The Continuing Madness of Western Policy
Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as if he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, “moderate” (i.e. obedient to American orders) and “pragmatic” (i.e. obedient to Israeli orders). And the more the Americans and Israelis lauded Dahlan, the more they undermined his standing among the Palestinians. Especially as Dahlan was away in Cairo, as if waiting for his men to receive the promised arms.
In the eyes of Hamas, the attack on the Fatah strongholds i
n the Gaza Strip is a preventive war. The organizations of Abbas and Dahlan melted like snow in the Palestinian sun. Hamas has easily taken over the whole Gaza Strip.
How could the American and Israeli generals miscalculate so badly? They are able to think only in strictly military terms: so-and-so many soldiers, so-and-so many machine guns. But in interior struggles in particular, quantitative calculations are secondary. The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organizations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas, because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation. The American statements about their intention of arming them with Israeli weapons have finally condemned them.
That is not a matter of Islamic fundamentalism. In this respect all nations are the same: they hate collaborators of a foreign occupier, whether they are Norwegian (Quisling), French (Petain) or Palestinian.
IN WASHINGTON and Jerusalem, politicians are bemoaning the “weakness of Mahmoud Abbas”.
They see now that the only person who could prevent anarchy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was Yasser Arafat. He had a natural authority. The masses adored him. Even his adversaries, like Hamas, respected him. He created several security apparatuses that competed with each other, in order to prevent any single apparatus from carrying out a coup-d’etat. Arafat was able to negotiate, sign a peace agreement and get his people to accept it.
But Arafat was pilloried by Israel as a monster, imprisoned in the Mukata’ah and, in the end, murdered. The Palestinian public elected Mahmoud Abbas as his successor, hoping that he would get from the Americans and the Israelis what they had refused to give to Arafat.
If the leaders in Washington and Jerusalem had indeed been interested in peace, they would have hastened to sign a peace agreement with Abbas, who had declared that he was ready to accept the same far-reaching compromise as Arafat. The Americans and the Israelis heaped on him all conceivable praise and rebuffed him on every concrete issue.
They did not allow Abbas even the slightest and most miserable achievement. Ariel Sharon plucked his feathers and then sneered at him as “a featherless chicken”. After the Palestinian public had patiently waited in vain for Bush to move, it voted for Hamas, in the desperate hope of achieving by violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve by diplomacy.
The Israeli leaders, both military and political, were overjoyed. They were interested in undermining Abbas, because he enjoyed Bush’s confidence and because his stated position made it harder to justify their refusal to enter substantive negotiations. They did everything to demolish Fatah. To ensure this, they arrested Marwan Barghouti, the only person capable of keeping Fatah together.
The victory of Hamas suited their aims completely. With Hamas one does not have to talk, to offer withdrawal from the occupied territories and the dismantling of settlements. Hamas is that contemporary monster, a “terrorist” organization, and with terrorists there is nothing to discuss.
SO WHY were people in Jerusalem not satisfied this week? And why did they decide “not to interfere”?
True, the media and the politicians, who have helped for years to incite the Palestinian organizations against each other, showed their satisfaction and boasted “we told you so”. Look how the Arabs kill each other. Ehud Barak was right, when he said years ago that our country is “a villa in the jungle”.
But behind the scenes, voices of embarrassment, even anxiety, could be heard.
The turning of the Gaza Strip into Hamastan has created a situation for which our leaders were not ready. What to do now? To cut off Gazaaltogether and let the people there starve to death? To establish contacts with Hamas? To occupy Gazaagain, now that it has become one big tank trap? To ask the UN to station international troops there – and if so, how many countries would be crazy enough to risk their soldiers in this hell?
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