Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

In light of Hamas’ seizure of the Gaza Strip, it is worthwhile to understand how this radical Islamist organization came to play such a major role in Palestinian political life and how Israel and the United States contributed to making that possible.

Ironically, it was Israel which encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement as a counter to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the secular coalition composed of Fatah and various leftist and other nationalist movements. Beginning in the early 1980s, with generous funding from the U.S.-backed family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the antecedents of Hamas began to emerge through the establishment of schools, health care clinics, social service organizations and other entities which stressed an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam which up to that point had not been very common among the Palestinian population. The hope was that if people spent more time praying in mosques, they would be less prone to enlist in left-wing nationalist movements challenging the Israeli occupation.

While supporters of the secular PLO were denied their own media or right to hold political gatherings, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers and even have their own radio station. For example, in the occupied Palestinian city of Gaza in 1981, Israeli soldiers—who had shown no hesitation in brutally suppressing peaceful pro-PLO demonstrations—stood by when a group of Islamic extremists attacked and burned a PLO-affiliated health clinic in Gaza for offering family planning services for women.

Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who had been freed from prison when Israel conquered the Gaza Strip 20 years earlier. Israel’s priorities in suppressing Palestinian dissent during this period were revealing: In 1988, Israel forcibly exiled Palestinian activist Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist who advocated the use of Gandhian-style resistance to the Israeli occupation and Israeli-Palestinian peace while allowing Sheik Yassin to circulate anti-Jewish hate literature and publicly call for the destruction of Israel by force of arms.

American policy was not much different: Up until 1993, U.S. officials in the consular office in Jerusalem met periodically with Hamas leaders while they were barred from meeting with anyone from the PLO. This policy continued despite the fact that the PLO had renounced terrorism and unilaterally recognized Israel as far back as 1988.

Early Boost

One of the early major boosts for Hamas came when the Israeli government expelled more than 400 Palestinian Muslims in late 1992. While most of the exiles were associated with Hamas-affiliated social service agencies, very few had been accused of any violent crimes. Since such expulsions are a direct contravention to international law, the UN Security Council unanimously condemned the action and called for their immediate return. The incoming Clinton Administration, however, blocked the United Nations from enforcing its resolution and falsely claimed that an Israeli offer to eventually allow some of exiles back constituted a fulfillment of the UN mandate. The result of the Israeli and American actions was that the exiles became heroes and martyrs; the credibility of Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinians grew enormously—and so did their political strength.

Still, at the time of the Oslo Agreement between Israel and the PLO in 1993, polls showed that Hamas had the support of only 15% of the Palestinian community. Support for Hamas grew, however, as promises of a viable Palestinian state faded as Israel continued to expand its colonization drive on the West Bank, doubling the amount of settlers over the next dozen years. The rule of Fatah leader and Palestine Authority president Yasir Arafat and his cronies proved to be corrupt and inept while Hamas leaders were seen to be more honest and in keeping with the needs of ordinary Palestinians. In early 2001, Israel cut off all substantive negotiations with the Palestinians and a devastating U.S.-backed Israeli offensive the following year destroyed much of the Palestine Authority’s infrastructure, making prospects for peace and statehood even more remote. Israeli closures and blockades sank the Palestinian economy into a serious depression and Hamas-run social services became all the more important for ordinary Palestinians.

Seeing how Fatah’s 1993 decision to end the armed struggle and rely on a U.S.-led peace process had resulted in increased suffering, Hamas’ popularity grew well beyond its hard-line fundamentalist base, and its use of terrorism against Israel—despite being immoral, illegal and counter-productive—seemed to express the sense of anger and impotence of wide segments of the Palestinian population. Meanwhile—in a policy defended by both the Bush administration and Democratic leaders in Congress—Israel’s use of death squads resulted in the deaths of Sheik Yassin and scores of other Hamas leaders, turning them into martyrs in the eyes of many Palestinians and increasing Hamas’ support still further.

The Election of a Hamas Government

With the Bush administration insisting that the Palestinians stage free and fair elections after the death of Arafat in 2004, Fatah leaders hoped that coaxing Hamas into the electoral process would help weaken its more radical elements. However, the response from Washington was overwhelmingly negative. In December 2005, a month prior to the Palestinian election, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by an overwhelming 397-17 majority criticizing Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas for "his willingness to see Hamas participate in the elections without first calling for it to renounce its goal of destroying the State of Israel."

However, neither Pelosi nor other House leaders have ever criticized Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for his willingness to see parties, such as the National Union—which seeks to destroy any Palestinian national entity and expel its Arab population—to participate in Israeli elections, an apparent acknowledgement that while Congress sees Israel's survival is axiomatic, Palestine's survival is an open-ended question. (In any case, under the Palestinian Authority, as with the state of Israel, the head of state simply does not have the authority to ban a political party simply because of its ideology, however repugnant.)

Similarly, the resolution—co-sponsored by Pelosi and other Democratic leaders—insisted that groups such as Hamas "should not be permitted to participate in Palestinian elections until such organizations recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state." Ironically, however, the United States allows a number of political organizations, such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers World Party—which also refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state—to participate in U.S. elections, indicating that the apparent belief by Pelosi and her colleagues that Arab nations should not be able to experience the same degree of democracy we enjoy in this country which allows even those with extreme views to seek political office.

The Senate also weighed in. A letter signed by 73 of 100 senators—including 2008 Democratic presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama—also questioned the decision to allow Hamas to participate in the election on the grounds that "No democracy in the world allows a political party to bear its own arms." Ironically, just weeks earlier the Senate had voted unanimously to praise the recently completed Iraqi parliamentary elections in which a number of political parties with their own militias openly participated and formed the new Iraqi government. In addition, the United Kingdom—America's closest ally—allowed Sinn Fein to operate a legal political party and participate in elections even during the decades in which its armed wing, the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, engaged in terrorist attacks against British citizens with no criticism of Westminster emanating from Capitol Hill.

Despite U.S. objections, the Palestinian parliamentary elections went ahead in January 2006 with Hamas’ participation. They were monitored closely by international observers and were universally recognized as free and fair. With reformist and leftist parties divided into a half dozen competing slates, Hamas was seen by many Palestinians disgusted with the status quo as the only viable alternative to the corrupt Fatah incumbents and with Israel refusing to engage in substantive peace negotiations with Abbas’ Fatah-led government, they figured there was little to lose in electing Hamas. In addition, factionalism within the ruling party led a number of districts to have competing Fatah candidates. As a result, even though Hamas only received 44% of the vote, they captured a majority of parliament and the right to select the prime minister and form a new government.

Ironically, the position of prime minister did not exist under the original constitution of the Palestine Authority, but was added in March 2003 at the insistence of the United States, which desired a counterweight to the President Arafat. As a result, while the elections allowed Abbas to remain as president, he was forced to share power with Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister.

Efforts to Undermine the Elected Government

Despite claiming support for free elections, the United States tried from the outset to undermine the Hamas government. It was largely due to U.S. pressure that Abbas refused Hamas’ initial invitation to form a national unity government that would include Fatah and from which some of the more hardline Hamas leaders would have presumably been marginalized. The Bush administration pressured the Canadians, Europeans and others in the international community to impose stiff sanctions on the Palestine Authority, though a limited amount of aid continued to flow to government offices controlled by President Abbas.

Once one of the more prosperous regions in the Arab world, decades of Israeli occupation had resulted in the destruction of much of the indigenous Palestinian economy, making the Palestine Authority dependent on foreign aid to provide basic functions for its people. The impact of these sanctions, therefore, was devastating. The Iranian regime rushed in to partially fulfill the void, providing millions of dollars to run basic services and giving the Islamic Republic—which until then had not been allied with Hamas and had not been a major player in Palestinian politics—unprecedented leverage.

Meanwhile, record unemployment led angry and hungry young men to become easy recruits for Hamas militants. One leading Fatah official noted how, "For many people, this was the only way to make money." Some Palestinian police, unpaid by their bankrupt government, clandestinely joined the Hamas militia as a second job, creating a dual loyalty.

The demands imposed at the insistence of the Bush administration and Congress on the Palestine Authority (PA) in order to lift the sanctions appeared to have been designed to be rejected and were widely interpreted as a pretext for punishing the Palestinian population for voting the wrong way. For example, the United States demanded that the Hamas-led government unilaterally recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, even though Israel has never recognized the right of the Palestinians to have a state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip or anywhere else. Other demands included an end of attacks on civilians in Israel while not demanding that Israel likewise end its attacks on civilian areas in the Gaza Strip. They also demanded that the Hamas-led PA accept all previously negotiated agreements even as Israel continued to violate key components of the Wye River Agreement and other negotiated deals with the Palestinians.

While Hamas honored a unilateral cease fire regarding suicide bombings in Israel, border clashes and rocket attacks into Israel continued. Israel, meanwhile, with the support of the Bush administration, engaged in devastating air strikes against crowded urban neighborhoods, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties. Congress also went on record defending the Israeli assaults—which were widely condemned in the international community as excessive and in violation of international humanitarian law—as legitimate acts of self-defense.

A House resolution last summer, passed by an overwhelming 410-8 majority, went so far as to praise Israel’s "longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcomes Israel's continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties" despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Only seven Democrats voted against the resolution, which put them on record commending President Bush "for fully supporting Israel as it responds to these armed attacks by terrorist organizations and their state sponsors."

It was out of this environment that Hamas grew from a radical minority to an electoral majority and is now patrolling the streets of the Gaza Strip in full control.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus. He is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).

There is much blame to go around regarding the tragic turn of events in the Gaza Strip. While Hamas is the most immediate culprit, responsibility also rests with Fatah, Israel - and the United States.

The seizure of power in the tiny coastal territory by Hamas militants after bitter factional fighting with Fatah militiamen has only encouraged anti-Palestinian hardliners in Israel and the United States who claim that the Palestinians are unworthy of statehood and that Israel should continue its occupation and colonization of major segments of Palestinian territory seized by the Israeli armed forces in June 1967. The scenes of the bloody infighting among Palestinians have seemingly reinforced racist notions common in the United States and Israel, as exemplified by the statement by former Israeli Prime Minister and recently re-elected Labor Party leader Ehud Barak’s that Israel was “a villa in the jungle.”

The vast majority of ordinary Palestinians, meanwhile, are disgusted at the behavior of both Hamas and Fatah, who see it as little better than gang warfare and a tragic setback in their struggle for freedom against foreign military occupation. Whether the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip or the newly established parallel government in Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank will be recognized as legitimate by the Palestinians themselves remains to be seen.

As much responsibility as the Palestinian leadership itself must bear for the current situation, none of this would have happened if the U.S. government had lived up to its responsibilities as guarantor of the Oslo Accords and self-proclaimed chief mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. U.S. refusal to force Israel to live up to its legal obligations to end its colonization drive in the West Bank and withdraw from the occupied territories in return for security guarantees has led much of the Palestinian population to give up on the peace process and embrace groups like Hamas, which demand control of all of historic Palestine.

The myth perpetuated by both the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties was that Israel’s 2005 dismantling of its illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip and the withdrawal of military units that supported them constituted effective freedom for the Palestinians of the territory. American political leaders from President George W. Bush to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have repeatedly praised Israel for its belated compliance with a series of UN Security Council resolutions calling for their withdrawal of these illegal settlements (despite Israel’s ongoing violations of these same resolutions by maintaining and expanding their illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights). Pelosi, for example, called Israel’s pullout a “courageous” and “gut-wrenching” decision that constituted “a decisive milestone on the road to peace” toward which the Palestinians have responded by violence, proving that the “conflict is not over occupation…it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.”

In reality, however, the Gaza Strip has remained effectively under siege. Even prior to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections last year, the Israeli government not only severely restricted - as is its right - entry from the Gaza Strip into Israel, but also controlled passage through the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt as well. Israel also refused to allow the Palestinians to open their airport or seaport. This not only led to periodic shortages of basic necessities imported through Egypt but resulted in the widespread wasting of perishable exports - such as fruits, vegetables and cut flowers - vital to the territory’s economy. Furthermore, Gaza residents were cut off from family members and compatriots in the West Bank and elsewhere in what many have referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Since the election of a Hamas majority in Palestinian parliamentary elections last year, international sanctions led to a reduction in government spending by the Palestinian Authority by more than half, severely reducing available health care, education and other basic services and dramatically increasing unemployment and malnutrition.

In addition, Israeli bombing, shelling, and periodic incursions in civilian areas in the Gaza Strip during the past year have killed over 200 civilians, including scores of children. Bush administration officials, echoed by Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, have justifiably condemned rocket attacks by some Hamas-allied units into civilian areas of Israel (which have resulted in scores of injuries but only one death), but have defended Israel’s far more devastating attacks against civilian targets in the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip’s population consists primarily of refugees from Israel’s ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine almost 60 years ago and their descendents, most of whom have had no gainful employment since Israel sealed the border from most day laborers in the late 1980s. Crowded into only 140 square miles and subjected to extreme violence and poverty, it is not surprising that many would become susceptible to extremist politics, such as those of the Islamist Hamas movement. Nor is it surprising that under such conditions, people with guns would turn on each other.

Undermining the Unity Government

When factional fighting between armed Fatah and Hamas groups broke out this spring, Saudi officials negotiated a power-sharing agreement between the two leading Palestinian political movements. U.S. officials, however, unsuccessfully encouraged Abbas to renounce the agreement and dismiss the entire government. Indeed, ever since the election of a Hamas parliamentary majority last year, the Bush administration had been pressuring Abbas and Fatah to stage a coup and abolish parliament.

The national unity government put key ministries in the hands of Fatah members and independent technocrats and removed some of the more hard-line Hamas leaders and, while falling well short of Western demands, Hamas did indicate an unprecedented willingness to engage with Israel, accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and negotiate a long-term cease fire with Israel. For the first time, this could have allowed Israel and the United States the opportunity to bring into peace talks a national unity government representing virtually all the factions and parties active in Palestinian politics on the basis of the Arab League peace initiative for a two-state solution and UN Security Council resolution 242. However, both the Israeli and American governments refused.

Instead, the Bush administration decided to escalate the conflict by ordering Israel to ship large quantities or weapons to armed Fatah groups to enable them to fight Hamas. Israeli military leaders initially resisted the idea, fearing that much of these arms would end up in the hands of Hamas, but - as Israeli journalist Uri Avnery put it - “our government obeyed American orders, as usual.” That Fatah was being supplied with weapons from Israel while Hamas was fighting the Israelis led many Palestinians - even those who don’t share Hamas’ extremist Islamist ideology - to see Fatah as collaborators and Hamas as liberation fighters. This was a major factor leading Hamas to launch what it saw as a preventive war or a counter-coup by overrunning the offices of the Fatah militias and, just as the Israelis feared, many of these newly-supplied weapons have indeed ended up in the hands of Hamas militants.

The United States also threw its support to Mohammed Dahlan, the notorious Fatah security chief in Gaza, who - despite being labeled by American officials as “moderate” and “pragmatic” - oversaw the detention, torture, and execution of Hamas activists and others, leading to widespread popular outrage against Fatah and its supporters.

Alvaro de Soto, who recently stepped down from his term as the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, stated in his confidential final report leaked to the press a few weeks before the Hamas takeover that “the Americans clearly encouraged a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas” and “worked to isolate and damage Hamas and build up Fatah with recognition and weaponry.” De Soto also recalled how in the midst of Egyptian efforts to arrange a cease fire following a flare-up in factional fighting earlier this year, a U.S. official told him that “I like this violence…it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.”

Weakening Palestinian Moderates

For moderate forces to overcome extremist forces, the moderates must be able to provide their population with what they most need: in this case, the end of Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and its occupation and colonizing of the remaining Palestinian territories. However, Israeli policies - backed by the Bush administration and Congress - seem calculated to make this impossible. The noted Israeli policy analyst Gershon Baskin observed, in an article in the Jerusalem Post just prior to Hamas’ electoral victory, how “Israel ’s unilateralism and determination not to negotiate and engage President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority has strengthened the claims of Hamas and weakened Abbas and his authority which was already severely crippled by … Israeli actions that demolished the infrastructures of Palestinian Authority governing bodies and institutions.”

Bush and an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the U.S. Congress have also thrown their support to the Israeli government’s unilateral disengagement policy that, while withdrawing Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip, has expanded them in the occupied West Bank as part of an effort to illegally annex large swathes of Palestinian territory. In addition, neither Congress nor the Bush administration has pushed the Israelis to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, which have been suspended for over six years, despite calls by Abbas and the international community that they resume. Given that Fatah’s emphasis on negotiations has failed to stop Israel’s occupation and colonization of large parts of the West Bank, it’s not surprising that Hamas’ claim that the U.S.-managed peace process is working against Palestinian interests has resonance, even among Palestinians who recognize that terrorism by Hamas’ armed wing is both morally reprehensible and has hurt the nationalist cause.

Following Hamas’ armed takeover of Gaza, the highly respected Israeli journalist Roni Shaked, writing in the June 15 issue of Yediot Ahronoth, noted that “The U.S. and Israel had a decisive contribution to this failure.” Despite claims by Israel and the United States that they wanted to strengthen Abbas, “in practice, zero was done for this to happen. The meetings with him turned into an Israeli political tool, and Olmert’s kisses and backslapping turned Abbas into a collaborator and a source of jokes on the Palestinian street.”

James Zogby, director of the Arab-American Institute in Washington, observed correctly that “at every turn in the last seven years, the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to Israel’s aggressive expansion in the West Bank and its systematic humiliation of the people there, and its assault on Gaza. In this context, it was plainly stupid for the administration” to reject the outcome of the Palestinian parliamentary elections and “frustrate Saudi efforts to reconcile that outcome with the demands of the international community.”

Only Sticks

M.J. Rosenberg of the Israeli Policy Forum, a liberal pro-Israel think tank based in Washington, noted how the United States “offered no carrots, only sticks. And we didn’t even make much of an effort to strengthen Hamas’s arch-enemy, President Mahmoud Abbas, with Congress hastening to impose redundant and insulting conditions even on aid that was intended for him.”

De Soto’s report to the UN Secretary General, in which he referred to Hamas’ stance toward Israel as “abominable,” also noted that “Israeli policies seemed perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian militants.” Regarding the U.S.-instigated international sanctions against the Palestine Authority, the former Peruvian diplomat also observed that “the steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the opposite effect.”

Some Israeli commentators see this strategy as deliberate. Avnery noted, “Our government has worked for year to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal form the occupied territories and the settlements there.” Similarly, Rosenberg observed, “the fact is that Israeli (and American) right-wingers are rooting for the Palestinian extremists” since “supplanting… Fatah with Islamic fundamentalists would prevent a situation under which Israel would be forced to negotiate with moderates.”

The problem, according to Avnery, is that “now, when it seems that this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory.”

Among the few American elected officials to recognize the folly of U.S. policy has been Ohio Congressman and Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, who noted that “the chaos and factional violence in Gaza that ultimately led to the Hamas military takeover…demonstrates a failure of President Bush’s strategy.” This and similar statements which have allied Kucinich with Israeli and Palestinian moderates have resulted in strong rebukes from most of his rivals for the 2008 presidential nomination.

Last year, former President Jimmy Carter presciently warned that in trying to “punish Hamas, we’ll actually going to be punishing the Palestinian people who are already living in deprivation. And it’s going to turn the Palestinian people even more against the West and against Israel and make Hamas seem to be… their only friend.” As with Kucinich, in response to such calls for moderation, Carter has been harshly criticized by Pelosi and other Democratic leaders.

Current U.S. Policy

Since their humiliating defeat in the Gaza Strip, Fatah militia have been engaging in a wave of arrests and kidnappings of Hamas activists in the West Bank. This has led to fears of a popular backlash if the repression goes too far. Furthermore, while Hamas’ popular support has traditionally been less in the West Bank than in the Gaza Strip, where the majority of its residents live in impoverished refugee camps, the Islamist group’s support is still quite strong in the West Bank as well. Indeed, the weakness of Fatah’s resistance to the Hamas uprising in the Gaza Strip - despite having a larger number and better-armed fighters than Hamas - is indicative of their continued weak political standing.

Despite its dubious constitutionality, President Abbas announced a new emergency cabinet without any Hamas participation within days of Fatah’s ouster from the Gaza Strip, and included some prominent technocrats, reformers and independents. His new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, is a highly intelligent economist and former World Bank official who lived for most of his adult life in the United States. He served as the representative for the International Monetary Fund to the Palestine Authority before briefly becoming its Finance Minister in 2005 in a belated effort by Abbas to clean up the Fatah government’s chronic corruption. Fayyad then formed a small centrist party with scholar and human rights activist Hanan Ashrawi to challenge both Fatah and Hamas in last year’s parliamentary election, but their slate received only 2.4% of the vote. Though a sincere nationalist and reformer, Fayyad’s close ties to the United States and international financial institutions, coupled with his poor electoral performance, raises questions regarding his legitimacy in the eyes of most Palestinians.

The makeup of his new government is not Abbas’ biggest problem, however. The Palestinians recognize that the United States has defended repeated Israeli attacks against Palestinian population centers, supported the Israeli seizure of the Gaza Strip and vetoed a series of UN Security Council resolutions and blocked enforcement of a series of others calling on Israel to abide by international humanitarian law. They are aware that the Bush administration and Congress have endorsed Israel’s annexation of Arab East Jerusalem and surrounding areas, funded Israel’s occupation and colonization of the West Bank and defended Israel’s construction of an illegal separation barrier deep inside occupied Palestinian territory.

They also know how the United States has rejected Palestinian proposals for a permanent peace with Israel in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory while backing Israeli plans to annex much of the West Bank, confining the Palestinians into tiny cantons surrounded by Israel. As a result, the strong U.S. backing shown so far by Washington for Abbas’ new government may not help its credibility among the Palestinian population. Indeed, it is already been widely labeled as a collaborationist regime due to its strong backing from Israel and the United States.

Israel has announced it will unfreeze funds seized from the export of Palestinian goods to Abbas’ new government. The government’s hope is that by improving the quality of life for Palestinians, it will show how much better things are under Fatah than under Hamas and weaken support for the Islamists.

Concrete Political Initiatives

However, unless there are concrete political initiatives as well, this will not be enough.

Abbas has called for peace with strict security guarantees for Israel, including the dismantling of Hamas’ militias, in return for an independent state on the 22% of Palestine occupied by Israel since 1967, and has even expressed his willingness to accept minor and reciprocal border adjustments. Polls show that a majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would accept such an agreement.

Israel has refused that offer, however, insisting on its right to annex large swaths of West Bank territory, including Arab East Jerusalem, in such a way that would make a contiguous and viable Palestinian state impossible. Under this Israeli plan - endorsed by the Bush administration and a broad bipartisan majority of Congress - Israel would be able to control Palestinian air space, Palestinian water resources, and movement in and out of the Palestinian entity and between its separated territories. These non-contiguous Palestinian cantons, therefore, would more closely resemble the infamous Bantustans of apartheid South Africa than a viable independent state. And, unless the Palestinians have strong prospects that a viable independent state will eventually emerge, the credibility of Abbas’ government will erode and the appeal by the radicals of Hamas will grow.

The Israeli government, with no apparent objection from the United States, has thus far refused to even put a freeze on the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank that are eating up ever more Palestinian land needed to make a Palestinian state viable. Furthermore, Israeli occupation forces have yet to lift the scores of checkpoints paralyzing economic life in the West Bank. Israel also continues to refuse to release Palestinian prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti, the charismatic Fatah reformer who would be the most likely Palestinian leader to unite the country in accepting a two-state solution with Israel. Such confidence-building measures are critical in the period prior to a resolution of the important final status issues if talks are to move forward and extremists are to be marginalized.

However, as a result of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, according to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, “the Prime Minister’s advisers [declared] the Palestinian Authority dead, [saying] there is no one to talk to…and that the Bush administration will not put pressure on Olmert at this stage to come up with ideas for renewing the negotiations with Abbas and promoting a diplomatic solution.”

As Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa program director for the International Crisis Group and former and former National Security Council member and special assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs under President Bill Clinton, has noted how “Almost every decision the United States has made to interfere with Palestinian politics has boomeranged.”

Hamas’ armed takeover of the Gaza Strip has shown this to be all too true, and the U.S. embrace of Abbas’ new government without concomitant pressure on Israel may prove to have similar results.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus. He is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003.)

Even as American officials reluctantly agreed last month to include Syrian representatives in multiparty talks on Iraqi security issues, the Bush administration continues to block Israel from resuming negotiations with Syria over its security concerns. In 2003, President Bashar al-Assad offered to resume peace talks with Israel where they had left off three years earlier, but Israel, backed by the Bush administration, refused. Assad eventually agreed to reenter peace negotiations without preconditions, but even these overtures were rejected.

Beginning in 2005, with the knowledge of their governments, private Israeli and Syrian negotiators began crafting a draft treaty to end the decades-long conflict between the two countries. The Bush administration, however, downplayed the talks’ significance.

Following last summer’s war in Lebanon, several prominent members of the Israeli cabinet – including Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Internal Security Minister Avid Dichter – called on their government to resume negotiations with Syria. Although Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni appointed a senior aide to prepare for possible talks, such initiatives did not get any support from Washington. According to the Jewish Daily Forward, it appeared that “Israel would be prepared to open a channel with Syria but does not want to upset the Bush administration.”

Indeed, when Israeli officials asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about pursuing exploratory talks with Syria, her answer, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was, “don’t even think about it.” Similarly, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reports that Israeli government officials “understood from President Bush that the United States would not take kindly to reopening a dialogue between Israel and Syria.”

Such pressure appears to have worked. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly expressed concern that it would inappropriate to counter President Bush at a time when his policies are being seriously challenged at home, since he has such a “clear position on this issue” and he is “Israel's most important ally.” Similarly, Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres was quoted as saying, “The worse thing we could do is contradict the United States, which opposes negotiating with Syria.” Interior Minister Ronni Baron told a television reporter, “When the question on the agenda is the political legacy of Israel's greatest friend, President Bush, do we really need now to enter into negotiations with Syria?”

Hostility to Earlier Initiatives

Israel and Syria came very close to a peace agreement in early 2000. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to withdraw from Syrian territory occupied since the June 1967 war in return for Syria agreeing to strict security guarantees, normalized relations, the demilitarization of the strategic Golan Heights and the cessation of support for radical anti-Israel groups. Only a dispute regarding the exact demarcation of the border, constituting no more than a few hundred yards, prevented a final settlement.

With the death of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad later that year and the coming to power of the right-wing Likud Bloc in the subsequent election, talks were indefinitely suspended. Assad’s successor, Bashar al-Assad, called for the resumption of talks where they left off, but both Israel and the United States rejected the proposal.

The Syria Accountability Act, passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress in 2003, demands that “the Governments of Lebanon and Syria should enter into serious unconditional bilateral negotiations with the Government of Israel in order to realize a full and permanent peace.” Congress and the administration insisted that Syria enter new talks “unconditionally” rather than resume them from the two parties’ earlier negotiating positions – in which both sides made major concessions and came very close to success after several years. In so doing, the U.S. government effectively rejected the position of the more moderate Israeli government of former Prime Minister Barak and instead embraced the rejectionist position of the current right-wing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

As a result, it is unclear how the U.S. government’s demand that Syria enter into such negotiations with an occupying power that categorically refuses to withdraw from its conquered land will “realize a full and permanent peace.” Indeed, Congress and the administration appear to want to force Syria to capitulate entirely and accept Israel’s annexation of Syria's Golan region. If so, this demand is unrealistic. The UN Charter expressly forbids any nation from expanding its territory by force, recognizing Israel’s annexation would violate a series of UN Security Council resolutions, and no Syrian government – even a hypothetically democratic one – could ever accept such a settlement.

It is also noteworthy that Congress and the administration insist that both Syria and Lebanon enter into bilateral negotiations with Israel instead of multilateral negotiations. Such multilateral negotiations, called for by UN Security Council resolution 338, makes particular sense given the interrelated concerns of these three nations. In any case, prior to President Bush signed the Accountability Act into law, President Assad announced Syria’s willingness to accede to U.S. and Israeli demands and resume talks with Israel unconditionally.

In response to these initiatives, Israel announced at the end of 2003 that it would double the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied Golan region of Syria. According to Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz , who also chaired the government’s settlements committee, “The aim is to send an unequivocal message: the Golan is an integral part of Israel.” This renewed colonization drive is also a direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits any occupying power from transferring its civilian population onto territories seized my military force, and UN Security Council resolutions 446, 452, 465 and 471, which call on Israel to refrain from building additional settlements and withdraw from existing settlements.

Israeli Public Challenges Bush

Within Israel, however, there is also a growing awareness that returning the Golan Heights to Syria would not jeopardize Israeli security. While maintaining the high ground may have constituted a strategic advantage 40 years ago, it is far less important in an era when the principal threats to Israel’s security come in the form of suicide bombers and long-range missiles. Israeli army chief Lt. Gen Moshe Yaalon observes that, from a strategic perspective, Israel could cede the Golan Heights in return for peace and successfully defend Israel’s internationally-recognized border.

With Syria calling for a resumption of peace talks, pressure has been growing within Israel to resume negotiations, with polls showing that a majority of Israelis support such efforts. Alon Ben-Meir, a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, argues for the need to engage with Syria, otherwise the Bush administration “will forfeit another historic opportunity to bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, however remote that prospect may now seem.”

Many Israelis also recognize the broader implication of resuming dialogue with Damascus, in that it would likely reduce Iran’s regional influence, weaken the threat from Hezbollah, improve Israel’s relations with other Arab states, and encourage more pragmatic Palestinian voices while weakening extremists. “The moment there are negotiations with Syria, then everything changes in the Middle East,” says Danny Yatom, former head of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, “and we can begin renewing ties with other Arab states.” Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, notes how “the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian official sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion in is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state’s right to exist, an putting Syrian allies than oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position.”

As a result, the pressure from the Bush administration on Israel to reject Syria’s offer for negotiations and the Israeli government’s willingness to give in to such pressure has led to growing resentment in Israel. According to the normally hawkish Maariv columnist Ben-Dror Yemini, “We’ve always said that our arms are extended in peace. That is, unless the Americans twist them.” The eminent Israeli novelist Amos Oz asks, “Why should Israel suspend one of its paramount national interests – peace with its neighbors – for the sake of the pleasantness or unpleasantness of its relations with a foreign government?”

Debra DeLee, head of the liberal pro-Israel group Americans for Peace Now, says that “it takes a lot of chutzpah to tell Israel not to even talk about peace with its neighbor.” She goes on to assert that it was “outrageous…for the President to pressure Israel not to negotiate.”

Putting Syria into a Trap

Ironically, the Syria Accountability Act, passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress in 2003, contains a provision prohibiting any U.S. assistance to Syria until the U.S. president “determines that substantial progress has been made . . . in negotiations aimed at achieving a peace agreement between Israel and Syria.” Given the administration’s repeated efforts to block such negotiations from taking place in the first place, it obviously makes it difficult for Syria to comply. The primary motivation may be more sinister, however.

The Jerusalem Post reported on July 30 that President Bush pushed Israel to expand the war beyond Lebanon, with Israeli military officials “receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.” In the early days of the fighting, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams reportedly met with a very senior Israeli official to underscore Washington’s support for extending the war to Syria, but Israeli officials described the idea as “nuts” and decided to limit their military operations to Lebanon. Haaretz noted that some in Washington were “disappointed by Israel’s decision not to attack Syria at the same time.” Meyrav Wurmser, head of the Center for Middle East Policy at the conservative Hudson Institute and wife of the principal Middle East advisor for Vice-President Cheney, went further, declaring that there was “a lot of anger” in Washington that Israel did not attack Syria, which she argued would have served “U.S. objectives.” U.S. officials also hoped that an Israeli invasion of Lebanon might lead Syrian troops to re-enter Lebanon to defend the country from the Israeli invasion, which could then be used as an excuse to expand the war to Syria itself.

Not everyone in Israel supports attacking Syria on behalf of the United States. As bad as the Assad regime may be, forcing its overthrow could result in a new regime that is far worse. Following a forced departure of the Baathists who have ruled for over 44 years, radical Sunni Islamists would be most likely poised to take advantage of the inevitable chaos.

However, the Bush administration appears quite willing to continue its divide-and-rule policies in the Middle East by preventing the resumption of talks that could end hostilities between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It is yet another reminder that the problem with U.S. policy is not that it is too “pro-Israel,” but that it is anti-peace.

There is increasing evidence that Israel instigated a disastrous war on Lebanon largely at the behest of the United States. The Bush administration was set on crippling Hezbollah, the radical Shiite political movement that maintains a sizable block of seats in the Lebanese parliament. Taking advantage of the country's democratic opening after the forced departure of Syrian troops last year, Hezbollah defied U.S. efforts to democratize the region on American terms. The populist party's unwillingness to disarm its militia as required by UN resolution—and the inability of the pro-Western Lebanese government to force them to do so—led the Bush administration to push Israel to take military action.

In his May 23 summit with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President George W. Bush offered full U.S. support for Israel to attack Lebanon as soon as possible. Seymour Hersh, in the August 21 New Yorker, quotes a Pentagon consultant on the Bush administration's longstanding desire to strike “a preemptive blow against Hezbollah.” The consultant added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” Israel was a willing partner. Although numerous Israeli press reports indicate that some Israeli officials, including top military officials, are furious at Bush for pushing Olmert into war, the Israeli government had been planning the attack since 2004. According to a July 21 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Israel had briefed U.S. officials with details of the plans, including PowerPoint presentations, in what the newspaper described as “revealing detail.” Political science professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University told the Chronicle that “[O]f all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared. In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal …” Despite these preparations, the Bush administration and congressional leaders of both parties tried to present the devastating attacks, which took as many as 800 civilian lives, as a spontaneous reaction to Hezbollah's provocative July 12 attack on an Israeli border post and its seizure of two soldiers.

Some reports have indicated that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was less sanguine than Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or President Bush about the proposed Israeli military offensive. Rumsfeld apparently believed that Israel should focus less on bombing and more on ground operations, despite the dramatically higher Israeli casualties that would result. Still, Hersh quotes a former senior intelligence official as saying that Rumsfeld was “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.” The recent announcement of a shaky ceasefire may represent only a minor speed bump in U.S. plans. After all, the attack on Hezbollah was only the first stage of what the Bush administration apparently hopes will be a joint redrawing of the Middle East map.

On to Iran and Syria?

On July 30, the Jerusalem Post reported that President Bush pushed Israel to expand the war beyond Lebanon and attack Syria. Israeli officials apparently found the idea “nuts.” This idea was not exactly secret. In support of the Israeli offensive, the office of the White House Press Secretary released a list of talking points that included reference to a Los Angeles Times op-ed by Max Boot, senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. The article, “It's Time to Let the Israelis Take Off the Gloves,” urges an Israeli attack against Syria. “Israel needs to hit the Assad regime. Hard,” argues Boot. “If it does, it will be doing Washington's dirty work.” Iran, too, was in the administration's sights. T he Israeli attack on Lebanon, according to Seymour Hersh, was to “serve as a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations.” But first, the Bush administration needed to get rid of Hezbollah's capacity to retaliate against Israel in the event of a U.S. strike on Iran, which apparently prompted Hezbollah's buildup of Iranian-supplied missiles in the first place.

Starting this spring, according to Hersh, the White House ordered top planners from the U.S. air force to consult with their Israeli counterparts on a war plan against Iran that incorporated an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the chief of staff of the Israeli military and principal architect of the war on Lebanon, worked with U.S. officials on contingency planning for an air war with Iran.

The Bush administration's larger goal apparently has been to form an alliance of pro-Western Sunni Arab dictatorships—primarily Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan—against a growing Shiite militancy exemplified by Hezbollah and Iran and, to a lesser extent, post-Saddam Iraq. Though these Sunni regimes initially spoke out against Hezbollah's provocative capture of the two Israeli soldiers that prompted the Israeli attacks, popular opposition within these countries to the ferocity of the Israeli assault led them to rally solidly against the U.S.-backed war on Lebanon.

In Israel's Interest?

In the years prior to Israel's July 12 bombing of Lebanese cities, Hezbollah had become less and less of a threat. It had not killed any Israeli civilians for more than a decade (with the exception of one accidental fatality in 2003 caused by an anti-aircraft missile fired at an Israeli plane that violated Lebanese airspace). Investigations by the Congressional Research Service, the State Department, and independent think tanks failed to identify any major act of terrorism by Hezbollah for over a dozen years.

Prior to the attack, Hezbollah's militia had dwindled to about 1000 men under arms—this number tripled after July 12 when reserves were called up—and a national dialogue was going on between Hezbollah and the government of pro-Western prime minister Fuad Siniora regarding disarmament. The majority of Lebanese opposed Hezbollah, both its reactionary fundamentalist social agenda as well as its insistence on maintaining an armed presence independent of the country's elected government. Thanks to the U.S.-backed Israeli attacks on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, however, support for Hezbollah, according to polls, has grown to more than 80%, even within the Sunni Muslim and Christian communities.

Even Richard Armitage, a leading hawk and deputy secretary of state under President Bush during his first term, noted that “[T]he only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.” Despite U.S. encouragement that Israel continue the war, Israel's right-wing prime minister has come under increasing criticism at home, with polls from the Haaretz newspaper indicating that only 39% of Israelis would support the planned expansion of the ground offensive. Meretz Party Knesset member Ran Cohen, writing in the Jerusalem Post, called earlier moves to expand the ground offensive “a wretched decision.” Yariv Oppenheimer, general director of Peace Now, which had earlier muted its criticism of the attacks on Lebanon, noted that “[T]he war has spiraled out of control and the government is ignoring the political options available.” Not only have a growing number of Israelis acknowledged that the war has been a disaster for Israel, there is growing recognition of U.S. responsibility for getting them into that mess. A July 23 article in Haaretz about an anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv noted that “this was a distinctly anti-American protest” that included “chants of ‘We will not die and kill in the service of the United States,' and slogans condemning President George W. Bush.” Members of Congress who have unconditionally backed Israel's attacks on Lebanon have responded to constituent outrage by claiming they were simply defending Israel's legitimate interests. In supporting the Bush administration, however, they have defended policies that cynically use Israel to advance the administration's militarist agenda.

Who's Anti-Semitic?

One of the more unsettling aspects of the broad support in Washington for the use of Israel as U.S. proxy in the Middle East is how closely it corresponds to historic anti-Semitism. In past centuries, the ruling elite of European countries would, in return for granting limited religious and cultural autonomy, established certain individuals in the Jewish community as the visible agents of the oppressive social order, such as tax collectors and moneylenders. When the population threatened to rise up against the ruling elite, the rulers could then blame the Jews, channeling the wrath of an exploited people against convenient scapegoats. The resulting pogroms and waves of repression took place throughout the Jewish Diaspora.

Zionists hoped to break this cycle by creating a Jewish nation-state where Jews would no longer be dependent on the ruling elite of a given country. The tragic irony is that, by using Israel to wage proxy war to promote U.S. hegemony in the region, this cycle is being perpetuated on a global scale. This latest orgy of American-inspired Israeli violence has led to a dangerous upsurge in anti-Semitism in the Middle East and throughout the world. In the United States, many critics of U.S. policy are blaming “the Zionist lobby” for U.S. support for Israel's attacks on Lebanon rather than the Bush administration and its bipartisan congressional allies who encouraged Israel to wage war on Lebanon in the first place.

Unfortunately, most anti-war protests in major U.S. cities have targeted the Israeli consulate rather than U.S. government buildings. By contrast, during the 1980s, protests against the U.S.-backed violence in El Salvador rarely targeted Salvadoran consulates, but instead more appropriately took place outside federal offices and arms depots, recognizing that the violence would not be taking place without U.S. weapons and support.

Israel is no banana republic. Even those like Hersh who recognize the key role of the Bush administration in goading Israel to attack Lebanon emphasize that rightist elements within Israel had their own reasons, independent of Washington, to pursue the conflict.

Still, given Israel's enormous military, economic, and political dependence on the United States, this latest war on Lebanon could not have taken place without a green light from Washington. President Jimmy Carter, for example, was able to put a halt to Israel's 1978 invasion of Lebanon within days and force the Israeli army to withdraw from the south bank of the Litani River to a narrow strip just north of the Israeli border. By contrast, the Bush administration and an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress clearly believed it was in the U.S. interest for Israel to pursue Washington's “dirty work” for an indefinite period, regardless of its negative implications for Israel's legitimate security interests.

Domestic Political Implications

Given the lack of success of the Israeli military campaign, U.S. planners are likely having second thoughts about the ease with which a U.S.-led bombing campaign could achieve victory over Iran. However, the propensity of the Bush administration to ignore historical lessons should not be underestimated. A former senior intelligence official told Hersh that “[T]here is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this. When the smoke clears, they'll say it was a success, and they'll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.” Indeed, on August 14, President Bush declared that Israel had achieved “victory” in its fight against Hezbollah.

The outspoken support of congressional Democrats for Bush's policies and Israel's war on Lebanon portends similar support should the United States ignore history and common sense and attack Iran anyway. Both the Senate and House, in backing administration policy, claimed that, contrary to the broad consensus of international opinion, Israel's military actions were consistent with international law and the UN Charter. By this logic, if Israel's wanton destruction of a small democratic country's civilian infrastructure because of a minor border incident instigated by members of a 3000-man militia of a minority party is a legitimate act of self-defense, surely a similar U.S. attack against Iran—a much larger country with a sizable armed force whose hard-line government might be developing nuclear weapons—could also be seen as a legitimate act of self-defense.

Ironically, political action committees sponsored by liberal groups such as MoveOn.org, Peace Action, and Act for Change continue to support the election or re-election of Congressional candidates who have voiced support for Washington's proxy war against Lebanon despite massive Israeli violations of international humanitarian law, its serving as a trial run for a U.S. war against Iran, and its being against Israel's legitimate self-interests. And, unfortunately, on the other extreme, some of the more outspoken elements that have opposed America's proxy war against Lebanon frankly do not have Israel's best interest in mind.

As a result, without a dramatic increase in protests by those who see Washington's cynical use of Israel as bad for virtually everyone, there is little chance this dangerous and immoral policy can be reversed.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project.