Who gave Gaza to Hamas? Bush, Cheney and the NeoCons are largely at fault.

One of the most significant events in the Palestine/Israel situation has just occurred. The results of the election which the Palestinian government of Fatah was forced into have come to fruit. Fatah has been kicked out of Gaza and the extremist Islamic Iranian-backed Hamas has taken over. As M. J. Rosenberg describes the situation:

Gaza has fallen to Hamas. Abu Mazen's Fatah is on the run. Unless a United Nations force (like UNIFIL) steps in, a sliver of territory with a population of 1.4 million, a short drive from Tel Aviv will become a dagger aimed at Israel's heart and perhaps even an Al Qaeda staging ground. A humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions is a certainty.

Yep. No one needs to negotiate with the Islamists or their Iranian and Syrian backers, and the Palestinians are their own worst enemies, so just fence then away and every time one of them gets out of like and bombs those he considers the oppressors, just oppress them harder. Then just ignore the nasty beggars. They'll go away. Don't believe that? Continue reading Rosenberg's excellent analysis of what happened. Here is a key point he makes:

...it is not difficult understanding how Hamas won the legislative elections in 2006. This is another ugly part of the story. First we demanded that the Palestinians hold elections (Abbas didn’t want them), then we dispatched monitors to certify sure they were “free and fair” which they were, but when we didn’t like the election results we rejected them and promised that the Palestinians would “pay.” Almost immediately Members of Congress rushed to stop almost all forms of aid not just to Hamas-run institutions but to the Palestinian people at large.

There was another way we might have gone. We could have welcomed Hamas’s participation in the election as a sign that Hamas was implicitly accepting the Oslo framework (which it was), insisted on the complete cessation of violence, and then used carrots and sticks to encourage the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority to mend its ways. But we offered no carrots, just sticks. And we didn’t even make much of an effort to strengthen Hamas’s arch-enemy, President Mahmoud Abbas, with Congress hastening to impose redundant and insulting conditions even on aid that was to be sent through him.

It was all fun and games, politics as usual. Meanwhile, Hamas looked better and better to a people whose salaries were not being paid, thanks to the US sponsored international boycott of the PA, and whose schools and hospitals were collapsing.

Today it is almost amusing to contemplate the professions of horror on the part of right-wing Israelis (and their neocon friends) who scream “bloody murder” about an outcome they helped effect and actually welcome.

The name of their game was, is, and always will be making sure that Israel has “no partner” with whom to negotiate. Their worst fear is of Palestinians like Mahmoud Abbas who is a credible negotiating partner.

Sure has worked well, hasn't it? I'm sure that the NeoCons and Dick Cheney are delighted, while I wonder if anyone has bothered to mention the bad news to Bush. Bush gets testy with underlings who dare give him bad news, and it's really not like Bush has a clue regarding what to do. Does he dare create an Israel - Palestinian Czar to turn it over to as he has just done the Iraq - Afghanistan twin disasters with "Czar" Lute? Might not be all that bad an idea, but how much of the Presidency can Bush offload onto other people because he can't figure out what to do? At some point it becomes logical to simply bring in a real President who is up to the job himself.

But anyway, the question is still on the table? Who lost Gaza? Whose fault is THIS disaster?

The Palestinians, of course. But hardly theirs alone. As Nahum Barnea, Israel's finest journalist, put it today in Yediot Achronoth, "The US and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure. The Americans, in their lack of understanding for the processes of Islamization in the territories, pressured to hold democratic elections and brought Hamas to power with their own hands…. Since the elections, Israel, like the US, declared over and over that "Abu Mazen must be strengthened," but in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert's kisses and backslapping turned Abu Mazen into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street."

The failures to which Barnea refers didn't start with the Palestinian elections either, not by a long shot. Back when Hamas was just a gleam in Sheik Ahmad Yassin’s blind eye, Israeli right-ringers were implementing a strategy to eliminate the authority of Palestinian moderates by building up religious extremists. These Israelis (some very high in Likud governments) believed that only supplanting Arafat’s Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.

M. J. Rosenberg continues with his excellent analysis, which you should go read.

Remember that time seven years ago when then-President Bill Clinton was able to get the Israelis and Fatah to sit down together and nearly agree to settle the Israeli - Palestinian problem? It was torpedoed by one man, Yassir Arafat. With a solution that close, Arafat could have been dealt with but it was time for Bush to take over the Presidency.

Bush and the NeoCons wanted much grander solutions, which included invading Iraq and setting up a demonstration state that showed how free elections (the form is what democracy is all about, isn't that so? Rule of Law? Traditions? Unimportant!) and a free-market small-government economy could bring the Muslims out of the Dark Ages and into the Modern World.

So the Bush administration dropped the ball on things that Clinton considered important and workable, like resolving the Israeli - Palestinian conflict and preparing to prevent terrorist incidents, and instead embarked on what is now clearly known to be the most disastrous series of foreign policy blunders in all of America's history. So we got 9/11, the occupation of Iraq, and now the total collapse of rational Palestinian government. Oh, yeah. We also got an expensive and still non-working white elephant called the Missile Defense System.

When you combine the idiocies of conservative free-market ideology with the ignorance of and refusal to learn about the cultures you intend to transform, then you ignore the experience of the Generals who tell you how things work while you go off headlong into an unneeded and unwinnable war, and give this entire witches-brew over to the tender mercies of the extremist wings of the Republican Party to finance and steal money from, the makings of the current disasters in American domestic policies, economic, taxation and the almost entirely Bush-made disaster that has overtaken the Middle East become clear. This mess that the Republicans have created will take generations to recover from, and historians will be looking back in horror for centuries.

It has been an educational period of time. After Nixon - Agnew - Kissinger I thought I understood how bad the Republican Party could be if placed in power. This administration has shown me that my imagination just couldn't reach the depths of depravity and ignorance the Republicans have gone to in reality. And just think. A lot of us have been permitted to watch the Republican train-wreck unfold, live and in color.

I think I would have preferred to go to Cleveland, thank you. Or gone to see a slasher movie that I could have walked out on.