[News] Gaza Bombshell - White House Plans Palestinian Civil War
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Mar 4 15:02:28 EST 2008
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¤tPage=all
After failing to anticipate Hamass 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 hotels 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: Ive 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 Hamass 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
Dans father is forced to sit and listen to his
sons 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 Fatahs resident
strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently
served as Abbass 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 its
possible, during your presidency? he told an
audience in Jerusalem on January 9. And the answer is: Im 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: Hamass complete control of Gaza, home to
some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized
power in a bloody coup détat 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.
Its a tough situation, Bush admitted. I dont
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 Americas 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 Cheneys 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 wasnt 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 presidents 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,
its 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 Gazas Khan Younis refugee camp, and
his education came mostly from the street. In
1981 he helped found Fatahs 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 Arafats 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 Authoritys 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 Dahlans 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. Hes simply a great and fair man,
Dahlan says. Im 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
Clintons 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 Arafats 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 wasnt 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. Ive asked why nobody saw it
coming, Condoleezza Rice told reporters. I
dont know anyone who wasnt caught off guard by Hamass 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 Hamass election victory, the freedom agenda was dead.
The first step, taken by the Middle East
diplomatic Quartetthe U.S., the European
Union, Russia, and the United Nationswas to
demand that the new Hamas government renounce
violence, recognize Israels 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 Arafats
compound, which Israel had destroyed in 2002.
Americas leverage in Palestinian affairs was
much stronger than it had been in Arafats 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 Washingtons help.
At their joint press conference, Rice smiled as
she expressed her nations great admiration for
Abbass leadership. Behind closed doors, however,
Rices tone was sharper, say officials who
witnessed their meeting. Isolating Hamas just
wasnt 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 were agreed? Youll
dissolve the government within two weeks?
Maybe not two weeks. Give me a month. Lets wait
until after the Eid, he said, referring to the
three-day celebration that marks the end of
Ramadan. (Abbass 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 Americas 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, Walless
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 Fatahs 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 Fatahs 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, Fatahs security
forces had never really recovered from Operation
Defensive Shield, Israels 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
Hamass 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 Gazas 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 didnt reply, she says. I tried to
call his mobile [phone], but it was switched off.
So I called his deputy, Mahmoun, and he didnt
know where he was. Thats 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 didnt 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. Thats 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, drivers license, and credit card.
Very Clever Warfare
Fatahs 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 wasnt 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 Hamass 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
sisters 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 wasnt alone. That same night that I
was released, abu Jidyans 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-Jassers torture:
The only order I gave was to defend ourselves.
That doesnt mean there wasnt 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.
Hes 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, Hes 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 didnt 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, Israels 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 presidents 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 Husseins 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 Daytons
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 Abbass
office in Ramallah, and I explained the whole
thing to Condi. And she said, Yes, we have to
make an effort to do this. Theres 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 programsthe 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
Reagans 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 wasnt 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 everythingnamely, 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 things for sure, we werent
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 wasnt the only
one: There were severe fissures among
neoconservatives over this, says Cheneys 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
didnt have faith in Americas 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 millionmost 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 Authoritys
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 Abbass control to
establish internal law and order, stop terrorism and deter extralegal forces.
The Bush administrations 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
Fatahs 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 Fatahs 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 Daytons team and the Palestinian
technical team for reforma 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 Daytons team.
On April 30, 2007, a portion of one early draft
was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Majd. The
secret was out. From Hamass 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 hed 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 Gazas 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
Dahlans appointment as national-security
adviser. Meanwhile, he said, Hamass Executive
Force was becoming extremely unpopular I would
say that we are kind of late in the ball game
here, and we are behind, theres 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 buildings 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.
Fatahs Last Stand
The Hamas leadership in Gaza is adamant that the
coup would not have happened if Fatah had not
provoked it. Fawzi Barhoum, Hamass 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 Hamass 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
Fatahs 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 Fatahs al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades,
which continue to fire rockets into Israel from
Gaza. Dahlans 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 thats 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, weve 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
Haniyehs 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 Abbass
official Gaza residence. Much of Dahlans house,
which doubled as his office, was reduced to rubble.
Fatahs 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 Gazas 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 Fatahs 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 Gazas 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 Jaberis 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
Husseins 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 wont talk
to Hamas, says one such expert, but in the end
theyre going to have to. Its 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
Americas allies in Fatahif the Bush
administration had pursued a different policy.
One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any worse.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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