so have a look.
this is what really really ineptly conceived and executed policy can get you: EXACTLY what you wanted least to have happen.
Quote:
Hamas Seizes Key Fatah Installation
By STEVEN ERLANGER and GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: June 14, 2007
JERUSALEM, June 14 ? President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah faced the further collapse of his power in Gaza today as fierce fighting continued and Hamas fighters took over the headquarters of Fatah?s Preventive Security forces in
Aides to Mr. Abbas say he is expected to announce an ?important decision? later today. He is under pressure from within Fatah and from his Western allies to suspend participation in the so-called unity government with Hamas, which began in March, or to declare a full state of emergency.
Hamas forces consolidated their control over much of Gaza on Wednesday, taking command of the main north-south road and blowing up a Fatah headquarters in Khan Yunis, in the south.
By Wednesday, Hamas controlled Gaza City except for several areas, including the presidential compound of Mr. Abbas and the Suraya headquarters of the National Security Forces, the Palestinian army. Hamas had surrounded Al Suraya, calling on the occupants to surrender. Mr. Abbas was outside Gaza, in Ramallah, on the West Bank.
Today, Hamas tightened its grip further by capturing the headquarters of the Fatah-dominated Preventive Security forces, in the Tal el-Hawa district of Gaza City.
The fall of that headquarters would have powerful resonance for both Fatah and Hamas. Preventive Security is an elite national security force that was founded by Mohammed Dahlan, a Fatah strongman, and was considered to be one of the most important Fatah forces in Gaza.
By Wednesday, in northern Gaza and Gaza City, Hamas military men, many of them in black masks, moved unchallenged through the streets as Fatah fighters ran short of arms and ammunition and abandoned their posts.
The powerful Hamas move to exert authority in Gaza, and the poor performance and motivation of the larger security forces supposedly loyal to Fatah, raised troubling questions for Mr. Abbas and Israel, and left the White House with a dwindling menu of policy options.
Mr. Abbas faces a putative Palestinian state divided into a West Bank run by Fatah and a Gaza run by Hamas.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel warned of ?regional consequences? if Gaza fell under the complete control of Hamas, an Islamist movement that does not recognize Israel?s right to exist. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Hamas control of Gaza would limit Israel?s ability to negotiate with Mr. Abbas, as Washington wants.
Hamas spokesmen said the movement had no political goal except to defend itself from a group within Fatah collaborating with Israel and the United States. They said they wanted to bring the security forces under the control of the unity government, in which Fatah agreed to play a part until the current fighting.
Some Israeli security officials say Israel wants to see the West Bank isolated from Gaza, even more so with Hamas in control there. One official suggested that Hamas?s show of strength in Gaza would make it more likely that the Israeli military would intervene there this summer to cut back Hamas?s military power. The Israeli security services say Hamas, which is able to smuggle weapons and explosives from Egypt, is developing a sophisticated army on the model of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, said Israel did not see ?the implosion of the Palestinian Authority in anyone?s interest.? In Gaza, he added, ?the clear strength that Hamas is demonstrating on the ground is a problem for us, and a challenge.?
?It?s a problem for the Palestinians, too,? Mr. Regev said. ?Our whole policy is to work with moderate pragmatic Palestinians who believe in peace, and Hamas hegemony in Gaza is not good for Israel, for the Palestinians or for peace.?
Since the election victory of Hamas in January 2006, the United States and Israel have worked to isolate and damage Hamas and build up Fatah with recognition and weaponry. Asked whether the Hamas gains showed the failure of that policy, Mr. Regev said: ?I don?t think Israel or the international community should give up on Palestinian moderates. That would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.?
Some in Israel, however, are beginning to ask whether it might make sense to have indirect discussions with Hamas, which is clearly not going away.
In Wednesday?s clashes in Gaza City, Hamas took over the Awdah building, a tall apartment complex where many Fatah leaders lived, causing another Fatah leader, Maher Miqdad, to flee with his family, after at least eight Fatah men were killed.
Hamas also took over and burned the main police station, another symbol of Fatah power, and surrounded the main national security headquarters building, Al Suraya.
In northern Gaza, Hamas gave fighters in isolated Fatah military headquarters until Friday at 7 p.m. to surrender their weapons.
In Khan Yunis, Hamas detonated a large bomb in a tunnel under the headquarters of Fatah?s Preventive Security, killing at least one of those inside and wounding eight more.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said the movement was defending itself, not reaching for unalloyed power.
?There is no political goal behind this but to defend our movement and force these security groups to behave,? Mr. Zuhri said in an interview.
He insisted that ?Hamas did not initiate these attacks, but it was pushed to do so to end crimes by the factions inside Fatah who favor a coup.?
He said Hamas ?is doing the work that Fatah failed to do, to control these groups,? whom he accused of crimes, chaos and collaboration with Israel and the United States.
Mr. Zuhri said the United States should ?sit with the movement at the dialogue table on the basis of mutual respect, respecting the elections.?
Mr. Miqdad accused Hamas of following an Israeli script. ?This is an Israeli plan,? he said. ?They want to connect the West Bank to Jordan and make Gaza a separate jail. This will be the end of an independent Palestinian state.?
Abdullah al-Aqad, 28, of Khan Yunis, said he joined the national security forces to have a job. He marveled at the speed of the Hamas advance. ?We are 70,000 P.A. soldiers, and where are they all?? he asked. ?And facing 10,000 Hamas soldiers.?
From Ramallah, Mr. Abbas spoke to the exiled Hamas political leader, Khaled Meshal, to try to ease the crisis. ?This is madness, the madness that is going on in Gaza now,? Mr. Abbas told reporters.
At least 13 Palestinians were killed on Wednesday and 64 injured, according to Moaweya Hassanein of the Palestinian Health Ministry. He said 59 had died since Monday.
The dead included two workers with the United Nations agency that helps the 70 percent of Gazans who are refugees or their descendants. The agency announced it was curtailing its operations until the fighting stopped.
While Fatah blamed Hamas for the crisis, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, Danny Rubinstein, said the ?primary reason for the break-up is the fact that Fatah has refused to fully share the Palestinian Authority?s mechanism of power with its rival Hamas, despite Hamas?s decisive victory in the January 2006 general elections.?
Fatah ?was forced to overrule Palestinian voters because the entire world demanded it do so,? Mr. Rubinstein added. ?Matters have come to the point where Hamas attempted to take by force what they believe they rightfully deserve.?
Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza City and Khan Yunis.
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source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/wo...hp&oref=slogin
hamas could have been by this point a much different type of organization---holding power moderates because the premises of the game shift--legitimacy is no longer a matter of claims that you make but of continuity of services and security. hamas was elected and those champions of "democracy" those Beacons of democracy, examples to the fucking world---the us and israel--CHOSE not to recognize the elections. they CHOSE a set of actions that would force the collapse of the pa in gaza. they CHOSE to blockade.
they CHOSE hamas coming to power militarily.
they CHOSE to create conditions that would reinforce hamas most radical tendencies, to force it to rely on exactly what both parties were most anxious about.
this is why i tried yesterday to get folk to read the de soto report rather than to rely on the usual rhetorical suspects the usual rhetorical moves to address this question. this is the outcome of the entire discourse of the "war on terror"--this is what it gets you--it gets you what you are most afraid of--it gets you what you claim to want to stop--you produce what you are trying to eliminate--you want, apparently, what you claim to not want--you need, apparently, what you claim endangers you.
i am not interested in the various claims to up-close-and-personal experience of the consequences of this situation. i am interested in the dynamics that cause them. here you see it, in technicolor, happening right in front of you.
rather than look at it, there is post after post above that tries instead to run the thread to ground (this in an electrical sense, like an antenna).
"dead jews dont move you," loquitor sez to me. nice, bud.
x or y above has experience at no to one to two removes of "terrorism".
so it follows that there is no reason to look at system-level causes--you know choices, errors, or (in the case of the bush administration) ideologically-driven fuck ups--because of course we all know that the "war on terror" discourse is a simple description of fact, nothing ideological about it. no reason to think about causes or systemic matters because the television tells us that "terrorists" are just Evil--an "explanation" what gets accepted and repeated above seemingly because it exempts us from thinking about difficult unpleasant things and replaces them with simpler unpleasant things--images of violence inflicted on civilians ON BOTH SIDES of this conflict that are decontextualized because we WANT then to be decontextualizated so that we can contemplate the carnage without bothering with causation.
but what is the status of these simpler, more self-contained unpleasant things, these acts of violence that one deplores while at the same time holding them so close to your imagination that you can think of nothing else? you could say that individual incidents which produce individual victims are important--and i would agree--you could say that looking at systemic matters trivializes these individual incidents--to which i would counter that NOT looking at systemic problems is what trivializes these individual acts of violence--it trivializes them absolutely because it disconnects them from reality, disconnects them from any causes of meanings outside themselves--NOT looking makes all acts of violence arbitrary--and it is the refusal to look that makes these individual victims of individual actions meaningless because your perspective on these actions is such that meaning is impossible to think about.
there is a performative element inside of this, an active dimension to the refusal to think in terms of choices and policy and the linkages between these and this fiction we refer to as "terrorism"---and this action must be connected to something psychological, link to some preference--perhaps that preference is aesthetic--perhaps there is something inwardly prettier about reducing this long, brutal, dehumanizing conflict to a series of artitrary incidents that you can separate at your leisure, that provide you with images of explosions and carnage that you can hold up before your mind's eye and say "tsk tsk tsk" about.
a bus with israeli children is blown up: tsk tsk.
a family of palestinians is killed by the idf: tsk tsk.
i would go further: i think that there is some level at which the policy choices made by israel and the united states with reference to gaza indicates that both actually LIKE this fiction "terrorism" that they NEED this fiction and ENJOY the actions that give this fiction its content--they find valdiation in the fact of it for their idioitic nationalist policies. if there was no enjoyment, then it is hard to figure out why both would pursue policy choices that create and perpetuate the conditions that prompt violent political actions in the first place.
and to my mind there is no other way to see what the united states and israel have been doing to gaza.
the olmert government is hopelessly weak. so is the bush administration. both NEED chaos in gaza. it provides them with the kind of conditions that they can appear to react coherently to and in that appearance of coherent response lay (temporary) bounces in polling numbers and with that comes a (transient) puff of air into the balloon that is the sense of holding power. both have worked very hard to make sure it happens.
and here it is.
so dont talk to me about victims. dont talk to me about which deaths you imagine move me and which dont--that entire way of thinking about this is part of the same logic that you see at the policy level behind the present war--and there is no other word for it--in gaza. this is a clear, self-evident example of the extent to which the ideology geared around the prevention or eradication of "terrorism" is an explanation for it.
you reap what you sow, sports fans.