winterbadger | (no subject)

depressing, but fairly sound analysis of the situation within and around Palestine

The situation now is bleak, with Hamas in control of Gaza, and Abbas and Fatah in control of as much as Israel allows in the West Bank. It puts Palestine’s destiny back into the US neo-conservative laboratory. This turn of events could free Abbas to focus on the much more manageable West Bank, where he can depend on the Israel Defence Forces to suppress challenges from Hamas, and on Jordan and the US to help rebuild his security forces, according to Martin Indyk, the US pro-Israel lobbyist, writing in The Washington Post on 15 June. Most American mainstream editorials and commentators are sounding the same message, refusing to see Palestinians as human beings deserving of dignity, peace or security.

Meanwhile various Arab governments, the EU, the US and Israel are flocking to back Abbas: money, weapons and political legitimacy are coming to him from all directions. The once irrelevant leader is now the darling of the international community; the sanctions are set to be lifted on the emergency government which he appointed after sacking the unity government, an unconstitutional act by all standards.

Israel is now pressure-free. Israeli officials cannot imagine a more satisfactory scenario. The new experiment suggests that the West Bank will be lavished with aid and Gaza will be starved further. This is the height of injustice, and as always the US and Israel take centre stage in directing the show. Abbas and his men are the true heroes here, and are now making their debut as the legitimate face of Palestinian democracy, one that is determined by Condoleezza Rice and Ehud Olmert, not the Palestinians themselves. They are mere subjects of an experiment, and a brutal one at that.

What's painful, tragic is the difficulty of seeing how any other condition could have arisen, given the motivations, interests, and background of the parties involved. And of seeing any productive, peaceful outcome in the future.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Divide and conquer :-(

Anyway. If Hamas will go around staging coups d'etat it can't really expect the world to shower it with rose petals. Nobody in their right minds could seriously expect Hamas to be able to continue as part of the unity government after forcibly seizing Gaza from it.

Except that the author makes the case that Hamas was only responding to an attempt by Fatah to destroy it. Which I have to say I find credible. After all, having been voted into power, why would Hamas choose to fight if it could just rule? Even US press has been fairly consistently reporting that Fatah refused to hand over control of security forces tot eh duly elected government.

Yes, Hamas was not a negotiating partner that Israel, the US, et al. could achieve a negotiated peace with under current conditions. But that's a long way from encouraging Fatah to overthrow it, which is what has been done. We can't even pretend to have any credibility if we go about saying we want people to elect their own governments and then try to get rid of the governments that are elected when we don't like them.

Maybe it's more complicated than I knew then, thanks. In fact that's probably a pretty good rule of thumb for the Middle East :-)

Having taken a quick look at the wikipedia entry on Hamas, and remembering stuff I've heard about them previously, it seems they do both lots of good (social & medical services) and evil (mass murder).

But apart from all that, I think I'll save my own sympathy for those who are not seeking to set up an Islamic state. Such a state would no doubt seek to put me to death in an instant, so no thanks.

The situation does make one despair, doesn't it. But it just goes on, and on, and on, and on... there'll still be a bitter conflict there hundreds of years after we've gone. Either that or one side will have won, which would be even worse.

I hold no particular brief for Hamas; but they are the people that a large portion of the Palestinian people put their faith in, just at the moment (and I can understand why). I deplore their stance towards Israel, and I find their Islamic radicalism dangerous and disturbing. But if anyone wants to talk to the Palestinian people right now, for better or worse they must talk to and deal with Hamas. It doesn't mean one has to accept their positions, but it does mean that if one wants to accomplish anything productive, one has to work with them. You can't work to moderate people you won't talk to.

But who needs to be productive? In situations like this, Israel just refuses to talk (publicly--there are always backchannel negotiations going on with anyone). Its security forces are stronger (or it thinks they are) than the Palestinian militias. It has the economic upper hand. It can starve Palestine of jobs, goods, food, water, even hope. And Israel is secure in the knowledge that it has the US to drag around behind it like a big scary dog on a lead.

What is worrying Israel these days, IMO, is Iraq. The big scary US dog is a lot less scary these days, having been exposed as unable to effectively fight anything other than conventional war (the surge may eventually demonstrate that we can technically fight counterinsurgency, after a bloody five years of training, but the US people don't have the moral or economic bottle to do so).

And Israel depends on the corrupt and self-interested regimes that rule most of the Arab world to spew enough rhetoric to justify Israel's constant application of the Bush Doctrine while not actually threatening Israel in any real way. And those regimes are looking much less stable these days. People might just get the idea from Iraq that a weak, corrupt, self-interested government can be pushed to the brink of destruction, no matter how many security forces it has. And if it doesn't have a huge foreign army to support it... I would not want to be president of Syria, or Egypt, or Libya, or the ruler of any of the Gulf states right now...