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4 How the Saudis stole a march on the
US By Alastair Crooke and Mark
Perry
anyway you can help us?'"
Rashid's enemies inside the central committee
responded by sending their own emissaries to
counter Rashid's moves. "Their message was pretty
simple: 'Stay away from this guy.'"
Despite these warnings, by February 2006 -
just one month after the Hamas victory in the
Palestinian parliamentary elections - the
Dahlan-Rashid axis had succeeded in making both
men an essential part of America's program to
undermine Hamas. Dahlan
was
the darling of the Western intelligence services,
and was being tutored in English in London, where
he could be found at Claridge's Hotel. In the
evenings, he would sometimes be spotted at some of
London's most fashionable nightclubs. When not in
London, Dahlan appeared at the side of Abu Mazen
during the Palestinian president's most important
public events.
He soon became a fit
subject for international photographers and
correspondents, who commented on the rise of the
new generation of Fatah activists that Dahlan
seemed to represent. Rashid, in the meantime, had
decided that the best way back into the
Palestinian political environment was simply to
offer his services to both Abu Mazen and the Hamas
leadership. In late January, at the same time that
King Abdullah's emissary was having quiet
discussions with Meshaal in Damascus, Rashid
showed up in the offices of the Palestinian
Foreign Ministry in Gaza. "What's he doing here?"
an official there asked another ministry official
the day of Rashid's visit. "I have no idea," was
the reply.
So it was that the first
reports coming from the Middle East about a
prospective agreement between Hamas and Fatah
named Rashid and Dahlan as instrumental in forging
the initiative. It was not the Saudis, Dahlan
partisans said, who had suggested that the two
parties resolve their differences - it was Rashid.
It was Rashid who instigated the rapprochement, it
was Rashid who shaped the final agreement, and it
was Rashid, under Dahlan's guiding hand, who
brought the two sides together.
"Nonsense.
Total nonsense. Whatever you've read in the papers
is nonsense," an official close to the Fatah-Hamas
negotiations said. "We keep hearing that Fatah
officials close to the Americans decided they
would seek an opening to Hamas. That's simply not
true. This was King Abdullah's idea and was the
result of direct talks between Riyadh and
Damascus. King Abdullah sent a senior Saudi
official to talk with Meshaal in Damascus and to
get his agreement to come to Mecca. This is how
this happened."
While this
mini-controversy may seem marginally important in
hindsight, it is central to understanding the full
breadth of the Hamas-Fatah discussions - to
understanding why the Mecca agreement symbolizes a
setback for US policies in the region, to how
Fatah activists intend to rebuild their party, and
to how senior Fatah officials have wrested control
of their movement from the hands of a younger and
more pro-American generation of Fatah activists.
While Meshaal agreed to King Abdullah's
invitation to attend a meeting in Mecca with Abu
Mazen and senior Fatah officials, Hamas' senior
leadership was initially skeptical that Abdullah
could successfully negotiate a unity government.
They were even more surprised by Abu Mazen's
sudden change of heart. Through all of January Abu
Mazen had hesitated to meet with Hamas officials
and had not given his approval to meeting them,
even when the Saudis began to apply pressure to
him in mid-January. But by the end of January, Abu
Mazen began to have deep doubts that the
US-authored anti-Hamas program would succeed.
January had been a particularly bloody
month, with the slaying of dozens of Palestinians.
More important, Hamas officials had intercepted
truckloads of weapons intended for Fatah forces in
Gaza. The shipment included newly polished M14
automatic rifles. The pro-American Fatah faction
in Gaza was embarrassed that their trucks had been
intercepted, but defended themselves by saying
that the trucks carried medical equipment and
tents. Then Fatah spokesmen upped the ante,
announcing that they had arrested five Iranian
military trainers helping Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
This was proof, they said, that Hamas was being
armed and trained by Iranian Shi'ite radicals.
Fatah did not produce the Iranian
trainers, while Hamas leaders said they would pack
"tents and pills" in the trucks and return them to
Fatah - and keep the guns. "The situation was
slipping out of control," a Fatah official
admitted. "There were real fears that the violence
would become general, that many more people would
die."
The increased violence was monitored
closely by Abu Mazen, who worked endless hours
trying to dampen it. He continued to hew a
moderate, fence-sitting line, blaming both
factions for fueling the disagreement. But nothing
seemed to work. In all of this, he was influenced
by Fatah security officials who claimed that Hamas
would soon "break" - that their government would
collapse. When it did, they said, he would be free
to reopen talks with Israel - with US backing.
With the Hamas government still in office, they
argued, those talks would fail.
Abu Mazen
reluctantly agreed with this assessment until the
evening of February 1, when Fatah activists
answering to Dahlan broke into the campus of
Gaza's Islamic University, setting fire to three
buildings. The invasion of the Islamic University
marked a major escalation in the fighting, and a
shift in Abu Mazen's thinking. On the morning of
February 2, as three separate buildings on the
university campus lay in ashes, Hamas leaders told
Abu Mazen that they now had little choice: the
invasion of the Islamic University was being
viewed by their rank-and-file as an invasion of a
sacred precinct. Fatah, they said, had stepped
over the line.
In response, Hamas security
officials sanctioned the occupation of
Fatah-controlled police facilities in northern
Gaza, and three were quickly overrun. Abu Mazen
was stunned by the Islamic University incident and
Hamas' reaction. "It really shook him," a Fatah
official said. The next morning, with Erakat and
Abed Rabbo still safely in Washington, Abu Mazen
confirmed that he would attend the Mecca summit.
"His basic thinking was that if he had to do
something," an American official who monitored the
negotiations stated, "he did not want to be
remembered as the first Palestinian president to
preside over a Palestinian civil war."
While Abu Mazen had continually wavered in
the face of increasing violence, Saudi King
Abdullah had never doubted that he would come to
Mecca. It was only a matter of making it clear to
him that he would have the political protection he
needed to face Rice when she showed up in Ramallah
- a meeting that was scheduled for February 19,
after Abdullah had forged a Hamas-Fatah unity
government.
"For the Saudi royal family,
the violence in Gaza [the overrunning of the
Islamic University] was the worst kind of news," a
Palestinian official speculated. "The royal family
could see the conflict worsening just by switching
on the television. They wanted to put an end to
it. They were also worried about their own street.
How could they answer claims that they were
supporting a program designed to have Sunnis kill
Sunnis?"
It was in this context that King
Abdullah decided that he would break with the
United States. He had given the White House one
year to deliver on its promise to transform the
Palestinian political landscape, and the US had
failed. "Abdullah decided that he wanted an Arab
solution to an Arab problem," a former American
diplomat confirmed. "With instability in the West
Bank and Gaza, in Lebanon, and with deepening
divisions between Sunnis and
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