[R-G] Gaza: The Canadian Connection

[Richard Menec]

http://jonelmer.ca/files/elmer_cd_jan2008.pdf

Published in Canadian Dimension:
VOL 42 No 1 | January/February 2008: pp. 28-30

Fighting in the Gaza ghetto

By Jon Elmer

When Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after six months of
increasingly violent clashes with the security forces of its rival Fatah, it
was neither a coup nor a civil war.

To be sure, there were times when Gaza convulsed with a type of
street-by-street fighting that gave the air of civil war. Gunmen took up
positions on the rooftops and balconies of high-rise apartments in Gaza
City. Makeshift checkpoints became sand-bagged bunkers, and more than once
in the winter of 2007, life in the long-battered enclave ground to a halt.

Yet the fighting cannot so easily or broadly be characterized as Hamas
versus Fatah, much less civil war. Significant elements of both movements
opposed the confrontation, as did the overwhelming majority of Palestinians.

What happened in June was, instead, a focused and purposeful takeover of a
flawed and failed security apparatus created by the United States and
Israel; a security apparatus that was explicitly born, armed, trained and
tasked to protect Israel's interests. For more than a decade, at the behest
of Israel and the US, it arrested, imprisoned and tortured Palestinians
engaging in resistance to Israel's creeping occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza. Most importantly, the conflict in June was the takeover of a security
apparatus that was openly aligned with Israel and the US designs to
overthrow the elected Hamas government.

BORN OUT OF OSLO

The principle target of Hamas' takeover of Gaza was the network of
paramilitary forces born out of the so-called Oslo peace process and the
establishment of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA),
particularly the Presidential Guard and the Preventative Security Service.
Under the direct leadership of the CIA and Washington's favourite 
'strongman'
in the Palestinian arena, Mohammed Dahlan, the security forces became a
symbol of a discredited Palestinian Authority regime that failed to achieve
sovereignty for the Palestinians while creating a bloated and corrupt
network of patronage and extraordinary personal enrichment for its
officials.

As Martin Indyk, a key advisor to President Clinton and US ambassador to
Israel during the 1990s, bluntly told a congressional hearing: "I'm quite
sure it is not a secret that the Central Intelligence Agency played a
critical role in training Arafat's security forces."

With a security force totaling more than 80,000 members, Palestinians have
the highest ratio of official security personnel to population on the
planet. Yet for Palestinians, this hardly translated to anything like
security - no legitimate courts, no effective dispute resolution
mechanisms - only an increasingly violent Israeli occupation that
Palestinians themselves were being asked to police. Hamas activists were
routinely tortured and humiliated in the jail cells of the Preventative
Security forces. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group,
31 Palestinians died in PA custody between 1995 and 2000.

Despite the torture and repression, under the leadership of Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas refused to fight the PA. "We shall
never clash with the Authority, even if they torture us, even if they shut
down our institutions, arrest us, even of they kill us," Yassin wrote in
Hamas' newspaper in November 1997. In many ways, it was such discipline by
Hamas that prevented, or indeed postponed, the internal conflict fostered by
the pressure cooker of Israel's occupation.

THE ELECTION OF HAMAS

The uprising that began in September of 2000, and Israel's comprehensive and
brutal suppression of it, moved the internal power struggle largely off the
agenda. Israel's pullout from Gaza and Hamas' decisive election victory in
the West Bank and Gaza in January of 2006, however, has led to a
reinvigorated engagement with PA security forces as the US and Israel has
sought to pressure the Palestinians to overthrow Hamas.

Immediately following their election defeat, Fatah rejected Hamas' offer to
form a government of national unity and set about undermining the newly
elected government in concert with the US, Israel, Canada and the EU. The
Fatah-dominated security forces refused to take orders from Hamas, and
western capitals began the crippling boycott. "Not a red cent to Hamas,"
Peter MacKay said in Ottawa, throwing Canada's weight behind what the UN has
called history's first sanctions regime enforced on an occupied population.

The result has been a catastrophe for Palestinians. A recent UN human rights
report describes a "carefully managed" humanitarian crisis, a "controlled
strangulation that apparently falls within the generous limits of
international toleration."

THE KARNI PROJECT

Insofar as the sanctions were intended to pressure the Palestinians into
overthrowing Hamas, they failed. By the fall of 2006, the US began
rebuilding the Palestinian security forces to confront Hamas. Under the
guidance of US "security coordinator" Lt Gen Keith Dayton, the US openly
began training what were in practice anti-government paramilitaries loyal to
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Dahlan.

Rice bluntly characterized the motive of arming PA forces on Voice of
America: "I do know that if Hamas has strong forces and Mahmoud Abbas does
not, that's not good for the United States, it is not good for the
Palestinians, and it is most certainly not good for Israel."

While occasionally denying that the intent was to confront Hamas, the Dayton
Plan was no secret. Dayton told Israel's largest newspaper, Yediot Aharanot,
"we are involved in building up the Presidential Guard, instructing it,
assisting it to build itself up and giving them ideas."

State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack told reporters in November
2006: "You have Keith Dayton, General Dayton on the ground, who continues to
work on the real down-in-the-weeds blocking and tackling work of helping
build up the security forces. Now, that may not be very newsworthy in terms
of big headlines flashed across the newspaper or the lead story on the
nightly news, but it¹s important and essential work."

Officially dubbed the Karni Project, the plan went beyond simply training
security forces. It was, and is, a model for Palestinians policing Israel's
occupation regime. The objective is to train Palestinians to administer the
border crossings and commercial terminals of the newly cemented Palestinian
ghettoes (Karni being the name of the major commercial border terminal into
Gaza from Israel).

Gaza was the first Palestinian ghetto surrounded by concrete walls, but the
700 km wall that Israel is building in Palestinian territory is creating a
series of smaller Gazas in the West Bank. Such objectives are neither
covert, nor clandestine. The plans were discussed by top officials and aired
openly in the media. A Jerusalem Post headline declared the Karni project
the "acid test of Abbas' abilities" and concluded that Karni "could be a
prototype for running Palestine".

CANADA'S ROLE

On his first visit to the region as foreign minister, Peter MacKay waded
into the heart of the conflict, immediately meeting in Jerusalem with Lt
General Keith Dayton and offering $1.2 million dollars to support the
General's mission. Canada's involvement, however, goes beyond money.
According to the CBC "about a fifth of Dayton's staff" are Canadian, and
Condoleezza Rice told reporters in a briefing alongside MacKay in Jerusalem
that Dayton "has a Canadian counterpart with whom he works very closely."

During MacKay's visit, Israel's foreign ministry praised "the exceedingly
warm relations enjoyed" between the two countries. Particularly, Israel
lauded Canada's vocal boycott of Hamas, as well as its diplomatic posture
opposing a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel set about the ruination
of large swaths of Lebanon, and its position "in the vanguard" of the fight
against Iran. On the three biggest issues of the day, Canada is in lock-step
with Israel. During MacKay's visit, the Department of Foreign Affairs issued
a statement which said in part: "our message in the region is clear."

THE TAKEOVER

Despite being heavily outnumbered, the military superiority of Hamas'
fighters (considered to be about 10,000-strong) was never in doubt. Yet the
ease with which they overran the PA security apparatus was notable and its
impact on the security of Gaza's streets was dramatic. On June 12, Hamas
began to systematically take control of the bases and headquarters of the
Palestinian Authority's Preventative Security and Presidential Guard. In
less than three days of concentrated attacks, Hamas fighters had full
control of the Gaza Strip.

For Hamas, the takeover was more than a settling of scores; it was a
government asserting its legitimate authority in territory it was elected to
administer. It was acting, as Hamas repeatedly said, to preempt an openly
planned coup led by Dayton and the PA security apparatus.

In fact, Hamas' takeover of Gaza precipitated what was to be the real coup,
as Abbas immediately declared a state of emergency, suspended the
Palestinian charter, and illegally ousted Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and
the Hamas parliament. Having apparently cut Gaza loose, Abbas then appointed
former IMF and World Bank official Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister in the
West Bank, where Hamas is still far stronger than Fatah, though forced
largely underground by daily Israeli military raids.

As they did throughout the 1990s, the security forces of Abbas have worked
in close coordination with Israel's occupation regime to keep Hamas on the
defensive. The Palestinian Authority government and civil society
employees - including doctors - have been forced to strike by Abbas and
Fayyad in order to receive their paycheques, crippling the Hamas government.
If Palestinian government employees go to work, they forfeit their salary
indefinitely.

Abbas issued a decree in September that closed more than 100 Hamas charities
and civil society organizations - many of the very same social welfare
organizations that so importantly contributed to Hamas' popularity and
helped to establish the movement's deep roots in Palestinian society,
particularly in Gaza. "Civil society is not sacred," Sumud Damiri, a
spokesman for Abbas' interior ministry coldly declared.

Between June 15 and October 15, some 600 Palestinians were arrested and many
were tortured, according to the Palestinian Independent Commission for
Citizens Rights. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas legislator, recorded 755 attacks on
Hamas institutions of all sorts - clubs, libraries, charities - in the first
forty days after the Gaza takeover. In effect, the very same antidemocratic
and collaborationist postures that resulted in Fatah¹s resounding electoral
defeat in 2006 are being deepened by Abbas and Fayyad in the West Bank.

That Palestinians find their aspirations for self-determination once again
abandoned to a violent and expanding Israeli occupation can hardly come as a
surprise. That the internationally supported regime of sanctions, internal
clashes and collective punishment was predicated by democratic elections
only compounds the bitterness.

Jon Elmer, a Canadian photojournalist, covered the Hamas-Fatah conflict from
Gaza City between December 2006 and February 2007.

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