Fatah is Still Criminal
By David Frum
AEI.org | June 18, 2007
Scenes from a civil war, courtesy of Human Rights Watch and the British journalist Melanie Phillips:
"At least 15 Palestinians, including a United Nations relief worker, were killed today as Hamas looked set to complete its conquest of the entire Gaza Strip." "Muhammad Swairki, 28, a cook for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's presidential guard, was thrown to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building in Gaza City on Sunday."
"Muhammad al-Ra'fati, a Hamas supporter and mosque preacher, was thrown from a Gaza City high-rise apartment building. Fatah gunmen began firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.Hamas gunmen attacked the home of a Fatah security official with mortars and grenades, killing his 14-year-old son and three women inside, security officials said.
Other Fatah gunmen stormed the house of a Hamas lawmaker and burned it down."Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday evening dressed as a woman to avoid dozens of Hamas militiamen who had attacked it. When he arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles. 'They literally blew his head off with more than 40 bullets,' said a doctor at Kamal Udwan Hospital."
Hamas has now completed its conquest of Gaza. The last Fatah fighters were captured and then machine-gunned to death in front of their wives and children. The Fatah compound in Gaza City will be turned into a mosque; Gaza itself into an Islamic state.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has struck back against Hamas in the West Bank, where Hamas is weak and Mr. Abbas's Fatah is stronger. On Wednesday, Mr. Abbas declared a state of emergency.
His forces have raided Hamas offices in Ramallah and Nablus and arrested some 1,500 Hamas activists. Mr. Abbas is now appealing for more American and Western military and economic aid.
And he has requested an international police force for Gaza.
Good luck with that last request. Gaza looks like an Arabic Somalia, a beachfront Fallujah. No Western government will volunteer to deploy forces into such an environment.
But if Mr. Abbas is refused troops, he will certainly now receive massive new infusions of money. The big idea sweeping Western capitals is that Fatah must learn to compete with Hamas as a provider of social services.
Over the years, billions of dollars of aid have been donated to the Palestinian Authority.
In 2006, the Palestinians collected more Western aid per capita than any other people on earth: U.S. $300 per year, as compared to U.S. $44 for sub-Saharan Africa.
Much of that money has been stolen or wasted.
Even worse, because UN relief agencies have allowed themselves to be penetrated and captured by Hamas, much of the Western aid has ended up reinforcing exactly the people we supposedly want to defeat.
It's not very realistic to imagine that Fatah can suddenly change its ways and learn to run aid programs honestly. Fatah is a criminal gang, and it inevitably acts like one.
As Gaza burns, you will of course hear voices blaming Israel.
Yesterday morning, the Boston Globe published a classic editorial that attacked Israel for occupying Gaza in 1967 and then for quitting Gaza in 2005. But if any outside forces deserve blame, it is those who have encouraged some Palestinian people in their extremist fantasies: the Arab states, the old Soviet Union, the Islamists, and anti-Israel forces in the West.
Looking at the wreckage in the Palestinian territories, it's impossible to sustain any further hope that any responsible state can ever arise there.
Too many Palestinian Arabs are gripped by what might be called "anti-nationalism": Too many care more about destroying the nation of Israel than about the building of a nation of Palestine.
For Gaza now, the best possible outcome is a reversion to Egyptian rule.
That will not happen soon--the Egyptians are no more eager to assume responsibility for Baghdad by the sea than the Europeans are--but it will happen. Egyptian forces already patrol Gaza's borders.
They have looked the other way as weapons flow into Gaza to be used against Israel. But what happens when Gaza becomes a sanctuary for anti-Egyptian Islamists?
And as international cash ceases to flow, and Hamas's service infrastructure breaks down, a constituency for an alternative government will take form inside Hamasistan.
And for the West Bank? Palestinian sovereignty over that territory now looks more and more like a gamble the world cannot afford.
In their struggle for control of the Palestinian movement, Hamas and Fatah between them have killed the Palestinian state.
Sounds like moderation to me--YEAH RIGHT!!
Now this master manipulator has Israel and the US under his spell. Snatching Victory from the jaws of defeat, Abbas is going to parlay his embarrassing defeat into a victory by squeezing concessions out of Israel. "Don't you want to Prop up the Moderate?" well the problem is There is NO Moderate.
Abbas Wants Israeli Concessions to Buy Reconciliation with Hamas
(Debka Files)
Mahmoud Abbas has good reason to rejoice over Ehud Olmert’s strange celebration of the Hamas victory in Gaza as “a new peace opportunity,” especially as the prime minister brings this message to his White House talks with President George W. Bush Tuesday, June 19.
The rest of the West is lamenting the fact a jihadist Islamic terrorist organization has acquired rule over a territory for the first time.
Abbas is making hay. His Fatah government installed in Ramallah Sunday, June 17, is already getting a shower of direct Western aid. The European Union has added its usual two bits of advice for Israel to add its support. The Palestinian leader has translated this advice into a list of extortionate concessions, which Israel previously denied as opening the door to suicidal terror in its cities.
Abbas means to demand the massive release of the most dangerous Palestinian security prisoners, including multiple murderers, and the sweeping removal of the West Bank checkpoints which screen and intercept potential bombers.
He was quick to grasp that Olmert in this mode will be openhanded enough to give him a fresh lease of life in the form of concessions to buy his passport to credibility in Palestinian eyes. He will then have the leverage he needs for his next move – not a war to prevent Hamas domination of the West Bank, but to the contrary, reconciliation with the jihadists of Gaza. He is gearing up to establish another Palestinian unity government, one which endorses Hamas as masters of Gaza and grants him wall-to-wall approval at the top of the Palestinian tree instead of a flop in Gaza.
A serious obstacle to this ambition, the presence at his side of the ex-Gaza strongman Muhammed Dahlan, the object of Hamas’ abhorrence, as national security adviser, is about to removed. The inquiry commission Abbas announced Monday to probe the Gaza fiasco will take care of that.
In the meantime, the 11 ministers he named to his emergency cabinet in Ramallah Sunday, June 17, are mostly nonentities, except for the pro-Western prime minister, Salim Fayyed, who is trusted in Washington and Brussels with aid funds. The portfolios are available for returning Hamas ministers, including the prize bait of the interior ministry which controls Palestinian security forces.
That Abbas was building a façade was obvious from his choice of interior minister: the 80-year old pensioned-off general Razek Yahya, who lives in retirement in Amman and is clearly a stopgap. Had he intended to put up serious resistance to a Hamas takeover of the West Bank, Abbas would have installed a charismatic military leader with operational qualifications.
As for the Western aid funds about to pour into Ramallah, Abbas will not invest the cash in a security force capable of taking on Hamas, because not a single soldier will be sent into battle against the Islamist group, any more than he sent his Presidential Guardsmen into action to save Gaza from Hamas domination last week. For his needs, the force built by the Americans will suffice. Aid funds will be used to cover the wages of the Palestinian Authority security personnel remaining in the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule and preserve their loyalty.
DEBKAfile’s Israeli military sources with long experience of Palestinian dealings say this is a typical formula, familiar from the aftermath of the 1983 Oslo accords: Fatah officers will survive in Gaza by serving two masters, Abbas and Hamas, and drawing salaries from both.
The rampage his security forces conducted under Col. Tawfiq Tirawi against Hamas activists and institutions in the last three days is described as no more than token action to gain Abbas an extra bargaining chip against Hamas. Once a deal is struck, Hamas will be reinstated on the West Bank as before.
Abbas’ candidate to replace Dahlan as his number two is Jibril Rajoub, former chief of the West Bank Preventive Security Service and Dahlan’s old enemy, who gets on well with Hamas. He has been designated Abbas’ lead negotiator, DEBKAfile’s sources disclose, for the reconciliation talks with Hamas, which are due to start in a couple of months after the dust settles in Gaza.
Rajoub is already doing some spadework in Cairo. He has advised Egyptian leaders not to cut of their ties with Hamas, after pulling out their diplomatic and military missions from Gaza last week, but to work with the Hamas’ “moderate” wing and the “right people” in Fatah as future power-sharing partners.
So why is the Israeli prime minister so pleased with the Gaza episode? And what blinds him to Abbas’ manipulations for consolidating Hamas’ grip on Gaza, ensconcing Iran and Damascus on Israel’s border, and strengthening Hamas’ position on the West Bank and in Palestinian government?
DEBKAfile’s sources report that Olmert hopes his Gaza line will make Israelis and Americans forget his blunders in supporting Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, his permission for the Jan. 2006 Palestinian general poll which brought Hamas to power through the ballot and his mismanagement of the Lebanon war last summer.
He will argue that his policies will eventually triumph in the Middle East if he is allowed to pursue them to the finish
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