Hamas arrests Fatah leaders in Gaza

A week of bizarre tit-for-tat arrests of leaders of the opposing Palestinian movements culminated with the arrest of 15 Fatah leaders, taken from their homes in Gaza, by Hamas forces on Friday.

Those arrested yesterday included three Fatah-affiliated district governors, as well as the two highest Gaza representatives of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the officials said.

A spokesman for Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, declined to confirm the number or the identity of those taken into custody, but he did confirm that the arrests were a response to Fatah's seizures of "Hamas political leaders" in the West Bank.

The two Palestinian organizations have engaged in a bitter and often violent rivalry for several years, culminating in Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza one year ago. Fatah's power in Gaza was largely erased and it was left in control only of the West Bank.

Both groups have periodically carried out arrest sweeps targeting rivals in the territories they control. Several of the men arrested by Hamas on Friday had already been seized in the past and later released.

Hamas initiated the crackdown after a July 25 explosion in Gaza killed five Hamas members and a 6-year-old girl. Hamas blamed Fatah for the deaths and responded by arresting male members of the organization. Fatah denied responsibility, and launched it's own roundup of Hamas men in the West Bank in retaliation.

In all, it is estimated that both sides have seized about 200 of the other groups members, although neither side will reveal an exact number or the identities of those they are holding.

Jimmy Carter Acts Like a Statesman Again

What is a statesman? Is it a soothing presence like James Baker, willing to lend his name to things like "The Iraq Study Group" so that the United States can ignore what was offered as advice in exchange for an extra six months of pretending the war in Iraq is going well? Or is it something more like Jimmy Carter, who stands up and delivers knock out blows to the collective consciousness of people who pay attention to what's going on?

Chris Floyd nails it:

Here's a thought experiment. Try to imagine a major American political figure boldly calling on Europe to break with the United States, unilaterally lift the blockage on Gaza and negotiate directly with Hamas, the democratically-elected government of Palestine.

He then goes on to reveal -- from his access to the most highly classified intelligence -- that Israel, far from being at risk from "destruction" by Iran or anyone, possesses a minimum of 150 nuclear weapons: the first time that any such high-level U.S. official has ever publicly confirmed the existence of Israel's arsenal, much less detailed its size.

What's more, this Establishment renegade then calls for the complete withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, combined with pledges of massive aid to rebuild Iraq "from the destruction we've caused."

Yes, Jimmy Carter did just that over the weekend. Did any of that appear in your newspaper or on your television? Chances are, if it ever does, it will be accompanied by the sneering presence of someone who has worked tirelessly to provide political cover to the Bush Administration. Think of a Fox News roundtable and a wholesale condemnation of Carter, accompanied by sneering and leering and misinformation.

What did Jimmy Carter do that was so wrong? He met with people and used his status as a former President to advocate for peace. Then, he had the temerity to follow through on what he had promised. And, he had the courage to speak about what he was doing:

Although it is 27 years since he left the White House, Carter recently met Hamas leaders in Damascus. He declared a breakthrough in persuading the organisation to offer a Gaza ceasefire and a halt to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel if Israel stopped its air and ground strikes on the territory.

Carter described western governments' self-imposed ban on talking to Hamas as unrealistic and said everyone knew Israel was negotiating with the organisation through an Egyptian mediator, Omar Suleiman. Suleiman took the Hamas ceasefire offer to Jerusalem last week.

Israel was still hesitating over the ceasefire, Carter confirmed yesterday. "I talked to Mr Suleiman the day before yesterday. I hope the Israelis will accept," he said.

While being scrupulously polite to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who represent the Fatah movement, he was scathing about their exclusion of Hamas. He described the Fatah-only government as a "subterfuge" aimed at getting round Hamas's election victory two years ago. "The top opinion pollster in Ramallah told me the other day that opinion on the West Bank is shifting to Hamas, because people believe Fatah has sold out to Israel and the US," he said.

Carter said the Quartet's policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams "a very militant supporter of Israel". The ex-president, whose election-monitoring Carter Centre had just certified Hamas's election victory as free and fair, addressed the Quartet for 12 minutes at its session in London in 2006. He urged it to talk to Hamas, which had offered to form a unity government with Fatah, the losers.

That, in a nutshell, is what a statesman does. This, in a nutshell, is what delusional neocons do:

Confidential documents obtained by "Vanity Fair" magazine have surfaced that appear to show that the U.S had planned to overthrow the Hamas-led Palestinian government shortly after they won their election in 2006.

In one of the documents, from March of 2007, detail a plan to remove Hamas by force. By supplying weapons and money to rival Fatah fighters, the U.S could install the movement into power, even though Hamas was democratically elected.

Sources at the U.S. State Department and Palestinian officials corroborate the documents, which revealed the plans were to be implemented by the State Department.

[SNIP]

The report confirms long-standing allegations by Hamas and other Palestinian officials that the U.S has been supplying arms and money to Fatah, so that fighters could "bring down the government". Even some senior Fatah officials themselves have accused the U.S of "meddling" in Palestinian affairs.

The magazine said that Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams "were entrusted with provoking a Palestinian civil war", and also quoted a former U.S Intelligence officer--experienced in covert planning--as saying that the plan was "close to the margins" of legality, but "probably wasn't illegal".

Your State Department at work. These are the people who are enabled by the people who sneer at Carter. These are the people who were supposed to bring dignity and honor back to Washington. And, once can just hear the "anti-Semite" charges cranking up, courtesy of the likes of Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz. Floyd notices that Carter let loose with a bombshell:

Carter's unprecedented explicitness regarding Israel's nuclear weapons somehow escaped the notice of the Guardian -- which sponsored the festival and conducted the interview -- but The Times picked it up:

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark...is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line.

But Carter, who as president had full access to America's secret knowledge about Israel's arsenal, steamrolled right over the long-held public line. The existence of this arsenal is of course the true context of Middle East relations: the fact that Israel can "obliterate" any of its antagonists in a matter of minutes, while none of them poses, even remotely, a similar "existential threat" to Israel. Yet the entire U.S. "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" gears much of its Middle Eastern policies around the professed goal of guaranteeing the survival and security of Israel.

The plain fact is that Israel is more than capable of guaranteeing its own survival. As for its manifold security problems, these might be better addressed by a more realistic, pragmatic engagement with its neighbors, and with the Palestinians locked down under its control. But as long as Israeli leaders can count on the full backing of the United States -- financially, diplomatically and militarily -- no matter what they do, they will have no incentive to come to any viable terms, and can continue their own dominationist policies, which over the years have only bred more suffering, more radicalization and more intransigence in their opponents.

How can it be wrong to point out that what is happening in Gaza is a humanitarian nightmare? Are all of the people complicit in the crimes of a militarized few? Wouldn't it make sense to reach out to the suffering and encourage them to get involved in the political process? Or is it too late, given that the Bush Administration has meddled in the affairs of these people to an extent that has blown away any possible chance of American influence?

I think the most important question is not whether there really are 150 nuclear weapons in Israel's arsenal. The most important question is whether any of them are scattered or deployed throughout the world for strategic reasons.

Either way, how much of a threat can Iran really be to a country with 150 nuclear weapons?

James Rubin Busts McCain for Hamas Hypocrisy

Cindy was getting a manicure when the news broke that George Bush had made his smarmy appeasement slur, and her polish wasn't dry by the time JSM had jumped on the bandwagon and agreed whole heartedly with the brilliance that is Bush.

Yes, indeed, he did chime in. Yes, indeed. The Democrats are a bunch of soft-on-Israel terrorist appeasers. Talking to “terrorists and radicals'’ was no different than appeasing Hitler and the Nazis. “Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,'’ McCain told reporters on the campaign bus after an appearance in Ohio. Asked if he thought that Barack Obama was an "appeaser" McCain was maddeningly, infuriatingly, smarmy in his answer. “I think that Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terrorism, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, that wants to wipe Israel off the map, who denies the Holocaust. That’s what I think Senator Obama ought to explain to the American people.'’

All well and good. So long as you understand that this is a new position McCain has settled on. Two years ago, when he wasn't running for president, he wasn't just singing from a different hymnal than the current one, he was across town worshiping with a small charismatic congregation.

Charging your opponents with appeasement and likening them to Neville Chamberlain in the Knesset is a brutal blow. It is bad enough that Republicans use the politics of personal destruction here at home, but to deploy that kind of political weapon at an occasion as solemn as an American president addressing the parliament of a friendly government marks a new low.

McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain's statement on Hamas, "I don't think that anybody should take that seriously." Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That's why they say such things.

But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

Nothing really to add. McCain will say anything to pander for votes. But we know that already.

The Middle East: just waiting out the ineffectual and counterproductive Bush administration

Throughout the Middle East, there seems to be a degree of resignation in the air – a sense that Gaza will suffer for the remainder of the Bush administration, and once he is out of the way, the dialogue will commence. The next administration will talk to Hamas, and so will the Israelis. "They'll have to," said Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian human rights activist "because they'll have seen that Hamas can deliver."

The looming end of the Bush regime underpins the political thought throughout the region. The political leaders of the region are looking forward to the end, preparing for change, and readying themselves for the coming dialogue.

Throughout the region, the disdain is virtually palpable, even among people like Dr. Sarraj, who consider themselves friends of the United States. The aura of just waiting it out does not bode well for any future Bush administration initiatives where the Israel/Palestine dilemma is concerned.

This sense of resignation and time-biding offers context for Condi’s recent embarrassingly inept trip to the region. (We know it was a failure because we didn’t hear anything about it.) The trip was such a flop that the tepid response by the Saudis that they might consider attending a U.S. sponsored summit was hailed as a significant development.

One Egyptian diplomat put it about as bluntly as possible "No one likes American policy."

The Israeli’s are equally critical:

A senior Israeli official sat silently for several seconds after he was asked which negotiating approach was most likely to lead to progress in peace talks with Israel's Arab neighbors. Then he laughed and, in flawless English, suggested to a colleague that he must not have understood the question. "I don't see any promising pathway," he said. "There is a huge gap between the rhetoric and what people believe."

The Israeli government understands that to have peace with Syria "means giving back the Golan Heights," the strategic high ground that Israel seized in 1967, and "we're willing to discuss it," he said. But with Bush insisting "from the Oval Office" that the U.S. won't talk to Syria, nothing can be expected. "The Syrians really want to talk to the United States," the official said. Even among government officials in Iraq there's little embrace of Bush policy, and surprising expressions of distrust.

Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy, with three decades in clandestine service, sworn to protect the Jewish state from enemies such as Hamas, now speaks aloud what was unthinkable until recently. “It is time to negotiate with the movements leaders.” (The leaders he now advocates dialogue with are the same leaders Mossad has made a policy of targeting for assassination.)

The Hamas takeover of Gaza in June effectively split the Palestinians into Gaza, controlled by Hamas, and the West Bank, politically dominated by the more secular Fatah party and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his appointed prime minister, Salam Fayad.

In response, the White House has rolled out what it calls a "West-Bank-first" strategy. (Without batting an eyelash that the strategy was “Gaza First” right up to the moment it blew up in their faces.)

The “new” approach envisions financial, political and diplomatic support for Mr. Abbas and Fatah. The thinking is that life can be improved in the West Bank to such a degree that support for Hamas will evaporate in both the West Bank and Gaza. Simultaneously, Washington maneuvers to work with Israel to isolate Hamas further, while refusing to talk to the leaders.

"I don't say we should talk to Hamas out of sympathy to them. I have no sympathy whatsoever for Hamas. I think they are a ghastly crowd," Mr. Halevy says. "But I have not seen anybody who says the Abbas-Fayad tandem is going to do the job."

Mr. Halevy says defeating Hamas politically is unrealistic, given its enduring popularity among Palestinians. Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian parliamentary elections last year.

"The danger is that they will not be defeated, that they will become more despairing...and they will no longer feel constrained by anything, because there is nothing left for them to hope for," he says.

Then he said something that truly gives me hope. When the former Mossad chief finally “gets it” there is reason to rejoice. "We don't need their recognition," he says. "We are a sovereign state...They need us to recognize them. The shoe is on the wrong foot." (Really, who cares whether Hamas recognizes Israel or not?) We're dealing in issues which are existential to free society," Mr. Halevy says. "When you look around for potential allies in this war, sometimes you have to settle for strange bedfellows."

Rice and Gates are off to the Middle East on a Salvage Operation

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will leave on a highly unusual joint mission to the Middle East. They leave with three objectives, and low expectations.

They need to persuade Iraq’s neighboring states to do more to help stabilize the country, they need to counter the growing influence of Iran in the region, and they hope to get some significant motion going on the development of a peace plan between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Lofty goals, but not likely to be very successful. The United States has little or no credibility in the region. The U.S. has caused massive death and instability in Iraq, and strengthened al Qaeda; they have also failed to calm the strife in Lebanon, bolster the Palestinian Authority, or bring pressure to bear on Syria.

Quite the contrary – U.S. policies have fanned the flames of Sunni extremism, and strengthened Iran. Those are the two things that cause the greatest consternation among the moderate Arab countries, because those are the two entities that threaten their grip on power.

Also not playing well to the locals is U.S. support for the ill-fated Israeli war against Hezbollah last summer. Continued attempts to undermine the popularly-elected Hamas in the Gaza strip. "The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas." Couple that failed strategy with United States’ continued support for Mubarak in Egypt, it pretty much puts the lie to claims that the United States “fosters Muslim democracy.”

The leaders of friendly states have lost faith in the Bush administration and do not believe he will deliver on his promises. Therefore, they are reluctant to risk anything for Bush. “Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

One needn’t read Runes to see other signs of discord in the administration.

On the eve of the trip, unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times that Washington believes Saudi Arabia has been unhelpful in Iraq by not supporting Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government. The administration publicly disavowed the report, but said that Saudi Arabia could do more to help. The leaked complaint seems unlikely to make life easier for Rice and Gates when they arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, early in the trip.

Pentagon and State Department officials said the trip is intended to reassure Arab leaders that the U.S. will uphold its security commitments in the region, and meanwhile, Arab diplomats in Washington resolutely maintain that they need more than reassurances. They have heard a lot of proposals and reassurances, but they have not seen a clear plan for peace or security in the region. The U.S. promises a more active role, but consistently fails to deliver. Arab diplomats in Washington voiced skepticism – anonymously – that the trip would be fruitful.

More than what Rice and Gates say on the trip, “[P]eople will be monitoring the debate in Washington. Everybody is watching that very closely and then will draw their own conclusions.” said one anonymous diplomat.

“There is no clarity,” another diplomat said on condition of anonymity, because he didn't want to disagree publicly with the administration. “The trip in and of itself is not important. What’s important is that the administration commit to dealing with the substantive issues.”

Rice and Gates have their work cut out for them. With 18 months left in office, it will be difficult to reshape the way the region sees the United States, said William Quandt, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, who as an aide to President Jimmy Carter helped craft the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

“I don’t think they have a real strategy that has much chance of working,” Quandt said. Gates, who joined the administration in December, “may be able to calm things down a little. But that won’t change the course.”

The two Secretaries will attend meetings together in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then they will part company. Gates will visit “other gulf states” and Rice will head for Israel and the Palestinain territories to meet with Mahmood Abbas and Israeli leaders. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to the popularly-elected Hamas, which now controls Gaza, but Rice has steadfastly maintained that there will be no dealing with the Hamas, which is the U.S. classifies as a terrorist organization.

Let us hope...

In the wake of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, senior Hamas leaders have vowed to work their influence to free kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Johnston was snatched off the street by gunmen on 12 March, and has not been seen or heard from since, although his wellbeing has been claimed by the Army of Islam, the group that has claimed responsibility for his abduction.

"We have started taking practical steps to release Alan Johnston." Hamas leaders said in a statement released yesterday. Ousted Prime Minister Esmail Hamiya, echoing the sentiment that the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip was a positive development and offered the best hope forhis freedom. "From now on, there will be one legitimate armed forde. We will bring discipline and law to Gaza. It will thus be easier to gain the liberation of the British journalist Alan Johnston. His kidnappers will listen to us more closely."

The Army of Islam, which claims to be holding Johnston has demanded the release of several Islamic militants and the Palestinian-born cleric Abu Qatada who is imprisoned in Britain.

In the wake of the kidnapping, Hamas, trying to move toward legitimate governance from armed insurrection, severed all ties with the Army of Islam, and denounced the abduction. Hamas and Haniya have repeatedly called for his release.

May they be able to secure it soon.

Civil War in Gaza

Oh where to even start. I have been trying all day to write something about the pressure-cooker in Palestine that has blown apart in the last few days.

Five years ago this month, the President of the United States made a Rose Garden speech, wherein he laid out a bold, vivid two-state vision for the Middle East. Israel and Palestine, coexisting side by side, their peoples living in peace and prospering together. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror." he declared back then.

That vision was a mirage.

I certainly do not have the answers to this dilemma but I do know one thing beyond all doubt – a lot of it can be directly traced to the horrid policies of the Bush (mal)administration and the State Department that wasn’t.

United States policy overtly encouraged Israel to withdraw from the Gaza strip – not in and of itself a bad thing. But they also pressed for elections in both the Palestenian territory and Israel. Abbas won the election to replace Arafat as the President of the Palestinian Authority after Arafat’s passing in late 2004. He arrogantly allowed Hamas to run candidates to stand for legitimate election to parliament, thinking that he could defeat them at the polls.

He thought wrong.

So the Bush administration – on the heels of moving the goalposts in Iraq from WMD’s to fostering Democracy – decided that they didn’t much care for Democracy the way the Palestinians exercised it, because gosh-darnit, they picked the wrong leaders. Money and aid was cut off – a situation choreographed by Washington D.C. – in an attempt to strangle Hamas out of the political process.

This blew up in their faces most spectacularly. The attempt to make Hamas unpopular enough that the Palestinians would blame them and their support would erode, instead engendered hatred and pure, unadulterated resolve toward the west, and by extension, to the man they perceived as a marionette of western masters, Abbas. This week, the seething cauldron boiled over. Hamas and Fatah turned their guns on one another, and as it stands now, Hamas is in control in Gaza.

"The two-state vision is dead. It really is," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who was once an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas, whose bouts of vacillation have irritated U.S. officials, yesterday dissolved the Palestinian government in response to Hamas's takeover of Gaza. U.S. officials signaled that they will move quickly to persuade an international peace monitoring group -- known as the Quartet -- to lift aid restrictions on the Palestinian government, allowing direct aid to flow to the West Bank-based emergency government that Abbas will lead.

"There is no more Hamas-led government. It is gone," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the administration must still consult with other members of the Quartet. He said that humanitarian aid will continue to Gaza, but that the dissolution of the Palestinian government is a singular moment that will allow the United States and its allies to create a "new model of engagement."

The evolving U.S. strategy would let the Hamas-run Gaza Strip fend for itself while attempting to bolster Abbas as a moderate leader who can actually govern and deliver peace with Israel. The senior administration official noted that Gaza has no territorial issues with Israel, since there are no Israelis in Gaza, so the Hamas entity there would have no stake in potential peace talks concerning the border on the West Bank.

Referring to Abbas, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters yesterday that "we fully support him in his decision to try and end this crisis for the Palestinian people and to give them an opportunity to return to peace and a better future."

But analysts said yesterday that this strategy of dividing the moderates from the extremists -- which was the core of Bush's 2002 speech -- proved ineffective and may have led to the dilemma facing the administration.

So now, the government has been dissolved, and the Gaza Strip is under Hamas control. Fatah has retreated to the West Bank, and the Bush administration is still supporting Abbas. And a radical Islamic state, committed to the destruction of the jewish state, exists literally on Israel’s doorstep.

No one has asked me, but if they did, I would say that it looks to my eyes like we should probably bow out. Every damned thing we have done has turned around and bit us on the ass. Beyond encouraging the “Quartet” to get aid and assistance flowing, and maybe send a check.

Although I am perhaps the least religious person you will ever encounter, I leave you with a prayer for peace. Oseh Shalom, Gaza.