Page 2 of 3 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Yes,
Bush is naked, what of
it? By Tony Karon
them to
agree that peace talks were impossible because
Arafat was autocratic and deceitful. So the US
demanded that, prior to any progress in the "peace
process", president Arafat would have to cede
control over Palestinian finances and security
forces to the democratically elected legislature
as well as the cabinet and prime minister it
picked.
Then Arafat died, and the
US-favored prime minister Mahmoud
Abbas
became president. Sharon promptly declared Abbas
too weak for peace, a prophecy he helped fulfill
by showing the Palestinian electorate that Abbas
would achieve nothing through patient, plaintive
conversations with Washington.
Still,
those dopey Americans didn't seem to get the joke;
so, perversely, they pushed for Palestinian
elections, which Hamas duly won. Blindsided, the
Bush administration promptly rushed out the
patently naive explanation that Hamas had won
because of Fatah's corruption (even as it
continued to coddle some of the most corrupt
elements in Fatah).
As former European
Union special Middle East adviser Alastair Crooke
has made clear, the election result was indeed
primarily a repudiation of Fatah and its policies.
International experience has shown that voters
will tolerate a measure of corruption on the part
of political leaders as long as they deliver on
some of their promises. (Brazil's current
government is a perfect example of this.) But
Palestinian voters recognized that Fatah had led
them up a blind alley - almost 20 years of
negotiations had not ended Israel's de facto
control of Gaza and had seen the steady expansion,
in the form of settlements, of its occupation of
the West Bank.
Palestinian democracy had
returned the "wrong" party to power. The US
response was best summed up in Brecht's quip about
an official East German statement claiming "the
people" had forfeited the confidence of the
government: "Wouldn't it be easier to dissolve the
people and elect another in their place?"
The Bush administration quickly adopted a
policy of collective punishment. The Palestinians
were to be choked until they relented and reversed
their electoral decision. An undoubtedly amused
Israeli leadership now watched as Washington
reversed everything it had said about Palestinian
governance, demanding that all authority over
security, finances, and anything else that came to
mind must be placed, as in Arafat's time, in the
hands of the president. More important, it also
began fomenting coup plans in which US-backed
Palestinian security forces answering to Fatah
strongman Muhammad Dahlan would seize control of
Gaza. We now know how well that worked out.
As the Bush administration's vaudeville
act spins on, Israel will play along, while
damning the hapless Abbas with faint gestures of
encouragement. Israel has agreed to begin
trickling funds - belonging to the Palestinian
Administration, but withheld since Hamas' election
victory - into Abbas' coffers (but not all at
once, mind you, lest he get the idea that he has
any freedom of action). It has also agreed to
release some 250 of the more than 9,000
Palestinian prisoners it holds (and only
lower-ranking members of Abbas' faction at that).
These two "gestures" are an indication of just how
little Israel seems ready to do to "bolster"
Abbas.
By contrast, Hamas is using its
capture more than a year ago of Israeli soldier
Gilad Shalit to negotiate the release of more than
1,000 Palestinian prisoners - and it has taken
care to make sure that its lists include prisoners
from all factions. You can guess which approach
will prove more popular among Palestinians.
Whether it's an enfeebled Abbas or an
unyielding Hamas, Israel will simply continue to
argue that there is no real Palestinian partner in
sight. The show of creating one will go on, but it
is designed to fail.
2. Mahmoud Abbas
Mahmoud Abbas has looked like a very
unhappy camper for a very long time. As well he
should. As former US negotiator (under president
Bill Clinton) Rob Malley and former Palestinian
adviser Hussein Agha noted four years ago, Abbas
(aka Abu Mazen) had an ambiguous role in the
script written by Ariel Sharon and green-lighted
by the Bush administration:
Let Abu Mazen succeed in order to
marginalize Arafat, end the armed intifada, and
achieve for Israel a measure of security. But
let him succeed only so far and no further. Let
him bring about a more peaceful situation
without benefiting from its potential political
returns. For Abu Mazen's success could bring him
strength, and his strength would revitalize the
threat of a unified Palestinian movement that
his rise was meant to thwart.
Having
gambled his political life on the willingness of
the United States to press Israel to conclude a
two-state deal, Abbas has long been glumly aware
of just how bare the negotiation cupboard really
is. For years now, he has had to stand by silently
being damned, in the eyes of his own people, by
the minimalist praise and parsimonious gestures
occasionally tossed his way.
Whatever the
rhetoric, it's not going to get much better. After
all, the Bush administration abandoned the role of
seriously mediating between Israel and the
Palestinians almost as soon as it took office.
Since then, its efforts can best be summed up by
the all-nighters Secretary of State Condi Rice
pulled in Jerusalem, as if engaged in real
diplomacy. She would then crow about how she had
gotten a border crossing into Gaza opened (which
would invariably close within days of her
departure). As if that wasn't sufficient
humiliation for Abbas, he had to endure periodic
scoldings from Rice over his failure to provoke a
Palestinian civil war with Hamas.
Abbas'
problem is that neither Bush - even if he wanted
to, which he doesn't - nor any successor US
president is likely to risk the domestic political
aggravation attached to pressing Israel into a
peace agreement. Bush's Middle East policy
director Elliott Abrams recently reassured
pro-Israel groups in the US that all of Rice's
shuttling around the region was simply "process",
designed to placate the Arabs and win their
support for putting more pressure on Iran.
President Bush, Abrams said, had no intention of
actually pressing Israel back to the negotiating
table.
The Palestinian electorate knew the
game was up long before the Fatah leadership faced
up to that fact. Alastair Crooke, a director of
Conflicts Forum, a UK- and US-based non-profit
organization working for dialogue with Islamists,
noted:
Hardly any Palestinians now believe
that Palestinian "good behavior" - as promised
to Israel by Fatah - will induce the US to
ignore its domestic Israel lobby and exert
pressure on Israel to withdraw from the lands
occupied in 1967 ... Palestinians have seen
their putative state in the West Bank
salami-sliced away by settlements, army posts,
military zones, fences and Israeli-only roads
that cut the territory into enclaves in which
2.5 million Palestinians are confined, their
movements heavily curtailed ... The US and the
[European Union] argued that Palestinian
violence was the problem; but the Palestinians
noted that in periods of quiet more rather than
less of their land fell to the Israeli
salami-slicer yet still the international
community remained silent.
So Abbas is
a very lonely man. And the corruption all around
him is but a symptom of the way his movement has
lost its political identity and become instead
just a vehicle for personal power and
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