Vanity Fair: The Gaza Bombshell

Not that this is new or surprising information...

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Complete article here

"Thus have We placed leaders in every town, its wicked men, to plot (and burrow) therein: but they only plot against their own souls, and they perceive it not." [Holy Quran, 6:123]

"This Week in Palestine"

By Guest Blogger Rose Mishaan

It has been a pretty eventful week and a half. After the Hamas "coup" of Gaza, the Fatah forces have been making their presence known in the West Bank -- mostly in the form of many armed guards standing around the main square and various government buildings in Ramallah and occasionally masked men with rifles riding around town in jeeps. The situation seems to have stabilized somewhat, at least here. I can't say much for those trapped in Gaza with no way in, no way out, no aid, no food, and no fuel.

Aside from the sectarian fighting, the occupation is alive and well. I cross the Qalandia checkpoint twice a day on my way to and from work in Jerusalem. Its a two-hour trek to get to Jerusalem, usually an hour to go back. The checkpoint ordeal can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 45+ minutes, depending on the political climate, holidays, or just the mood of the soldiers at the time. Lately they've started adding another temporary checkpoint about 100 meters after the first one. here they come on the bus and check all the IDs again, sometimes just stand outside the door and hold the bus up and don't check IDs, and sometimes take people off the bus, even after they have cleared the main checkpoint.

As part of my internship, I went to survey the aftermath of 4 house demolitions last week, around Jerusalem. The tactic of house demolitions is one way that the [apartheid] Israeli government has been trying to "Judaize" Jerusalem and drive Palestinians off the land. They are devastating. The government can demolish a house with little or no warning on the basis that the family did not get a permit to build. The problem is, it is virtually impossible for Palestinians to get building permits from the municipality, even when they own the land and plan to do the construction themselves. ICAHD (the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), the organization I am working with this summer has started a campaign to rebuild every Palestinian house that is destroyed by the [apartheid] Israeli government this year. They are doing this as a political act of resistance against the occupation and the policy of house demolitions. At the campaign launch, we went to the house of a woman in the old city of Jerusalem. She had lived there for many years, after her family's house was destroyed when the Mughrabi Quarter of old Jerusalem was leveled to make room for a plaza in front of the Wailing Wall, in 1967. Those living in the Mughrabi Quarter were largely refugees from the 1948 Nakbe (catastrophe). She showed us her house and how she had tried to make improvements to the house, and how the army came and tore them down -- including the ceiling in her front room, which to this day she has not been able to rebuild.

The rubble of the houses was hard to take. strewn among the bricks, cement, and tiles, were personal possessions, bed sheets, toys, furniture. The first place we visited: the house had been destroyed that morning. The family was wandering through the ruins, somewhat dazed. They were building the house on land that they owned. The last one was on a family's property that they had owned for over 300 years. They had the deeds to prove this. Their main home was left standing, but the addition that they were building to house their extended family, was demolished.

Yesterday, I headed to the town of Bil'in in the West Bank, to go to a weekly protest by the villagers against the building of the wall through their land. Several hundred people participate in this protest weekly, waving flags, marching, and chanting. As we marched down the road, you could see the army and police convoys in the distance -- a solid wall of soldiers in the distance. The people stop as they approach the soldiers. They stand there with arms up to show they are unarmed and then continue to chant in Hebrew and Arabic. Eventually, the soldiers start shooting tear gas through the crowd. People run back. Some that are willing to risk arrest stay up front and refuse to be pushed back. As people run back, you can hear the tear gas canisters whizzing around, and see them landing in the midst of the protesters. For those of us new to the protest, like myself, this is a scary experience. The canisters can hit people and burn them or otherwise injure them. The gas is very uncomfortable and there are always a few people who need medical attention. The Red Cross/Crescent folks always accompany the protesters and assist those that are injured. For those that come here every week, this is normal. They are used to it. When the shooting subsides, they return to meet the soldiers again. Then the soldiers start firing live ammunition as "warning shots" and try arresting people. This week they got two. Then the jeeps drive down the road towards the town, as the protesters run back again. The soldiers fire more tear gas and start shooting rubber bullets (kind of a misnomer, since rubber bullets are just steel bullets with a layer of rubber around them. They can, and have, killed people. By this point, I have decided to hang toward the back, as I don't think my stomach, or my nerves, can take another round of tear gas and shooting.

At the end of the day, we are all weary from the ordeal. The villagers return to their homes, the internationals head back to their various centers of operation, and the wall stands. Next Friday they will try again.

What Hamas Wants

THE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in [apartheid]Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

Read on at: NY Times

Robert Fisk: Welcome to 'Palestine'

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise [apartheid] Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular [apartheid] Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an [apartheid] Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province).

Read on at: The Independant