BLURRY VISION:

Takeover by Hamas Illustrates Failure of Bush's Mideast Vision (Glenn Kessler, June 15, 2007, Washington Post)

Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," the president declared.

The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza.

After his reelection in 2004, Bush said he would use his "political capital" to help create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term. In his final 18 months as president, he faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.

Palestinian statehood hopes in peril: Factional clashes could turn Gaza and West Bank into ministates ruled by Hamas and Fatah (Ken Ellingwood, June 15, 2007, LA Times)

It is possible that the two Palestinian factions can find a way to govern together after the fighting, which Hamas characterizes as an effort to weed out troublemakers intent on toppling the government it heads rather than as a bid to eradicate Fatah. A Hamas triumph could bring a halt to the chaos that has made Gazans miserable for months.

The crisis has forced Palestinians to face how far apart the West Bank and Gaza really are, though separated by just 20 miles of Israeli territory at the narrowest point. Israeli restrictions prevent most Palestinians from traveling between the two areas. Palestinian legislators gather via video link because Hamas lawmakers are prevented from traveling across Israel.

"We already see the separation taking place on the ground," said Samir Said, 55, a grocer in Ramallah. "This is really bad for the Palestinian cause. We can see the Palestinian state vanishing."

Gaza, by far the poorer and more pious of the two areas, is Hamas' stronghold, though Fatah had long dominated the established security forces there. The West Bank, especially urban Ramallah, is more liberal-minded. The secular Fatah is the dominant political force, though Hamas enjoys support in some of the bigger towns, such as Hebron and Nablus.

Gaza bears the conservative markings of its years under Egyptian control before its capture by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War, while the West Bank has deep ties with Jordan, said Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at Birzeit University near Ramallah.

"There is almost total separation," Jarbawi said.

The distinctions have been evident during the current fighting, with Hamas showing the might of its militias in Gaza and Fatah hitting back in the West Bank, where the Islamist movement is weaker.

A lasting split between the West Bank and Gaza could force Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah, to consider whether to talk to the Israelis about peace steps limited to the West Bank, such as terms under which Israel would withdraw from isolated settlements, but short of establishing a Palestinian state, said Yossi Alpher, an Israeli analyst.

"Will Abu Mazen be willing to talk to us about the West Bank alone?" Alpher asked, using Abbas' nickname. "If he is, this could open up some possibilities."

The political crisis has propelled a debate among Palestinian intellectuals over whether Palestinians might be better served by dumping the trappings of the 1993 Oslo peace agreement, which created the enfeebled Palestinian Authority, and leaving themselves under Israeli occupation without their own government.

This would, in effect, swap the two-state solution for a one-state vision in which Arabs might someday achieve a demographic majority in the region that includes Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The idea has gained momentum since the power-sharing agreement reached in February between Hamas and Fatah failed to get the international community to end its ban on aid to the Hamas-led government.

"One cannot exclude such a possibility: that this is the end of the two-state solution," said Yitzhak Reiter, a fellow at Hebrew University's Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Jerusalem.

The vision was mostly clear, the President just failed to comprehend that Hamas is going to govern the eventual nation of Palestine and was unprepared to deal with that fact when they won. The joint American, Israeli, Fatah attempt to thwart Hamas has had predictably bad results for all concerned.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 15, 2007 6:44 AM