territory. Hamas must therefore somehow resolve the tension between its commitment to destroy Israel and its need to keep Gaza afloat. When it shared power with Fatah, Hamas avoided this dilemma by letting Mahmoud Abbas deal with Israel. Now the group has no choice but to reach some kind of accommodation with Jerusalem.

Hamas reaching a mutually-acceptable “accommodation” with the Jewish State? I’m not holding my breath. . .

Writing in the London Review of Books, Alastair Crooke notes that the US’s lack of a coherent policy in the region is responsible for the unfolding nightmare in the occupied territories. Specifically, Crowe explains that the origins of the dramatic takeover of Gaza lie in “the reaction of the international community, and of Fatah, to Hamas’s overwhelming victory in the parliamentary elections of January 2006.”

According to Crowe’s account, Fatah, (the Palestinian liberation movement founded by the late Yasir Arafat), saw itself as the founder of the Palestinian Authority; it believed it was “the natural party of government; and it had fought a long battle with Arab neighbors to establish itself as synonymous with the PLO, and therefore, implicitly, as the ‘sole representative of the Palestinian people’”. Some within Fatah were unable to come to terms with their loss of power, or to reconcile themselves to the claim that, on the basis of the election result, an Islamist party best represented the views of the Palestinian people. At this crucial juncture, argues Crowe, the International Quartet intervened: they pressed President Abbas to hold fast against Hamas and they promised to support him if he did so.

He explains that not only was Abbas not to yield security control to the government and its Interior Ministry, as the constitution provided, but the International Quartet also demanded that he claw back powers from the new government and embody them in the presidency: financial responsibilities would be removed from the Ministry of Finance; the salaries of government officials would be paid by the president’s office; all key policy decisions would be enacted by presidential decree. In other words, the government was essentially to be rendered powerless. The Hamas government had no police force at its disposal, and no authority over frontier crossings.

This delicate situation was further aggravated by the actions of the US and European diplomats:

[T]he West imposed financial sanctions on the government and isolated it politically, insisting on conducting business and channeling funding exclusively through Abbas. In short, instead of helping Fatah through the transition and facilitating Palestinian unity – and taking advantage of a real chance to include Hamas, Islamism’s moderates, in the political process – the international community pursued an aggressive policy of internal division that established the conditions for the recent violence in Gaza. Europeans may wring their hands at what they see on their TVs, but European policy, acting in concert with the US, bears a large measure of responsibility for what has happened.

Additionally, The US and some European countries, including Britain, also “financed, trained and armed the security apparatus”; The ultimate aim was to build a Fatah militia able to successfully confront Hamas militarily. In the meantime, American officials hoped to maneuver Fatah into a position to depose Hamas from power – in other words, to promote a soft coup d’état against the government. A strategy document prepared by one of the US-led coalition of ‘moderate’ Arab states which was circulating among Palestinians in March 2007 said that the US objective was “to have Abbas dismiss the Hamas government in August. The International Quartet endorsed these plans in principle. The support the US and Europe give to Fatah is considerable and arrives by a variety of routes: through NGOs and development agencies; through Fatah reform initiatives; through youth development programmes; through information and media projects; and – most significantly – through a large programme aimed at recruiting, training, equipping and financing Fatah security cadres.

Left-Wing British journalist Jonathan Cook offers up some fresh insight in his article this week for bad actions as well.

Writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, Stephen Zunes provides an analysis of the situation that resembles Cook’s, but is more nuanced and I think more balanced. For example, he argues that:

As much responsibility as the Palestinian leadership itself must bear for the current situation, none of this would have happened if the U.S. government had lived up to its responsibilities as guarantor of the Oslo Accords and self-proclaimed chief mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. U.S. refusal to force Israel to live up to its legal obligations to end its colonization drive in the West Bank and withdraw from the occupied territories in return for security guarantees has led much of the Palestinian population to give up on the peace process and embrace groups like Hamas, which demand control of all of historic Palestine.

But at least Zunes is willing to acknowledge, even in passing, the responsibility not only Hamas but the Palestinian “leadership (I’m not sure exactly who this refers to) as well for the crisis. He even goes so far as to note that most Palestinians are disgusted with the actions of Hamas and Fatah, comparing it to “gang warfare”.

More to the point, Zunes adds that:

For moderate forces to overcome extremist forces, the moderates must be able to provide their population with what they most need: in this case, the end of Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and its occupation and colonizing of the remaining Palestinian territories. However, Israeli policies – backed by the Bush administration and Congress – seem calculated to make this impossible. The noted Israeli policy analyst Gershon Baskin observed, in an article in the Jerusalem Post just prior to Hamas’ electoral victory, how “Israel ’s unilateralism and determination not to negotiate and engage President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority has strengthened the claims of Hamas and weakened Abbas and his authority which was already severely crippled by … Israeli actions that demolished the infrastructures of Palestinian Authority governing bodies and institutions.”

He goes into a detailed critique of current US policy with regard to the Israel-Palestinian situation that is well worth the time it takes to read; it is too long and too good for me to attempt to excerpt it here. I will say, though, that Zunes is correct in his observation that a fair amount of the problem is that the Bushies favor Fatah despite the democratic elections of Hamas last year, and it is precisely this financial and diplomatic support that delegitimizes both the US’s stated commitment to fostering democracy in the Middle East as well as Fatah’s perceived independence from the US. (For more background on the Hamas electoral victory of 2006, see this)

M.J. Rosenberg, regular blogger over at TPMCafe as well as director of policy analysis at the (relatively) liberal Israeli Policy Forum offers up yet another slightly-different perspective on the crisis and provides a brief history lesson on the history of Hamas’ founding in the process.

Quoting Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, he agrees with the proposition that: “The US and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure. The Americans, in their lack of understanding of the processes of Islamization in the territories, pressured [the Palestinians] 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 Abbas into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street.”

Rosenberg adds:

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 Ahmed 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.

So considering the historical context of the Israeli Right’s very active – and ill advised – support of (and role in the creation of) Hamas, it is not surprising that Hamas ended up winning last year’s parliamentary elections:

First we demanded that the Palestinians hold elections (Abbas didn’t want them), then we dispatched monitors to certify they were “free and fair” which they were, but when we didn’t like the election results we rejected them and promised that the Palestinians would “pay.” Almost immediately Members of Congress rushed to stop almost all forms of aid not just to Hamas-run institutions but to the Palestinian people at large.

This served to force the Palestinian people to support Hamas out of frustration as well as the fact that the terrorist organization was the main entity responsible for paying for health and social services in the territories.

Blogging over at TPMCafe.com two weeks later, Rosenberg criticizes what he sees as the celebratory mood that has overcome the neocons and Right-wing pundits in the US. He thinks this can be attributed to the fact that even though deep in their own hearts they don’t believe it, they are trying to convince American public opinion that a two-state solution, and the possibility of Palestinian statehood, was made impossible by what happened in Gaza.

For illustration, he quotes Brett Stephens, writing in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, as saying: “Palestine as we know it today, will revert to what it was–shadow land between Israel and its neighbors–and Palestinians, as we know them today, will revert to who they were: Arabs. Whether there might have been a better outcome is anyone’s guess. But the dream that was Palestine is finally dead.”

While Rosenberg is spot on in his criticisms of the US and Israeli government’s handling of the situation, I think a commenter captures what essentially encapsulates my dissatisfaction and frustration of all the analyses discussed in this post. “Brad the Dad” argues:

Hamas has achieved a level of depravity and rejectionism that far outstrips anything committed by the Irgun. But more importantly, Ben-Gurion and the Haganah were not only willing to make a deal to get Israel established, they had the means to do so. Fatah is weak, corrupt to the core and, above all, spectacularly incompetent.

I’ll ask the same question I’ve been asking for a while: what is the case to be optimistic about a negotiated settlement establishing a Palestinian state? Isn’t it the case that at some point, it no longer about what the US or Israel have done to support Fatah or fast-track negotiations? When are the Palestinians supposed to produce their own Ben-Gurion, the unifying figure who combines ruthlessness, peacefulness and competence to get the state established and then make it viable?

Reading the peacenik camp, personified by MJ Rosenberg, one gets the sense that they think the US and Israel can just wave a wand and a Palestinian state will appear. All that matters is what WE do. Now I’m quite certain they understand it is not quite that simple. But you would never know it from their ceaseless, baseless optimism about the possibility of a settlement.

The right may indeed have it wrong that Palestinian desire for statehood will wither away. If nothing else, it serves as convenient propaganda for those whose real agenda remains the destruction of Israel and a second Holocaust. But surely the left has it wrong in dismissing the notion that the main obstacles to statehood are with American or Israeli policy. Let’s call a spade a spade: the Palestinians are a worse enemy to themselves than Israel, the US, the Arab world and everyone else. That doesn’t say anything at all about their RIGHT to statehood. But it does say everything about how likely they’ll be to ever achieve it.

And for those of us keeping track of such things, dozens of war crimes and human rights violations are occurring on both sides according to Human Rights Watch.