SURPRISE! Israel's Attack On Hamas Undermines Fatah Instead--NYT

by: Paul Rosenberg

Thu Jan 15, 2009 at 11:34

"War on Hamas Saps Palestinian Leaders"
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM - Israel hoped that the war in Gaza would not only cripple Hamas, but eventually strengthen its secular rival, the Palestinian Authority, and even allow it to claw its way back into Gaza.

But with each day, the authority, its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and its leading party, Fatah, seem increasingly beleaguered and marginalized, even in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which they control. Protesters accuse Mr. Abbas of not doing enough to stop the carnage in Gaza - indeed, his own police officers have used clubs and tear gas against those same protesters.

The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas's support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from average Palestinians.

"The Palestinian Authority is one of the main losers in this war," said Ghassan Khatib, an independent Palestinian analyst in the West Bank city of Ramallah. "How can it make gains in a war in which it is one of the casualties?"

....

Ever since Hamas began its one-party rule of Gaza, in the summer of 2007, Israel and the West have tried to turn Gazans against Hamas through an economic embargo and diplomatic isolation. While there is certainly anger at Hamas among Gazans, it pales beside the anger at Israel, the West and what some see as Fatah's collusion with those enemies.

The only thing surprising about this is that the Times is publishing this analysis right in the midst of the carnage--an indication, perhaps, that the failure of Israeli policy is becoming undeniable.  Of course, it's not just counter-productive for Israel, as bin Laden has issued a renewed call for Holy War.

Meanwhile, Israel attacks a hospital, UN headquarters and an international media building....

Remembering How Gaza Got Like This

by: Daniel De Groot

Tue Dec 30, 2008 at 09:00

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America's behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Yes, that Elliott Abrhams, the Iran-Contra one.  Neoconservatives really do never ever learn from their mistakes and manage to be always wrong about everything.  It's their superpower.

Re-Framing the History of Israel

by: Jacob Freeze

Sun Dec 28, 2008 at 19:09

Apologists for Hamas don't want to explain what Hamas intended to accomplish with a series rocket-attacks on southern Israel between July and December 2008.

Did they think they could defeat Israel with a couple of bottle-rockets?

Or is it possible that they intended to provoke massive retaliation and buy "moral outrage" from the rest of the world at the price of Palestinian lives?

Meanwhile apologists for Israel adjust the parameters of discussion to frame a few rockets flying out of Gaza, and that frame is nested in yet another frame, also delimited by bombs and rockets, and so on all the way back to the creation of Israel, apparently ex nihilo, with the tacit assumption that opposition to the existence of Israel has always and only arisen out of the irrational intransigence of fundamentalist Islam.

But the entire foreign policy establishment of the United States opposed the creation of Israel, once upon a time, beginning at the top with Secretary of State George Marshall and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

Harry Truman eventually over-ruled the almost unanimous opposition of his military and diplomatic advisers, because in 1947 Harry Truman had a problem that he could not solve: where to put at least 250,000 displaced Jews after WWII.

Republican "heartlanders" were violently opposed to large-scale Jewish immigration, and Truman attributed the loss of a few Democratic seats in the 1946 election to Republican agitation about a mere 1000 Jews smuggled in by Henry Morgenthau. Accepting 250,000 Jewish immigrants looked like political suicide for the Democratic Party.

And, of course, no one else would take them in sufficient numbers to empty refugee camps from Kiev to London.

Truman also couldn't just walk away from the problem, and not only because of intense Jewish pressure in the United States, as anti-Israel propagandists often claim. An enormous crime had been committed by Germany, and committed in slow motion, with insane organization.

This was a nightmare that haunted the collective unconscious of the entire civilized world. How was such a thing possible? No one knew, and no one knows now.

So Harry Truman solved his problem at the expense of the indigenous population of Palestine, Israel was created, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled into refugee camps where millions of them are still confined.

No powerful advocates argued for the resettlement of these refugees, and their collective nightmare was just beginning. The Arab world refused to absorb the great majority of displaced Palestinians in 1947, and still refuses to issue more than a miserly trickle of immigration visas. Even now the border between Gaza and Egypt is gated and guarded on the Egyptian side just as mercilessly as the analogous border is guarded by Israel.

Now Israel exists, in spite of George Marshall's opposition, and James Forrestal's opposition, and the opposition of almost anybody else anywhere who had a realistic appreciation of what the creation of Israel would involve, and I do not mean to exclude Jewish supporters of the creation of Israel from the category of people who had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

But now that Israel exists, it's senseless for Hamas to provoke massive retaliation with their absurd and pathetic attacks on southern Israel.  There is no other conceivable purpose for that idiocy except the propaganda value of carnage on the front page of newspapers and TV, and this is the paradigm of Palestinian "leadership" from 1947 all the way to 2008.

For Fatah and Hamas, the Palestinian people are only inanimate tokens on a world-historical battlefield, and, in the idiom of the Koran, the political "leaders" of Palestine are wolves unto their own people.

Israel cannot be destroyed without raining down nuclear destruction on every Arab capital, and the condition of Palestinians cannot be improved by rocket attacks, but all those pin-pricks can eventually drive any Israeli government over the brink into the madness of bombing cities and claiming that only a handful of "civilians" have been killed.

So nothing much has changed since Harry Truman "solved" his problem with Jewish refugees in 1947.

The eastern end of the Mediterranean is occupied by a crazy country and a crazy non-country, and nothing anybody says about it will ever make any difference.