[R-G] Bush Plan Eliminated Obstacle to Gaza Assault

[Anthony Fenton]

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)