http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1785071,00.html
The Guardian  Monday May 29 2006
Punishment of Palestinians will create a crucible of trouble for the world
George Bush’s policies helped build Hamas; now a dangerous linkage
with Iran and Iraq threatens a mega-crisis
By David Hirst
Patients with chronic kidney disease dying for lack of their routine
dialysis; 165,000 employees of the Palestine Authority unpaid for two and
a half months; women selling jewellery for fuel or food … the
“humanitarian crisis” of the West Bank and Gaza is not a Darfur. And what
most shocks Arabs and Muslims is that it stems from a conscious political
decision by the world’s only superpower. First, they say, you give us
Iraq, now on the brink of civil war. Then this: the starving of a whole
people.
The psychological and strategic linkage between Iraq and Palestine is far
from new. But its latest, most intense phase began with the US invasion of
Iraq – conceived by the Bush administration’s pro-Israeli neoconservatives
as the first great step in their region-wide scheme for “regime change”
and “democratisation”, whose consummation was to be an Arab-Israeli
settlement. Indeed, professors Mearsheimer and Walt argue in their study,
The Israel Lobby, that there very likely wouldn’t have been an invasion at
all but for Israel and, above all, its partisans inside the US.
But it had always been crystal clear that the more authentic any democracy
Arabs or Palestinians did come to enjoy, US-inspired or not, the more
their conception of a settlement would collide with the US-Israeli one.
The point was swiftly proved, in the wake of Hamas’s assumption of power,
when President Bush declared: “We support democracy, but that doesn’t mean
we have to support governments elected as a result of democracy.” And his
administration set about engineering Palestinian “regime change” in
reverse.
Its strategy found more or less willing accomplices – Europeans, Arab
governments, some Palestinians themselves. But it was always going to be a
perilous one; the more vigorously it was pursued in the face of the
opposition that it was bound to encounter, the more likely it was to make
of Palestine a crucible of trouble for its own people, the region and the
world – very much like the one that other quasi-colonial western
intervention had already made of Iraq.
The idea was to get the Palestinians, through collective punishment, to
repudiate the very people they had just elected. Some do blame Hamas. But
most of those blame America much more. If anything, sanctions have had the
opposite effect from that intended, encouraging people to rally round the
new government. Buoyed by its own popularity, on top of its electoral
legitimacy, Hamas won’t easily relinquish power – “not without a war”,
said Iyyad Sarraj, a Gaza psychologist.
Even if the US did succeed in bringing Hamas down, it would, like the
overthrow of Saddam, be a catastrophic kind of success – plunging
Palestine, too, into the chaos and internecine strife that is the
antithesis of the modern, democratic, pro-western Middle East order the US
is trying to build. It is clear that, with President Mahmoud Abbas’s
bombshell proposal for a referendum on the nature of a final peace raising
the political stakes and with skirmishes in Gaza raising the military
ones, war between Hamas and Fatah is eminently possible. It is far from
clear that America’s “side” could win. “If Fatah couldn’t fight Hamas
while it was still in power,” said General Ilan Paz, the former head of
Israel’s civil administration in the territories, “how could it gain
control with Hamas in power and itself disintegrated?”
Furthermore, chaos in the territories would open the way to militants,
jihadists and suicide bombers from the rest of the world, just as it did
in Iraq. Iran, the non-Arab country that is now the main state patron of
Arab radicalism, was quicker than any Arab government to offer money to
the new Hamas regime. An intrinsic part of its wider strategic and nuclear
ambitions, Palestine now ranks among Iran’s top foreign-policy priorities.
Abbas says that Hizbullah and al-Qaida are already active in Gaza. From
where, if not from such outsiders, have come the long-range Katyusha
missiles that have begun to target southern Israel from Gaza? And if Hamas
were driven from office, it would go underground again, resuming with a
vengeance the resistance it has suspended.
As for the Arabs, they would be at least as subject to the fallout from
Palestine as they are from Iraq’s. Their discredited regimes hardly know
what to fear more: the example of a Hamas democratically installed or
undemocratically ousted. The first would encourage the ascension of their
own Islamists. The civil war liable to result from the second would arouse
even more dangerous passions among them. Broadly speaking, Hamas has Arab,
especially Islamist, public opinion on its side, and the more the regimes
defer to the US in its anti-Hamas campaign, the greater discredit they
will fall into.
For Rami Khouri, a leading Beirut columnist, the Palestine cause risks
being transformed from a “national” into a “civilisational” one, with
“potentially dangerous linkages between events in Palestine-Israel and the
rest of the Middle East”.
“Hundreds of thousands of young people will feel duped and betrayed. The
wellspring of support for Hamas- and Muslim Brotherhood-style democratic
engagement will slowly dry up in favour of more intense armed struggle.
They will stop wasting time trying to redress grievances through peaceful,
democratic politics or diplomacy … Bringing down the Hamas-led
Palestinian government will bring further radicalisation, resistance and
terrorism across the region.” Well aware of this resonance, the
Palestinian finance minister, Omar Abdul Razeq, warned: “The entire region
will catch fire if the Palestinian people are pushed to a situation where
they have nothing to lose.”
Suddenly this month the Bush administration seemed to grasp something of
the perils it is courting. And those US-engineered privations of Gaza were
too scandalous to ignore. At a meeting of the Quartet (the EU, the US, the
UN and Russia), it offered $10m in emergency medical aid. The largesse was
paltry and grudging, but at least it seemed to indicate that Washington
had given up hope of bringing about immediate “regime change” via economic
ruin. Gideon Levy, a pro-Palestinian Israeli commentator, was even moved
to say: “Hamas is winning.”
Hardly. For the only substantive way in which it could be said to be doing
that would be if the US started drawing the right conclusions from this
spectacularly unwelcome result of Arab democratisation – the most
important of which is that, were it not for US policies, Hamas would never
have won the elections.
But that would require a fundamental, revolutionary change of heart. In
the opinion of Mearsheimer and Walt, the extraordinary US attachment to
Israel – that moral and strategic “burden” – makes such a change
impossible any time soon. So the fear must now be that, long before this
could happen, the Middle East’s “dangerous linkages” will assert
themselves even more dangerously than before, and that those two ongoing
crises – Palestine and Iraq, which the attachment did so much to engender
– will be joined, and fused into a single mega-crisis, by a third: when,
on its protege’s behalf, the Bush administration goes to war against Iran.
David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963 to
2001
dhirst@beirut.com
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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration
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