[News] Gaza Bombshell - White House Plans Palestinian Civil War

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Vanity Fair Article Follows

Revealed: the US plan to start a Palestinian civil war
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9366.shtml

Report, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2008

[]

Muhammad Dahlan speaks during a Fatah rally in 
the West Bank town of Ramallah, 15 January 2006. 
(Mushir 
Abdelrahman/<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/htt://maanimages.com>MaanImages)

United States officials including President 
George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza 
Rice participated in a conspiracy to arm and 
train Contra-style Palestinian militias nominally 
loyal to the Fatah party to overthrow the 
democratically-elected Hamas government in the 
Occupied Palestinian Territories, an 
investigative article in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair has revealed. [1]

The allegations of such a conspiracy, long 
reported by The Electronic Intifada, are 
corroborated in Vanity Fair with confidential US 
government documents, interviews with former US 
officials, Israeli officials and with Muhammad 
Dahlan, the Gaza strongman personally chosen by Bush.

The article, by David Rose, recounts gruesome 
torture documented on videotape of Hamas members 
by the US-armed and funded militias under 
Dahlan's control. Hamas had repeatedly alleged 
such torture as part of its justification for its 
move to overthrow the Dahlan militias and take 
full control of the interior of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

Vanity Fair reported that it has "obtained 
confidential documents, since corroborated by 
sources in the US 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 
magazine adds that 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."

Abrams was one of the key Reagan administration 
figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal in 
the 1980s, whereby the US illegally armed 
militias in Nicaragua to overthrow the ruling 
Sandinista government. Abrams was convicted and 
later pardoned for lying to Congress.

While it has been known that the US engaged in 
covert activity to subvert Palestinian democracy 
and provoke Palestinians to shed each other's 
blood, the extent of the personal involvement of 
top US officials in attempting to dictate the 
course of events in Palestine -- while publicly 
preaching democracy -- has only now been brought to light.

[]

Muhammad Dahlan's 13 July 2003 letter to then 
Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz.

Bush met and personally anointed Dahlan as "our 
guy" in 2003. In July 2007, The Electronic 
Intifada 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7116.shtml>reported 
on a leaked letter written by Dahlan and sent to 
the Israeli defense minister in which he 
confirmed his role in a conspiracy to overthrow 
then Palestinian Authority President Yasser 
Arafat for whose replacement Bush had publicly 
called. Dahlan wrote: "Be certain that Yasser 
Arafat's final days are numbered, but allow us to 
finish him off our way, not yours. And be sure as 
well that ... the promises I made in front of 
President Bush, I will give my life to keep."

The US planning to overthrow the government 
elected by Palestinians under occupation began 
immediately after the Hamas movement won a clear 
victory in the January 2006 election for the 
Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas, however, proved "surprising resilient."

At a meeting at Abbas' Ramallah headquarters in 
October 2006, Rice personally ordered Abbas to 
dissolve the government headed by Hamas' Ismail 
Haniyeh "within two weeks" and replace it with an 
unelected "emergency government."

When Abbas failed to act promptly on Rice's 
order, the US stepped up its efforts to arm 
Dahlan in preparation for the attempted coup. 
Hamas foiled the coup plot by moving preemptively 
against Dahlan's gangs, many of whom refused to 
fight despite being furnished with tens of 
millions of dollars in weapons and training. The 
US-conceived "emergency government" headed by a 
former World Bank official, Salam Fayyad, was 
eventually appointed by Abbas, but its authority 
is limited to parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

While the United States and Israel were the 
driving forces behind the civil war and coup 
plot, others had a hand including several Arab 
states and their intelligence services. "The 
scheme," Rose writes, "bore some resemblance to 
the Iran-contra scandal" in that "some of the 
money for the [Nicaraguan] contras, like that for 
Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of US lobbying."


Endnotes
[1] "The Gaza Bombshell," Vanity Fair, April 
2008, 
(<http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804>http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804)



The Gaza Bombshell

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804?printable=true&currentPage=all


After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over 
Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White 
House cooked up yet another scandalously covert 
and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part 
Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential 
documents, corroborated by outraged former and 
current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how 
President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy 
National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed 
an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad 
Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza 
and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.




by David Rose April 2008

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of 
calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and 
violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit 
in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open 
to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, 
bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the 
suffering he endured 11 months before at the 
hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is 
a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist 
organization that has been designated a terrorist 
group by the United States, but I have a good 
reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind 
his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him 
with a black iron rod. “I lost all the skin on my 
back from the beatings,” he says. “Instead of 
medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It 
felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.”

On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the 
Islamic University of Gaza, had gone to a local 
cemetery with his father and five others to erect 
a headstone for his grandmother. When they 
arrived, however, they found themselves 
surrounded by 30 armed men from Hamas’s rival, 
Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud 
Abbas. “They took us to a house in north Gaza,” 
abu Dan says. “They covered our eyes and took us 
to a room on the sixth floor.”

The video reveals a bare room with white walls 
and a black-and-white tiled floor, where abu 
Dan’s father is forced to sit and listen to his 
son’s shrieks of pain. Afterward, abu Dan says, 
he and two of the others were driven to a market 
square. “They told us they were going to kill us. 
They made us sit on the ground.” He rolls up the 
legs of his trousers to display the circular 
scars that are evidence of what happened next: 
“They shot our knees and feet­five bullets each. 
I spent four months in a wheelchair.”

Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his 
tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush.

A clue comes toward the end of the video, which 
was found in a Fatah security building by Hamas 
fighters last June. Still bound and blindfolded, 
the prisoners are made to echo a rhythmic chant 
yelled by one of their captors: “By blood, by 
soul, we sacrifice ourselves for Muhammad Dahlan! Long live Muhammad Dahlan!”

There is no one more hated among Hamas members 
than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah’s resident 
strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently 
served as Abbas’s national-security adviser, has 
spent more than a decade battling Hamas. Dahlan 
insists that abu Dan was tortured without his 
knowledge, but the video is proof that his followers’ methods can be brutal.

Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. 
After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush 
publicly praised Dahlan as “a good, solid 
leader.” In private, say multiple Israeli and 
American officials, the U.S. president described him as “our guy.”

The United States has been involved in the 
affairs of the Palestinian territories since the 
Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel captured Gaza 
from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. With 
the 1993 Oslo accords, the territories acquired 
limited autonomy, under a president, who has 
executive powers, and an elected parliament. 
Israel retains a large military presence in the 
West Bank, but it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly 
stated that the last great ambition of his 
presidency is to broker a deal that would create 
a viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the 
Holy Land. “People say, ‘Do you think it’s 
possible, during your presidency?’ ” he told an 
audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very hopeful.”

The next day, in the West Bank capital of 
Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a 
rather large obstacle standing in the way of this 
goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to 
some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized 
power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. 
Almost every day, militants fire rockets from 
Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and 
President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His 
authority is limited to the West Bank.

It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t 
know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” 
What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.

According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed 
legislative elections in the Palestinian 
territories in January 2006, despite warnings 
that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas­whose 1988 
charter committed it to the goal of driving 
Israel into the sea­won control of the 
parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.

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.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” 
recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later 
pardoned) for withholding information from 
Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal 
under President Reagan. There are echoes of other 
past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 
ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, 
which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic 
revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs 
invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to 
solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian 
policy set off a furious debate. One of its 
critics is David Wurmser, the avowed 
neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President 
Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 
2007, a month after the Gaza coup.

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of 
“engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide 
a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with 
victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention 
of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It 
looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a 
coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that 
was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle 
East peace more remote than ever, but what really 
galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it 
exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between 
the president’s call for Middle East democracy 
and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”



Preventive Security

Bush was not the first American president to form 
a relationship with Muhammad Dahlan. “Yes, I was 
close to Bill Clinton,” Dahlan says. “I met 
Clinton many times with [the late Palestinian 
leader Yasser] Arafat.” In the wake of the 1993 
Oslo accords, Clinton sponsored a series of 
diplomatic meetings aimed at reaching a permanent 
Middle East peace, and Dahlan became the Palestinians’ negotiator on security.

As I talk to Dahlan in a five-star Cairo hotel, 
it’s easy to see the qualities that might make 
him attractive to American presidents. His 
appearance is immaculate, his English is 
serviceable, and his manner is charming and 
forthright. Had he been born into privilege, 
these qualities might not mean much. But Dahlan 
was born­on September 29, 1961­in the teeming 
squalor of Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, and 
his education came mostly from the street. In 
1981 he helped found Fatah’s youth movement, and 
he later played a leading role in the first 
intifada­the five-year revolt that began in 1987 
against the Israeli occupation. In all, Dahlan 
says, he spent five years in Israeli jails.

 From the time of its inception as the 
Palestinian branch of the international Muslim 
Brotherhood, in late 1987, Hamas had represented 
a threatening challenge to Arafat’s secular Fatah 
party. At Oslo, Fatah made a public commitment to 
the search for peace, but Hamas continued to 
practice armed resistance. At the same time, it 
built an impressive base of support through schooling and social programs.

The rising tensions between the two groups first 
turned violent in the early 1990s­with Muhammad 
Dahlan playing a central role. As director of the 
Palestinian Authority’s most feared paramilitary 
force, the Preventive Security Service, Dahlan 
arrested some 2,000 Hamas members in 1996 in the 
Gaza Strip after the group launched a wave of 
suicide bombings. “Arafat had decided to arrest 
Hamas military leaders, because they were working 
against his interests, against the peace process, 
against the Israeli withdrawal, against 
everything,” Dahlan says. “He asked the security 
services to do their job, and I have done that job.”

It was not, he admits, “popular work.” For many 
years Hamas has said that Dahlan’s forces 
routinely tortured detainees. One alleged method 
was to sodomize prisoners with soda bottles. 
Dahlan says these stories are exaggerated: 
“Definitely there were some mistakes here and 
there. But no one person died in Preventive 
Security. Prisoners got their rights. Bear in 
mind that I am an ex-detainee of the Israelis’. 
No one was personally humiliated, and I never 
killed anyone the way [Hamas is] killing people 
on a daily basis now.” Dahlan points out that 
Arafat maintained a labyrinth of security 
services­14 in all­and says the Preventive 
Security Service was blamed for abuses perpetrated by other units.

Dahlan worked closely with the F.B.I. and the 
C.I.A., and he developed a warm relationship with 
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, a 
Clinton appointee who stayed on under Bush until 
July 2004. “He’s simply a great and fair man,” 
Dahlan says. “I’m still in touch with him from time to time.”



“Everyone Was Against the Elections”

In a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 
June 24, 2002, President Bush announced that 
American policy in the Middle East was turning in 
a fundamentally new direction.

Arafat was still in power at the time, and many 
in the U.S. and Israel blamed him for wrecking 
Clinton’s micro-managed peace efforts by 
launching the second intifada­a renewed revolt, 
begun in 2000, in which more than 1,000 Israelis 
and 4,500 Palestinians had died. Bush said he 
wanted to give Palestinians the chance to choose 
new leaders, ones who were not “compromised by 
terror.” In place of Arafat’s all-powerful 
presidency, Bush said, “the Palestinian 
parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body.”

Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his 
replacement as Fatah leader, was elected 
president in January 2005. Elections for the 
Palestinian parliament, known officially as the 
Legislative Council, were originally set for July 
2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush 
administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for 
elections in January. Decades of 
self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned 
the party into a symbol of corruption and 
inefficiency­a perception Hamas found it easy to 
exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its 
position further: in many places, a single Hamas 
candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan 
says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I 
need an election. I want elections in the 
Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him 
in the American administration, and everyone is 
nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants 
elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On 
January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted 
the result, and there was no contingency plan to 
deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it 
coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I 
don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official 
with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in 
the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ”

In public, Rice tried to look on the bright side 
of the Hamas victory. “Unpredictability,” she 
said, is “the nature of big historic change.” 
Even as she spoke, however, the Bush 
administration was rapidly revising its attitude toward Palestinian democracy.

Some analysts argued that Hamas had a substantial 
moderate wing that could be strengthened if 
America coaxed it into the peace process. Notable 
Israelis­such as Ephraim Halevy, the former head 
of the Mossad intelligence agency­shared this 
view. But if America paused to consider giving 
Hamas the benefit of the doubt, the moment was 
“milliseconds long,” says a senior State 
Department official. “The administration spoke 
with one voice: ‘We have to squeeze these guys.’ 
With Hamas’s election victory, the freedom agenda was dead.”

The first step, taken by the Middle East 
diplomatic “Quartet”­the U.S., the European 
Union, Russia, and the United Nations­was to 
demand that the new Hamas government renounce 
violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and 
accept the terms of all previous agreements. When 
Hamas refused, the Quartet shut off the faucet of 
aid to the Palestinian Authority, depriving it of 
the means to pay salaries and meet its annual budget of roughly $2 billion.

Israel clamped down on Palestinians’ freedom of 
movement, especially into and out of the 
Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. Israel also detained 
64 Hamas officials, including Legislative Council 
members and ministers, and even launched a 
military campaign into Gaza after one of its 
soldiers was kidnapped. Through it all, Hamas and 
its new government, led by Prime Minister Ismail 
Haniyeh, proved surprisingly resilient.

Washington reacted with dismay when Abbas began 
holding talks with Hamas in the hope of 
establishing a “unity government.” On October 4, 
2006, Rice traveled to Ramallah to see Abbas. 
They met at the Muqata, the new presidential 
headquarters that rose from the ruins of Arafat’s 
compound, which Israel had destroyed in 2002.

America’s leverage in Palestinian affairs was 
much stronger than it had been in Arafat’s time. 
Abbas had never had a strong, independent base, 
and he desperately needed to restore the flow of 
foreign aid­and, with it, his power of patronage. 
He also knew that he could not stand up to Hamas without Washington’s help.

At their joint press conference, Rice smiled as 
she expressed her nation’s “great admiration” for 
Abbas’s leadership. Behind closed doors, however, 
Rice’s tone was sharper, say officials who 
witnessed their meeting. Isolating Hamas just 
wasn’t working, she reportedly told Abbas, and 
America expected him to dissolve the Haniyeh 
government as soon as possible and hold fresh elections.

Abbas, one official says, agreed to take action 
within two weeks. It happened to be Ramadan, the 
month when Muslims fast during daylight hours. 
With dusk approaching, Abbas asked Rice to join 
him for iftar­a snack to break the fast.

Afterward, according to the official, Rice 
underlined her position: “So we’re agreed? You’ll 
dissolve the government within two weeks?”

“Maybe not two weeks. Give me a month. Let’s wait 
until after the Eid,” he said, referring to the 
three-day celebration that marks the end of 
Ramadan. (Abbas’s spokesman said via e-mail: 
“According to our records, this is incorrect.”)

Rice got into her armored S.U.V., where, the 
official claims, she told an American colleague, 
“That damned iftar has cost us another two weeks of Hamas government.”



“We Will Be There to Support You”

Weeks passed with no sign that Abbas was ready to 
do America’s bidding. Finally, another official 
was sent to Ramallah. Jake Walles, the consul 
general in Jerusalem, is a career foreign-service 
officer with many years’ experience in the Middle 
East. His purpose was to deliver a barely 
varnished ultimatum to the Palestinian president.

We know what Walles said because a copy was left 
behind, apparently by accident, of the “talking 
points” memo prepared for him by the State 
Department. The document has been authenticated 
by U.S. and Palestinian officials.

“We need to understand your plans regarding a new 
[Palestinian Authority] government,” Walles’s 
script said. “You told Secretary Rice you would 
be prepared to move ahead within two to four 
weeks of your meeting. We believe that the time 
has come for you to move forward quickly and decisively.”

The memo left no doubt as to what kind of action 
the U.S. was seeking: “Hamas should be given a 
clear choice, with a clear deadline: 
 they 
either accept a new government that meets the 
Quartet principles, or they reject it The 
consequences of Hamas’ decision should also be 
clear: If Hamas does not agree within the 
prescribed time, you should make clear your 
intention to declare a state of emergency and 
form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”

Walles and Abbas both knew what to expect from 
Hamas if these instructions were followed: 
rebellion and bloodshed. For that reason, the 
memo states, the U.S. was already working to 
strengthen Fatah’s security forces. “If you act 
along these lines, we will support you both 
materially and politically,” the script said. “We 
will be there to support you.”

Abbas was also encouraged to “strengthen [his] 
team” to include “credible figures of strong 
standing in the international community.” Among 
those the U.S. wanted brought in, says an 
official who knew of the policy, was Muhammad Dahlan.

On paper, the forces at Fatah’s disposal looked 
stronger than those of Hamas. There were some 
70,000 men in the tangle of 14 Palestinian 
security services that Arafat had built up, at 
least half of those in Gaza. After the 
legislative elections, Hamas had expected to 
assume command of these forces, but Fatah 
maneuvered to keep them under its control. Hamas, 
which already had 6,000 or so irregulars in its 
militant al-Qassam Brigade, responded by forming 
the 6,000-troop Executive Force in Gaza, but that 
still left it with far fewer fighters than Fatah.

In reality, however, Hamas had several 
advantages. To begin with, Fatah’s security 
forces had never really recovered from Operation 
Defensive Shield, Israel’s massive 2002 
re-invasion of the West Bank in response to the 
second intifada. “Most of the security apparatus 
had been destroyed,” says Youssef Issa, who led 
the Preventive Security Service under Abbas.

The irony of the blockade on foreign aid after 
Hamas’s legislative victory, meanwhile, was that 
it prevented only Fatah from paying its soldiers. 
“We are the ones who were not getting paid,” Issa 
says, “whereas they were not affected by the 
siege.” Ayman Daraghmeh, a Hamas Legislative 
Council member in the West Bank, agrees. He puts 
the amount of Iranian aid to Hamas in 2007 alone 
at $120 million. “This is only a fraction of what 
it should give,” he insists. In Gaza, another 
Hamas member tells me the number was closer to $200 million.

The result was becoming apparent: Fatah could not 
control Gaza’s streets­or even protect its own personnel.

At about 1:30 p.m. on September 15, 2006, Samira 
Tayeh sent a text message to her husband, Jad 
Tayeh, the director of foreign relations for the 
Palestinian intelligence service and a member of 
Fatah. “He didn’t reply,” she says. “I tried to 
call his mobile [phone], but it was switched off. 
So I called his deputy, Mahmoun, and he didn’t 
know where he was. That’s when I decided to go to the hospital.”

Samira, a slim, elegant 40-year-old dressed from 
head to toe in black, tells me the story in a 
Ramallah café in December 2007. Arriving at the 
Al Shifa hospital, “I went through the morgue 
door. Not for any reason­I just didn’t know the 
place. I saw there were all these intelligence 
guards there. There was one I knew. He saw me and 
he said, ‘Put her in the car.’ That’s when I knew 
something had happened to Jad.”

Tayeh had left his office in a car with four 
aides. Moments later, they found themselves being 
pursued by an S.U.V. full of armed, masked men. 
About 200 yards from the home of Prime Minister 
Haniyeh, the S.U.V. cornered the car. The masked 
men opened fire, killing Tayeh and all four of his colleagues.

Hamas said it had nothing to do with the murders, 
but Samira had reason to believe otherwise. At 
three a.m. on June 16, 2007, during the Gaza 
takeover, six Hamas gunmen forced their way into 
her home and fired bullets into every photo of 
Jad they could find. The next day, they returned 
and demanded the keys to the car in which he had 
died, claiming that it belonged to the Palestinian Authority.

Fearing for her life, she fled across the border 
and then into the West Bank, with only the 
clothes she was wearing and her passport, driver’s license, and credit card.



“Very Clever Warfare”

Fatah’s vulnerability was a source of grave 
concern to Dahlan. “I made a lot of activities to 
give Hamas the impression that we were still 
strong and we had the capacity to face them,” he 
says. “But I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.” He 
had no official security position at the time, 
but he belonged to parliament and retained the 
loyalty of Fatah members in Gaza. “I used my 
image, my power.” Dahlan says he told Abbas that 
“Gaza needs only a decision for Hamas to take 
over.” To prevent that from happening, Dahlan 
waged “very clever warfare” for many months.

According to several alleged victims, one of the 
tactics this “warfare” entailed was to kidnap and 
torture members of Hamas’s Executive Force. 
(Dahlan denies Fatah used such tactics, but 
admits “mistakes” were made.) Abdul Karim 
al-Jasser, a strapping man of 25, says he was the 
first such victim. “It was on October 16, still 
Ramadan,” he says. “I was on my way to my 
sister’s house for iftar. Four guys stopped me, 
two of them with guns. They forced me to 
accompany them to the home of Aman abu Jidyan,” a 
Fatah leader close to Dahlan. (Abu Jidyan would 
be killed in the June uprising.)

The first phase of torture was straightforward 
enough, al-Jasser says: he was stripped naked, 
bound, blindfolded, and beaten with wooden poles 
and plastic pipes. “They put a piece of cloth in 
my mouth to stop me screaming.” His interrogators 
forced him to answer contradictory accusations: 
one minute they said that he had collaborated 
with Israel, the next that he had fired Qassam rockets against it.

But the worst was yet to come. “They brought an 
iron bar,” al-Jasser says, his voice suddenly 
hesitant. We are speaking inside his home in 
Gaza, which is experiencing one of its frequent 
power outages. He points to the propane-gas lamp 
that lights the room. “They put the bar in the 
flame of a lamp like this. When it was red, they 
took the covering off my eyes. Then they pressed 
it against my skin. That was the last thing I remember.”

When he came to, he was still in the room where 
he had been tortured. A few hours later, the 
Fatah men handed him over to Hamas, and he was 
taken to the hospital. “I could see the shock in 
the eyes of the doctors who entered the room,” he 
says. He shows me photos of purple third-degree 
burns wrapped like towels around his thighs and 
much of his lower torso. “The doctors told me 
that if I had been thin, not chubby, I would have 
died. But I wasn’t alone. That same night that I 
was released, abu Jidyan’s men fired five bullets 
into the legs of one of my relatives. We were in 
the same ward in the hospital.”

Dahlan says he did not order al-Jasser’s torture: 
“The only order I gave was to defend ourselves. 
That doesn’t mean there wasn’t torture, some 
things that went wrong, but I did not know about this.”

The dirty war between Fatah and Hamas continued 
to gather momentum throughout the autumn, with 
both sides committing atrocities. By the end of 
2006, dozens were dying each month. Some of the 
victims were noncombatants. In December, gunmen 
opened fire on the car of a Fatah intelligence 
official, killing his three young children and their driver.

There was still no sign that Abbas was ready to 
bring matters to a head by dissolving the Hamas 
government. Against this darkening background, 
the U.S. began direct security talks with Dahlan.



“He’s Our Guy”

In 2001, President Bush famously said that he had 
looked Russian president Vladimir Putin in the 
eye, gotten “a sense of his soul,” and found him 
to be “trustworthy.” According to three U.S. 
officials, Bush made a similar judgment about 
Dahlan when they first met, in 2003. All three 
officials recall hearing Bush say, “He’s our guy.”

They say this assessment was echoed by other key 
figures in the administration, including Rice and 
Assistant Secretary David Welch, the man in 
charge of Middle East policy at the State 
Department. “David Welch didn’t fundamentally 
care about Fatah,” one of his colleagues says. 
“He cared about results, and [he supported] 
whatever son of a bitch you had to support. 
Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to know 
best. He was a can-do kind of person. Dahlan was our guy.”

Avi Dichter, Israel’s internal-security minister 
and the former head of its Shin Bet security 
service, was taken aback when he heard senior 
American officials refer to Dahlan as “our guy.” 
“I thought to myself, The president of the United 
States is making a strange judgment here,” says Dichter.

Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who had been 
appointed the U.S. security coordinator for the 
Palestinians in November 2005, was in no position 
to question the president’s judgment of Dahlan. 
His only prior experience with the Middle East 
was as director of the Iraq Survey Group, the 
body that looked for Saddam Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction.

In November 2006, Dayton met Dahlan for the first 
of a long series of talks in Jerusalem and 
Ramallah. Both men were accompanied by aides. 
 From the outset, says an official who took notes 
at the meeting, Dayton was pushing two overlapping agendas.

“We need to reform the Palestinian security 
apparatus,” Dayton said, according to the notes. 
“But we also need to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.”

Dahlan replied that, in the long run, Hamas could 
be defeated only by political means. “But if I am 
going to confront them,” he added, “I need 
substantial resources. As things stand, we do not have the capability.”

The two men agreed that they would work toward a 
new Palestinian security plan. The idea was to 
simplify the confusing web of Palestinian 
security forces and have Dahlan assume 
responsibility for all of them in the newly 
created role of Palestinian national-security 
adviser. The Americans would help supply weapons and training.

As part of the reform program, according to the 
official who was present at the meetings, Dayton 
said he wanted to disband the Preventive Security 
Service, which was widely known to be engaged in 
kidnapping and torture. At a meeting in Dayton’s 
Jerusalem office in early December, Dahlan 
ridiculed the idea. “The only institution now 
protecting Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in 
Gaza is the one you want removed,” he said.

Dayton softened a little. “We want to help you,” he said. “What do you need?”



“Iran-Contra 2.0”

Under Bill Clinton, Dahlan says, commitments of 
security assistance “were always delivered, 
absolutely.” Under Bush, he was about to 
discover, things were different. At the end of 
2006, Dayton promised an immediate package worth 
$86.4 million­money that, according to a U.S. 
document published by Reuters on January 5, 2007, 
would be used to “dismantle the infrastructure of 
terrorism and establish law and order in the West 
Bank and Gaza.” U.S. officials even told 
reporters the money would be transferred “in the coming days.”

The cash never arrived. “Nothing was disbursed,” 
Dahlan says. “It was approved and it was in the 
news. But we received not a single penny.”

Any notion that the money could be transferred 
quickly and easily had died on Capitol Hill, 
where the payment was blocked by the House 
Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. 
Its members feared that military aid to the 
Palestinians might end up being turned against Israel.

Dahlan did not hesitate to voice his 
exasperation. “I spoke to Condoleezza Rice on 
several occasions,” he says. “I spoke to Dayton, 
to the consul general, to everyone in the 
administration I knew. They said, ‘You have a 
convincing argument.’ We were sitting in Abbas’s 
office in Ramallah, and I explained the whole 
thing to Condi. And she said, ‘Yes, we have to 
make an effort to do this. There’s no other way.’ 
” At some of these meetings, Dahlan says, 
Assistant Secretary Welch and Deputy 
National-Security Adviser Abrams were also present.

The administration went back to Congress, and a 
reduced, $59 million package for nonlethal aid 
was approved in April 2007. But as Dahlan knew, 
the Bush team had already spent the past months 
exploring alternative, covert means of getting 
him the funds and weapons he wanted. The 
reluctance of Congress meant that “you had to 
look for different pots, different sources of 
money,” says a Pentagon official.

A State Department official adds, “Those in 
charge of implementing the policy were saying, 
‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a 
position for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, 
and only Muhammad Dahlan has the guile and the 
muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this 
was where it would end up­with a military 
showdown.” There were, this official says, two 
“parallel programs”­the overt one, which the 
administration took to Congress, “and a covert 
one, not only to buy arms but to pay the salaries of security personnel.”

In essence, the program was simple. According to 
State Department officials, beginning in the 
latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several 
rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with 
leaders of four Arab nations­Egypt, Jordan, Saudi 
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked 
them to bolster Fatah by providing military 
training and by pledging funds to buy its forces 
lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly 
into accounts controlled by President Abbas.

The scheme bore some resemblance to the 
Iran-contra scandal, in which members of Ronald 
Reagan’s administration sold arms to Iran, an 
enemy of the U.S. The money was used to fund the 
contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a 
congressional ban. Some of the money for the 
contras, like that for Fatah, was furnished by 
Arab allies as a result of U.S. lobbying.

But there are also important differences­starting 
with the fact that Congress never passed a 
measure expressly prohibiting the supply of aid 
to Fatah and Dahlan. “It was close to the 
margins,” says a former intelligence official 
with experience in covert programs. “But it probably wasn’t illegal.”

Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take 
place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian 
trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled 
crossing into Gaza, where their contents were 
handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 
Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition 
clips, and two million bullets. News of the 
shipment leaked, and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, an 
Israeli Cabinet member, said on Israeli radio 
that the guns and ammunition would give Abbas 
“the ability to cope with those organizations 
which are trying to ruin everything”­namely, Hamas.

Avi Dichter points out that all weapons shipments 
had to be approved by Israel, which was 
understandably hesitant to allow state-of-the-art 
arms into Gaza. “One thing’s for sure, we weren’t 
talking about heavy weapons,” says a State 
Department official. “It was small arms, light machine guns, ammunition.”

Perhaps the Israelis held the Americans back. 
Perhaps Elliott Abrams himself held back, 
unwilling to run afoul of U.S. law for a second 
time. One of his associates says Abrams, who 
declined to comment for this article, felt 
conflicted over the policy­torn between the 
disdain he felt for Dahlan and his overriding 
loyalty to the administration. He wasn’t the only 
one: “There were severe fissures among 
neoconservatives over this,” says Cheney’s former 
adviser David Wurmser. “We were ripping each other to pieces.”

During a trip to the Middle East in January 2007, 
Rice found it difficult to get her partners to 
honor their pledges. “The Arabs felt the U.S. was 
not serious,” one official says. “They knew that 
if the Americans were serious they would put 
their own money where their mouth was. They 
didn’t have faith in America’s ability to raise a 
real force. There was no follow-through. Paying 
was different than pledging, and there was no plan.”

This official estimates that the program raised 
“a few payments of $30 million”­most of it, as 
other sources agree, from the United Arab 
Emirates. Dahlan himself says the total was only 
$20 million, and confirms that “the Arabs made 
many more pledges than they ever paid.” Whatever 
the exact amount, it was not enough.



Plan B

On February 1, 2007, Dahlan took his “very clever 
warfare” to a new level when Fatah forces under 
his control stormed the Islamic University of 
Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and set several 
buildings on fire. Hamas retaliated the next day 
with a wave of attacks on police stations.

Unwilling to preside over a Palestinian civil 
war, Abbas blinked. For weeks, King Abdullah of 
Saudi Arabia had been trying to persuade him to 
meet with Hamas in Mecca and formally establish a 
national unity government. On February 6, Abbas 
went, taking Dahlan with him. Two days later, 
with Hamas no closer to recognizing Israel, a deal was struck.

Under its terms, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas would 
remain prime minister while allowing Fatah 
members to occupy several important posts. When 
the news hit the streets that the Saudis had 
promised to pay the Palestinian Authority’s 
salary bills, Fatah and Hamas members in Gaza 
celebrated together by firing their Kalashnikovs into the air.

Once again, the Bush administration had been 
taken by surprise. According to a State 
Department official, “Condi was apoplectic.” A 
remarkable documentary record, revealed here for 
the first time, shows that the U.S. responded by 
redoubling the pressure on its Palestinian allies.

The State Department quickly drew up an 
alternative to the new unity government. Known as 
“Plan B,” its objective, according to a State 
Department memo that has been authenticated by an 
official who knew of it at the time, was to 
“enable [Abbas] and his supporters to reach a 
defined endgame by the end of 2007 The endgame 
should produce a [Palestinian Authority] 
government through democratic means that accepts Quartet principles.”

Like the Walles ultimatum of late 2006, Plan B 
called for Abbas to “collapse the government” if 
Hamas refused to alter its attitude toward 
Israel. From there, Abbas could call early 
elections or impose an emergency government. It 
is unclear whether, as president, Abbas had the 
constitutional authority to dissolve an elected 
government led by a rival party, but the Americans swept that concern aside.

Security considerations were paramount, and Plan 
B had explicit prescriptions for dealing with 
them. For as long as the unity government 
remained in office, it was essential for Abbas to 
maintain “independent control of key security 
forces.” He must “avoid Hamas integration with 
these services, while eliminating the Executive 
Force or mitigating the challenges posed by its continued existence.”

In a clear reference to the covert aid expected 
from the Arabs, the memo made this recommendation 
for the next six to nine months: “Dahlan oversees 
effort in coordination with General Dayton and 
Arab [nations] to train and equip 15,000-man 
force under President Abbas’s control to 
establish internal law and order, stop terrorism and deter extralegal forces.”

The Bush administration’s goals for Plan B were 
elaborated in a document titled “An Action Plan 
for the Palestinian Presidency.” This action plan 
went through several drafts and was developed by 
the U.S., the Palestinians, and the government of 
Jordan. Sources agree, however, that it originated in the State Department.

The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering 
Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. The 
“desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the 
capability to take the required strategic 
political decisions 
 such as dismissing the 
cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”

The drafts called for increasing the “level and 
capacity” of 15,000 of Fatah’s existing security 
personnel while adding 4,700 troops in seven new 
“highly trained battalions on strong policing.” 
The plan also promised to arrange “specialized 
training abroad,” in Jordan and Egypt, and 
pledged to “provide the security personnel with 
the necessary equipment and arms to carry out their missions.”

A detailed budget put the total cost for 
salaries, training, and “the needed security 
equipment, lethal and non-lethal,” at $1.27 
billion over five years. The plan states: “The 
costs and overall budget were developed jointly 
with General Dayton’s team and the Palestinian 
technical team for reform”­a unit established by 
Dahlan and led by his friend and policy aide 
Bassil Jaber. Jaber confirms that the document is 
an accurate summary of the work he and his 
colleagues did with Dayton. “The plan was to 
create a security establishment that could 
protect and strengthen a peaceful Palestinian 
state living side by side with Israel,” he says.

The final draft of the Action Plan was drawn up 
in Ramallah by officials of the Palestinian 
Authority. This version was identical to the 
earlier drafts in all meaningful ways but one: it 
presented the plan as if it had been the 
Palestinians’ idea. It also said the security 
proposals had been “approved by President Mahmoud 
Abbas after being discussed and agreed [to] by General Dayton’s team.”

On April 30, 2007, a portion of one early draft 
was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Majd. The 
secret was out. From Hamas’s perspective, the 
Action Plan could amount to only one thing: a 
blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup.



“We Are Late in the Ball Game Here”

The formation of the unity government had brought 
a measure of calm to the Palestinian territories, 
but violence erupted anew after Al-Majd published 
its story on the Action Plan. The timing was 
unkind to Fatah, which, to add to its usual 
disadvantages, was without its security chief. 
Ten days earlier, Dahlan had left Gaza for 
Berlin, where he’d had surgery on both knees. He 
was due to spend the next eight weeks convalescing.

In mid-May, with Dahlan still absent, a new 
element was added to Gaza’s toxic mix when 500 
Fatah National Security Forces recruits arrived, 
fresh from training in Egypt and equipped with 
new weapons and vehicles. “They had been on a 
crash course for 45 days,” Dahlan says. “The idea 
was that we needed them to go in dressed well, 
equipped well, and that might create the 
impression of new authority.” Their presence was 
immediately noticed, not only by Hamas but by 
staff from Western aid agencies. “They had new 
rifles with telescopic sights, and they were 
wearing black flak jackets,” says a frequent 
visitor from Northern Europe. “They were quite a 
contrast to the usual scruffy lot.”

On May 23, none other than Lieutenant General 
Dayton discussed the new unit in testimony before 
the House Middle East subcommittee. Hamas had 
attacked the troops as they crossed into Gaza 
from Egypt, Dayton said, but “these 500 young 
people, fresh out of basic training, were 
organized. They knew how to work in a coordinated 
fashion. Training does pay off. And the Hamas 
attack in the area was, likewise, repulsed.”

The troops’ arrival, Dayton said, was one of 
several “hopeful signs” in Gaza. Another was 
Dahlan’s appointment as national-security 
adviser. Meanwhile, he said, Hamas’s Executive 
Force was becoming “extremely unpopular I would 
say that we are kind of late in the ball game 
here, and we are behind, there’s two out, but we 
have our best clutch hitter at the plate, and the 
pitcher is beginning to tire on the opposing team.”

The opposing team was stronger than Dayton 
realized. By the end of May 2007, Hamas was 
mounting regular attacks of unprecedented boldness and savagery.

At an apartment in Ramallah that Abbas has set 
aside for wounded refugees from Gaza, I meet a 
former Fatah communications officer named Tariq 
Rafiyeh. He lies paralyzed from a bullet he took 
to the spine during the June coup, but his 
suffering began two weeks earlier. On May 31, he 
was on his way home with a colleague when they 
were stopped at a roadblock, robbed of their 
money and cell phones, and taken to a mosque. 
There, despite the building’s holy status, Hamas 
Executive Force members were violently 
interrogating Fatah detainees. “Late that night 
one of them said we were going to be released,” 
Rafiyeh recalls. “He told the guards, ‘Be 
hospitable, keep them warm.’ I thought that meant 
kill us. Instead, before letting us go they beat us badly.”

On June 7, there was another damaging leak, when 
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Abbas 
and Dayton had asked Israel to authorize the 
biggest Egyptian arms shipment yet­to include 
dozens of armored cars, hundreds of 
armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand 
grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition. A 
few days later, just before the next batch of 
Fatah recruits was due to leave for training in 
Egypt, the coup began in earnest.



Fatah’s Last Stand

The Hamas leadership in Gaza is adamant that the 
coup would not have happened if Fatah had not 
provoked it. Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas’s chief 
spokesman, says the leak in Al-Majd convinced the 
party that “there was a plan, approved by 
America, to destroy the political choice.” The 
arrival of the first Egyptian-trained fighters, 
he adds, was the “reason for the timing.” About 
250 Hamas members had been killed in the first 
six months of 2007, Barhoum tells me. “Finally we 
decided to put an end to it. If we had let them 
stay loose in Gaza, there would have been more violence.”

“Everyone here recognizes that Dahlan was trying 
with American help to undermine the results of 
the elections,” says Mahmoud Zahar, the former 
foreign minister for the Haniyeh government, who 
now leads Hamas’s militant wing in Gaza. “He was the one planning a coup.”

Zahar and I speak inside his home in Gaza, which 
was rebuilt after a 2003 Israeli air strike 
destroyed it, killing one of his sons. He tells 
me that Hamas launched its operations in June 
with a limited objective: “The decision was only 
to get rid of the Preventive Security Service. 
They were the ones out on every crossroads, 
putting anyone suspected of Hamas involvement at 
risk of being tortured or killed.” But when Fatah 
fighters inside a surrounded Preventive Security 
office in Jabaliya began retreating from building 
to building, they set off a “domino effect” that 
emboldened Hamas to seek broader gains.

Many armed units that were nominally loyal to 
Fatah did not fight at all. Some stayed neutral 
because they feared that, with Dahlan absent, his 
forces were bound to lose. “I wanted to stop the 
cycle of killing,” says Ibrahim abu al-Nazar, a 
veteran party chief. “What did Dahlan expect? Did 
he think the U.S. Navy was going to come to 
Fatah’s rescue? They promised him everything, but 
what did they do? But he also deceived them. He 
told them he was the strongman of the region. 
Even the Americans may now feel sad and 
frustrated. Their friend lost the battle.”

Others who stayed out of the fight were 
extremists. “Fatah is a large movement, with many 
schools inside it,” says Khalid Jaberi, a 
commander with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, 
which continue to fire rockets into Israel from 
Gaza. “Dahlan’s school is funded by the Americans 
and believes in negotiations with Israel as a 
strategic choice. Dahlan tried to control 
everything in Fatah, but there are cadres who 
could do a much better job. Dahlan treated us 
dictatorially. There was no overall Fatah 
decision to confront Hamas, and that’s why our 
guns in al-Aqsa are the cleanest. They are not 
corrupted by the blood of our people.”

Jaberi pauses. He spent the night before our 
interview awake and in hiding, fearful of Israeli 
air strikes. “You know,” he says, “since the 
takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains 
of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. 
We can only conclude that having Hamas in control 
serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise.”

The fighting was over in less than five days. It 
began with attacks on Fatah security buildings, 
in and around Gaza City and in the southern town 
of Rafah. Fatah attempted to shell Prime Minister 
Haniyeh’s house, but by dusk on June 13 its forces were being routed.

Years of oppression by Dahlan and his forces were 
avenged as Hamas chased down stray Fatah fighters 
and subjected them to summary execution. At least 
one victim was reportedly thrown from the roof of 
a high-rise building. By June 16, Hamas had 
captured every Fatah building, as well as Abbas’s 
official Gaza residence. Much of Dahlan’s house, 
which doubled as his office, was reduced to rubble.

Fatah’s last stand, predictably enough, was made 
by the Preventive Security Service. The unit 
sustained heavy casualties, but a rump of about 
100 surviving fighters eventually made it to the 
beach and escaped in the night by fishing boat.

At the apartment in Ramallah, the wounded 
struggle on. Unlike Fatah, Hamas fired exploding 
bullets, which are banned under the Geneva 
Conventions. Some of the men in the apartment 
were shot with these rounds 20 or 30 times, 
producing unimaginable injuries that required 
amputation. Several have lost both legs.

The coup has had other costs. Amjad Shawer, a 
local economist, tells me that Gaza had 400 
functioning factories and workshops at the start 
of 2007. By December, the intensified Israeli 
blockade had caused 90 percent of them to close. 
Seventy percent of Gaza’s population is now living on less than $2 a day.

Israel, meanwhile, is no safer. The emergency 
pro-peace government called for in the secret 
Action Plan is now in office­but only in the West 
Bank. In Gaza, the exact thing both Israel and 
the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass 
when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and 
ammunition­including the new Egyptian guns 
supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.

Now that it controls Gaza, Hamas has given free 
rein to militants intent on firing rockets into 
neighboring Israeli towns. “We are still 
developing our rockets; soon we shall hit the 
heart of Ashkelon at will,” says Jaberi, the 
al-Aqsa commander, referring to the Israeli city 
of 110,000 people 12 miles from Gaza’s border. “I 
assure you, the time is near when we will mount a 
big operation inside Israel, in Haifa or Tel Aviv.”

On January 23, Hamas blew up parts of the wall 
dividing Gaza from Egypt, and tens of thousands 
of Palestinians crossed the border. Militants had 
already been smuggling weapons through a network 
of underground tunnels, but the breach of the 
wall made their job much easier­and may have 
brought Jaberi’s threat closer to reality.

George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice continue to 
push the peace process, but Avi Dichter says 
Israel will never conclude a deal on Palestinian 
statehood until the Palestinians reform their 
entire law-enforcement system­what he calls “the 
chain of security.” With Hamas in control of 
Gaza, there appears to be no chance of that 
happening. “Just look at the situation,” says 
Dahlan. “They say there will be a final-status 
agreement in eight months? No way.”



“An Institutional Failure”

How could the U.S. have played Gaza so wrong? 
Neocon critics of the administration­who until 
last year were inside it­blame an old State 
Department vice: the rush to anoint a strongman 
instead of solving problems directly. This ploy 
has failed in places as diverse as Vietnam, the 
Philippines, Central America, and Saddam 
Hussein’s Iraq, during its war against Iran. To 
rely on proxies such as Muhammad Dahlan, says 
former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, is “an 
institutional failure, a failure of strategy.” 
Its author, he says, was Rice, “who, like others 
in the dying days of this administration, is 
looking for legacy. Having failed to heed the 
warning not to hold the elections, they tried to 
avoid the result through Dayton.”

With few good options left, the administration 
now appears to be rethinking its blanket refusal 
to engage with Hamas. Staffers at the National 
Security Council and the Pentagon recently put 
out discreet feelers to academic experts, asking 
them for papers describing Hamas and its 
principal protagonists. “They say they won’t talk 
to Hamas,” says one such expert, “but in the end 
they’re going to have to. It’s inevitable.”

It is impossible to say for sure whether the 
outcome in Gaza would have been any better­for 
the Palestinian people, for the Israelis, and for 
America’s allies in Fatah­if the Bush 
administration had pursued a different policy. 
One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any worse.




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