"America and the EU [European Union] shamelessly joined Israel in ostracizing and demonizing the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed. As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes."
These punitive measures were to remain in place until Hamas renounced violence (including stopping its cross-border rocket attacks), recognized Israel, and accepted all previous agreements based on the Oslo peace accords.
Which brings us back to that Washington-bound letter from Gaza. In the wake of the elections, Hamas was no longer the militant opposition to a ruling Fatah party, but a legally elected government operating under siege. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, suddenly responsible for governing and facing a mounting economic, humanitarian, and political catastrophe, sought to defuse the situation. In his June 2006 hand-written note to President Bush that Jerome Segal delivered to the State Department and the National Security Council, he requested a direct dialogue with the administration.
Despite Hamas's charter calling for the elimination of Israel, Haniyeh's conciliatory note to the American president conveyed a different message. "We are so concerned about stability and security in the area that we don't mind having a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and offering a truce for many years," Haniyeh wrote to Bush. This essentially added up to an offer of de facto recognition of Israel with a cessation of hostilities -- two of the key U.S. and Israeli demands of Hamas.
"The continuation of this situation," Haniyeh wrote to Bush, "will encourage violence and chaos in the whole region."
A few lonely voices in the U.S. and Israel urged that the moment be seized and Hamas coaxed toward moderation. After all, Israel itself had been birthed in part by the Irgun and Stern Gang (or Lehi), groups considered terrorist by the British and the U.N. In the years before Israel's birth, they had been responsible for a horrific massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and the Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel, killing 91 people. Leaders of the two organizations, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, later became prime ministers of Israel. Similarly, Yasser Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization was considered a terrorist group by Israel and the West, recognized Israel's right to exist in a pivotal 1988 speech, paving the way for the Oslo peace process.
"I believe there is a chance that Hamas, the devils of yesterday, could be reasonable people today," declared Efraim Halevy, former director of the Mossad, Israel's CIA. "Rather than being a problem, we should strive to make them part of the solution."
The Bush team, however, chose to ignore Hamas's overture, opting, with Israel, for violence and chaos. The Obama administration would follow the same path years later. In this way, a pattern of U.S. acquiescence in ongoing, ever worsening humanitarian disasters in Hamas-run Gaza was established. Direct American political and material support for the indiscriminate killing of thousands of Gaza's civilians, including hundreds of children, became Washington's de facto policy.
A U.S.-Israeli Military-Industrial Alliance
Three weeks after Haniyeh's unanswered letter was delivered, Hamas abducted an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and fired rockets into Israel. Israel launched a massive retaliation, Operation Summer Rains, returning to a fearsome and bloody history in Gaza that would repeat itself with greater intensity in the years ahead. Israeli missiles and fighter jets destroyed the offices of the prime minister and interior minister, the American International School, more than 100 other buildings, and heavily damaged Gaza's only power station, the sole source of electricity for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
During that operation, many Palestinians were limited to one meal a day, eaten by candlelight. More than 200 Palestinians were killed in the first two months of the conflict, at least 44 them children. Eleven Israelis died during that period. And yet, bad as it was, the death and destruction then would prove small compared to what was still to come.
Since Summer Rains, more than 4,200 Gazans, including nearly 1,400 non-combatants, including more than 600 children, have been killed by missiles, bombs, and other munitions -- some launched from offshore by Israel's navy, some from land by Israeli tanks and ground forces, and some from the air by American-made F-16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters, part of the $3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel. This includes the $276 million in bombs, grenades, torpedoes, rocket launchers, guided missiles, howitzers, mortars, machine guns, shotguns, pistols, cartridges, bayonets, and other battlefield weaponry that the U.S. has exported to Israel since January 2012.
This U.S.-Israeli military-industrial alliance has provided little incentive to explore peaceful or diplomatic alternatives. In 2007, Hamas and Fatah again discussed forming a unity government. The U.S. responded with heavy pressure on Mahmoud Abbas. American officials, through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had already been facilitating military training and arms shipments to his Fatah faction in Gaza. They wanted to bolster its capabilities against Hamas, allowing the U.S.'s favored Fatah leader in Gaza, strongman Mahmoud Dahlan, to take control.
This scenario, laid out in "The Gaza Bombshell," a 2008 Vanity Fair piece by David Rose, and elsewhere, was confirmed to me by an American official stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv at the time. Eventually, said Norman Olsen, a former State Department official and 26-year foreign service officer, the unity talks collapsed, "but not before Dahlan's undisciplined fighters engaged in months of open protection rackets, extortion, kneecappings, car-jackings, and abductions." Olsen knows the territory: he spent four years at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv covering the Gaza Strip, making hundreds of daily trips there, and later served as chief of the Embassy's political section, and as special advisor on the peace process to the U.S. ambassador.
Word of the American plan was leaked to an Arabic-language newspaper. Street battles between Fatah and Hamas erupted in Gaza. The "Battle of Gaza" took more than 100 lives. In the end, Hamas police and militants, according to Olsen, "drove Dahlan's fighters from the Strip, established order, and restored the ability of Gaza residents to move about safely."
Taken in by Dahlan's bravado, American officials were initially encouraged by the fighting. "I like this violence," a senior American Middle East envoy told his U.N. counterpart, Alvaro de Soto, according to a confidential "End of Mission Report" leaked to the Guardian. Israeli officials also saw opportunities in the de facto Palestinian civil war. Israel's director of military intelligence, according to a State Department cable later published by WikiLeaks, told the American ambassador in Tel Aviv that a Hamas victory would allow Israel "to treat Gaza" as a separate "hostile country," and that he would be "pleased" if Abbas "set up a separate regime in the West Bank."
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