Policy Note No. 16

In the wake of the fighting that pitted Fatah against Hamas this month, ending in Hamas control over Gaza, the United States has voiced full support for Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. But past US policy greatly contributed to present conditions: a Palestinian national movement in a power struggle over an authority that has no power, and a West Bank split from Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. The Institute's Senior Fellow Nadia Hijab argues that unless the US changes tack it will further weaken those it hopes to keep as allies.

The 26 June 2007 meeting of the Quartet (the US, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations) to appoint Britain's Tony Blair as Middle East envoy brought a weary sense of déjàvu to Palestinians marking their 40th year under Israeli military occupation. So did the 25 June 2007 Sharm Al Shaikh summit of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the PA. Israel's offer to free some 250 Palestinian prisoners (less than 3%) and to release a portion of some $800 million in Palestinian customs revenues showed how little Abbas and Fatah can deliver. And Blair's task of supporting Palestinian "government" is a mission impossible given the reality of West Bank fragmentation by Israeli settlements and Jewish-only roads. [1] Two constants of US policy need to change for meaningful progress: US insistence on 100% alignment with its goals, and unswerving support for Israel that makes possible Israeli settlement of Palestinian lands at no political or financial cost.

A Record of Half-hearted Support to Abbas vs. Whole-Hearted Support to Israel

As early as 2002, Bush made a change in Palestinian leadership a sine qua non for his vision of "two states, living side by side in peace and security": the Palestinian people had to "have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors." [2] In the post-September 11 world, Bush bought into former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's argument that the late Yasser Arafat was unable or unwilling to rein in militants and ignored Israel's far greater use of violence against Palestinians, including many violations of international law such as extra-judicial execution and indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The US pushed for the creation of the post of PA prime minister so as to weaken the presidency headed by Arafat and to bring in Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister (this move later backfired when Hamas won a parliamentary majority). What the US Administration ignored was that, although many Palestinians were unhappy about Arafat's leadership style, there was broad national consensus about the aspirations he represented: an immediate end to Israeli settlement and a release of Palestinian prisoners, followed by freedom in a sovereign state. Abbas resigned as prime minister in September 2003 after just four months partly due to tensions with Arafat, but more fundamentally, as he told the Palestinian Legislative Council, because Israel did not release its grip on the Territories or end its military attacks, and the US put no pressure on it to do so. [3]

Bush went on to break openly with past US policy (and with international law) in his 14 April 2004 exchange of letters with Sharon, in which he supported Israel's settlement blocs in the Territories, its rejection of the Palestinian right of return, and its self-definition as a Jewish state rather than a state in which all citizens had equal rights. [4] Over a year later, on 26 May 2005, Bush tried to placate Abbas when he said that any changes to the 1949 armistice lines would have to be mutually agreed. But the fact that the US remained unwilling to challenge Israel's settlement project made such statements meaningless. During 2005, when Abbas served as president for a full year - and before Hamas was elected - he was fulsomely praised as a moderate but had no tangible US support on core issues. Israel disengaged from Gaza in August 2005 without coordination with the then Fatah-led PA, kept Gaza under siege, and continued to colonize the West Bank. Fatah's inability to deliver on national aspirations together with growing accusations of corruption greatly contributed to the Hamas victory in the free and fair parliamentary elections of January 2006.

Insisting on 100% Alignment

Since the Hamas election, the Bush Administration, mired in Iraq, has preferred to tar all Islamist movements with the same brush, in spite of the gradual Hamas transformation into a party that effectively accepted a state alongside Israel and that had upheld a unilateral ceasefire for a year. This evolution has been amply documented by such figures as Henry Siegman as well as by the International Crisis Group, who could neither be accused of anti-Semitism nor of being apologists for terrorism. [5] Instead, the US moved swiftly to torpedo Palestinian unity efforts and to financially starve the PA. Soon after its election, Hamas proposed a unity government with Fatah. According to the leaked end of mission report by UN Special Coordinator for the ME Peace Process Alvaro de Soto, "...before the idea could advance any further the US made it known that they wanted Hamas to be left alone to form its government.'" [6] As for the Palestinian customs revenues, "the US, as its representatives intimated to us, does not wish Israel to transfer these funds to the PA" - although some 70% of the population had been pushed into poverty.

And, even though Saudi Arabia, one of the closest US allies in the region, managed to broker a Palestinian unity government at Mecca in February 2007, the US did not lift the Treasury Department's restrictions on dealing with the PA. Indeed, according to de Soto's report "... a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence,' referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured, because 'it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.'" The US maintained the restrictions even after the Hamas-Fatah unity government signed on to the Arab peace initiative at the Riyadh Arab summit in March 2007, although this arguably met the conditions set for talks with Hamas: renunciation of violence, recognition of Israel, and recognition of past agreements. Most seriously, as has been extensively reported, the US began to provide military support to Preventive Security Force (PSF) chief Muhammed Dahlan. It encouraged Israel to allow 500 PSF members into Gaza in mid-May to, as Israel's deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh put it, "change the balance" in favor of Fatah. [7]

Although Hamas has not been eliminated through financial and military means, the Bush Administration is unlikely to change course, and Gaza will continue to suffer. The US may be able to conjure up a picture of a representative Palestinian government based on new elections, and even of a "state." But that assumes that Palestinian national aspirations are skin-deep and that minimal support to allies can replace action on core issues, all evidence to the contrary. A more effective policy would be to recognize that Hamas has deep roots in the local population and has evolved its ideology, that it is better to unify rather than polarize political forces that are in fact seeking to join the mainstream, and that there is no alternative, at the end of the day, to an end to Israel's settlement enterprise and self-determination for the Palestinian people.


[1] The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs carries a chilling slide of the skeleton that remains of the West Bank http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/InsertMap_Fragmentation_May07-withCheckpoint.pdf
[2] Speech of 24 June 2002 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/print/20020624-3.html
[3] http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/09/06/mideast/
[4] See http://imeu.net/news/article002605.shtml
[5] See Siegman's "Hamas: The Last Chance for Peace?" in The New York Review of Books, 27 April 2006
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18939 and ICG's "Dealing with Hamas," 26 January 2004 and "Enter Hamas: The Challenges of Political Integration," 18 January 2006, crisisgroup.org. See also Khaled Hroub, "A 'New Hamas' through Its New Documents," in Journal of Palestine Studies XXXV no. 4 (Summer 2006).
[6] http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/06/12/DeSotoReport.pdf
[7] The Washington Post of 18 May 2007. See also the excellent summary in the International Institute for Strategic Studies "Hamas coup in Gaza," Vol. 13, Issue 5, June 2007
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