February 14, 2006
U.S. and Israelis Are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster
By STEVEN ERLANGER
JERUSALEM, Feb. 14 — The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.

The officials also argue that a close look at the election results shows that Hamas won a smaller mandate than previously understood.

The officials and diplomats, who said this approach was being discussed at the highest levels of the State Department and the Israeli government, spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

Today, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying "there was no such plan."

But the officials and diplomats say Hamas will be given a choice: recognize Israel's right to exist, forswear violence and accept previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements — as called for by the United Nations and the West — or face isolation and collapse.

Opinion polls show that Hamas's promise to better the lives of the Palestinian people was the main reason it won. But the United States and Israel say Palestinian life will only get harder if Hamas does not meet those three demands. They say Hamas plans to build up its militias and increase violence and must be starved out of power.

The officials drafting the plan know that Hamas leaders have repeatedly rejected demands to change and do not expect Hamas to meet them. "The point is to put this choice on Hamas's shoulders," a senior Western diplomat said. "If they make the wrong choice, all the options lead in a bad direction."

The strategy has many risks, especially given that Hamas will try to secure needed support from the larger Islamic world, including its allies Syria and Iran, as well as from private donors.

It will blame Israel and the United States for its troubles, appeal to the world not to punish the Palestinian people for their free democratic choice, point to the real hardship that a lack of cash will produce and may very well resort to an open military confrontation with Israel, in a sense beginning a third intifada.

The officials said the destabilization plan centers largely on money. The Palestinian Authority has a monthly cash deficit of some $60 million to $70 million after it receives between $50 million and $55 million a month from Israel in taxes and customs duties collected by Israeli officials at the borders but owed to the Palestinians.

Israel says it will cut off those payments once Hamas takes power, and put the money in escrow. On top of that, some of the aid that the Palestinians currently receive will be stopped or reduced by the United States and European Union governments, which will be constrained by law or politics from providing money to an authority run by Hamas. The group is listed by Washington and the European Union as a terrorist organization.

Israel has other levers on the Palestinian Authority: controlling entrance and exit from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for people and goods, the number of workers who are allowed into Israel every day, and even the currency used in the Palestinian territories, which is the Israeli shekel.

Israeli military officials have discussed cutting Gaza off completely from the West Bank and making the Israeli-Gaza border an international one. They also say they will not allow Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament, some of whom are wanted by Israeli security forces, to travel freely between Gaza and the West Bank.

On Sunday, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced after a cabinet meeting that Israel would consider Hamas to be in power on the day the new parliament is sworn in: this Saturday.

So beginning next month, the Palestinian Authority will face a cash deficit of at least $110 million a month, or more than $1 billion a year, which it needs to pay full salaries to its 140,000 employees, who are the breadwinners for at least one-third of the Palestinian population.

The employment figure includes some 58,000 members of the security forces, most of which are affiliated with the defeated Fatah movement.

If a Hamas government is unable to pay workers, import goods, transfer money and receive significant amounts of outside aid, Mr. Abbas, the president, would have the authority to dissolve parliament and call new elections, the officials say, even though that power is not explicit in the Palestinian basic law.

The potential for an economic crisis is real. The Palestinian stock market has already fallen about 20 percent since the election on Jan. 25, and the Authority has exhausted its borrowing capacity with local banks.

Hamas gets up to $100,000 a month in cash from abroad, Israel and Western officials say. "But it's hard to move millions of dollars in suitcases," a Western official said.

The United States and the European Union in particular want any failure of Hamas in leadership to be judged as Hamas's failure, not one caused by Israel and the West.

The officials say much now depends on Mr. Abbas, the Fatah-affiliated president who called for the January elections, has four more years in office and is insistent that Hamas has a democratic right to govern.

But Mr. Abbas has also threatened to quit if he does not have a government that can carry out his fundamental policies — which include, he has said, negotiations with Israel toward a final peace treaty based on a permanent two-state solution. The United States and the European Union have strongly urged him to stay on the job and shoulder his responsibilities, the officials say.

Western diplomats say they expect Mr. Abbas to repeat those positions in his speech on Saturday when the new parliament is sworn in, laying the groundwork for a future confrontation with Hamas.

In preparation for a Hamas-led government, Mr. Abbas is also said to be insisting on reinforcing his position as commander in chief of all Palestinian forces, even though the prime minister and the interior minister also have control over them through a security council that the prime minister chairs.

On Monday the departing parliament made an effort to boost Mr. Abbas's powers by passing legislation giving him the authority to appoint a new constitutional court that can veto legislation deemed in violation of the Palestinians' basic law.

Mr. Abbas would appoint the nine judges to the new court without seeking parliamentary approval. Hamas immediately objected. "The parliament has no mandate and no authority to issue any new legislation," said a Hamas spokesman, Said Siyam, adding that Hamas would try to overturn the decisions once the new legislature convened on Saturday.

Hamas will control at least 74 seats of the 132-member parliament, and it is likely to have the support of six more members on key votes. But more than 10 percent of the new legislators are already in Israeli jails: 10 from Hamas, 3 from Fatah and one from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The United States and Fatah believe that the Hamas victory was far less sweeping than the seat total makes it appear, said Khalil Shikaki, a pollster and the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

In an interview in Ramallah, Mr. Shikaki said that if Fatah had forced members to withdraw their independent candidacies in constituencies where they split the votes with official Fatah candidates, it might have won the election. Half of the 132 seats were decided by a vote for a party list, and the other half by a separate vote for a local candidate.

Hamas won 44 percent of the popular vote but 56 percent of the seats, while Fatah won 42 percent of the popular vote but only 34 percent of the seats. The reason? "Fatah ran a lousy campaign," Mr. Shikaki said, and Mr. Abbas "did not force enough Fatah independents to pull out."

If only 76 "independent" Fatah candidates had not run, Mr. Shikaki said, Fatah would have won 33 seats and Hamas 33. In the districts, Hamas won an average of only 39 percent of the vote while winning 68 percent of the seats, Mr. Shikaki said.

"Fatah now is obsessed with undoing this election as soon as possible," he said. "Israel and Washington want to do it over too. The Palestinian Authority could collapse in six months."

New Hamas legislators were unimpressed. Farhat Asaad, a Hamas spokesman, and Nasser Abdaljawad, who won a seat in Salfit where two Fatah candidates split the vote, gave the United States "a year or two" to come around to the idea of dealing openly with Hamas.

Mr. Asaad, a former Israeli prisoner, said: "We hope it isn't U.S. policy. Because those who try to isolate us will be isolated in the region."

Hamas will move on two parallel fronts, he said: the first, to reform Palestinian political life, and the second, "to break the isolation of our government." If Hamas succeeds on both fronts, he said, "we will achieve a great thing for our people, a normal life with security and a state of law, where no one can abuse power."

Hamas will find the money it needs from the Muslim world, said Mr. Abdaljawad, who spent 12 years in jail and got a Ph.D. while there. Hamas will save money by ending corruption and providing efficiency. Hamas will break the Palestinian dependency on Israel, he said.

Mr. Asaad laughed and added: "First, I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy. But there is no way to retreat now. It's not possible for the U.S. and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy."

Well, the ostensible purpose of starving the new government is to destabilize and replace it. Isn't Hamas' ouster, therefore, the goal? In the Post 911 era, a terrorist organization holding power over a nation is not acceptable to the Global community. Russia always causes problems and is always looking for an economic deal (and to screw the USA). Everybody else sees this as un-acceptable on many levels. Although, I can't argue with this: nobody wants democracy in the Middle East. You think American voters are un-educated and thoroughly brainwashed by propaganda? The citizens of the ME have been systematically brainwashed and purposely ill-educated for 50 years. Palestine is an ugly situation.

I'm not naive enough to think that this stuff didn't/doesn't go on routinely.You find this appalling. What is the alternative? But what's appalling, in my mind, is the fact that the predicate for going into Iraq was to plant the seed of democracy,This was never the goal of the USA government, though. There were a few goals (in this order): 1.Get the oil traded in USA dollars for our economy and our impending transition from oil dependance (see catastrophic price gouging). 2.Remove Saddam from power for many reasons. 3.Set up a pseudo-democracy and hope the subjugated people of Iran (one of the original Axis of Evil) revolt against their evil masters when they see freeER people in Iraq. 4.Create a long term significant military presence in SE Asia that is not on holy ground (see Al Queda citing this as one of their biggest complaints about the USA) the thinking being that there was something instrinsically good about the democratic process.Is the USA a democracy? So, what happens? A free and fair election, a cornerstone of said democratic process, is held and a particular party comes out on top. The Phillipines didn't stabilize until McCarthur put in order in about 1935. About 40 years after our initial intervention. Nobody ever had any misconceptions about them stabilizing and becoming a powerful ally over night. Now the U.S. is going to transparently undermine the new government because it happens to disagree with its policies? Happens to disagree with it's policies? Is this the understatement of the century or what? They are a terrorist organization that blow people up for a living. The USA government is on record: we do not support terror states. France recently said they will nuke, without question, and state that sponsors a terrorist attack on their soil.I realize that the funds in question are ours to deny. We should cut off all funding to them and Israel immediately in my opinion, but that's just me. But it's one thing to deny the funds on the grounds that Hamas won't renounce violence. It's another to do so on the basis of wanting to pervert the very democratic process whose virtues you've been extolling all along.Again, are we a democracy? We all remember Florida. As does Putin, he said so himself. The world knows the BS line. We have been an Imperial power for almost a century.

It makes for an even wider credibility gap, and further plunges our 'reasons' for invading Iraq into question.The reasons for invading Iraq are clear.

I guess theyre pulling an "Allende" on Hamas.

"Allende's increasingly bold socialist policies (partly in response to pressure from some of the more radical members within his coalition), combined with his close contacts with Cuba, heightened fears in Washington. The Nixon administration began exerting economic pressure on Chile via multilateral organizations, and continued to back Allende's opponents in the Chilean Congress. Almost immediately after his election, Nixon directed CIA and U.S. State Department officials to 'put pressure'on Allende's government." source: Wikipedia - Salvador AllendeThis may be similar, but it's very, very different.

Mr Inches, just a tip: I wouldn't use the Philippines as an example, because the amounts of people the Americans killed in stopping the insurgency works against your argument. Unless that's the point, that you can't make a democracy "omelette" without killing a few hundred thousand people.The loss of American lives to Phillipine lives in that scenario is actually pretty similar from what I read. I totally agree with you about the omelette. But, I'd say this: democracy was the rhetoric in both conflicts, but definitely NEVER (especially in the Phillipines who the Americans were very racist against: and who had to deal with racism and segregation at home: you are liberating a people while blacks are in bondage in your own country!: kind of thinking. But, the Phillipines and Iraq, as you point out, are apples and oranges. EXCEPT: they both represent intervention, they both went in under the umbrella if liberation, they both involved insurgencies where towns/villages were destroyed, they both involved house to house to combat, they both involved hugely slanted casualties on the insurgency/population side, they both involved socio-economic systems of autonomous regional control predicated on a warlord-like system, etc. So, there are similarities that are striking. And, my main point would have been: it's gonna take 40 years for Iraq to change: and It'll probably change into something we didn't predict.

I'm not naive enough to think that this stuff didn't/doesn't go on routinely. But what's appalling, in my mind, is the fact that the predicate for going into Iraq was to plant the seed of democracy, the thinking being that there was something instrinsically good about the democratic process.

Mr Inches, please quote in the correct manner. Okay, thanks.
Come on crease, you're also not naive enough to believe that that was the actual reason for going into Iraq. Which doesn't make it any less galling of course.

Russia have been making noises that they will meet with Hamas, with growing support from France. Other important European countries are sure to follow. I suspect that US/Israeli efforts to undermine Hamas, will in fact be themselves undermined. I also think that these tactics have the very real liklehood of backfiring, yet again. Palestinians are more likely to unite behind Hamas in the face of such obvious efforts against them. Yet another wrong move from the US.

Come on crease, you're also not naive enough to believe that that was the actual reason for going into Iraq. Which doesn't make it any less galling of course.

Russia have been making noises that they will meet with Hamas, with growing support from France. Other important European countries are sure to follow. I suspect that US/Israeli efforts to undermine Hamas will in fact be themselves undermined. I also think that these tactics have the very real liklehood of backfiring, yet again. Palestinians are more likely to unite behind Hamas in the face of such obvious efforts against them. Yet another wrong move from the US.

February 15, 2006
Editorial
The Right Way to Pressure Hamas
America and Israel have to walk a very narrow line in defining their relations with a democratically elected Palestinian government built around Hamas, a party that not only endorses terrorism but also commits it. They cannot possibly give political recognition or financial aid to such a government. Neither can any country that claims to oppose terrorism. That defines the right side of the line.

On the wrong side lies the kind of deliberate destabilization that, according to a report by our Times colleague Steven Erlanger, Washington and Jerusalem are now discussing. That would involve a joint American-Israeli campaign to undermine a Hamas government by putting impossible demands on it, starving it of money and putting even greater restrictions on the Palestinians with an eye toward forcing new elections that might propel the defeated and discredited Fatah Party back to power.

Set aside the hypocrisy such a course would represent on the part of the two countries that have shouted the loudest about the need for Arab democracy, and consider the probable impact of such an approach on the Palestinians. They are already driven to distraction by fury, frustration and poverty. Is it really possible to expect that more punishment from the Israelis and the Americans, this time for not voting the way we wanted them to, would lead them to abandon Hamas?

In the long, sorry history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, there is not a shred of evidence to support the notion that pushing the Palestinian population into more economic desperation would somehow cause them to moderate their political views. In fact, experience teaches the exact opposite.

Fatah lost last month's election because its incompetence and corruption drove Palestinian voters into the arms of the more austere, social-services-oriented Hamas. If the new government fails to deliver because it puts continued terrorism over the well-being of the Palestinian people, it may indeed be booted out of office. But a Hamas that could explain continued Palestinian misery by a deliberate American-Israeli plan to reverse the democratic verdict of the polls would be likely to become only stronger.

Washington publicly asserts that no such plan is being discussed. A far wiser course for the United States to pursue would be to step back and desist from deliberately provoking the Palestinians, and give Hamas a chance to reconsider its own options. Some hints about its intentions may emerge from the way its leaders respond to overtures by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Last week, Mr. Putin indicated that he intended to invite them to Moscow for a visit.

Mr. Putin's move was controversial in the West, and perhaps he should have provided more warning. But that would be a minor snub indeed if he prods Hamas toward renouncing terrorism, accepting Israel's right to exist and reviving the peace process.

Abbas calls aid restrictions 'financial crisis'
20 February 2006

GAZA: President Mahmoud Abbas said overnight that funding restrictions by Israel and the United States following the formation of a Hamas-led government had plunged the Palestinian Authority into a "financial crisis".

"Unfortunately, the pressures have begun and the support and the aid started to decrease. . .therefore we are currently in a real financial crisis," he told reporters in Gaza.

Israel's cabinet had decided to make permanent a halt to monthly transfers of some $US50 million to the Palestinian Authority after Saturday's swearing-in of the parliament, led by Hamas, which is sworn to the Jewish state's destruction.

The United States, Israel's biggest ally, has also asked the Palestinian Authority to return $US50 million in aid to ensure it does not reach Hamas, which crushed Abbas's long-dominant Fatah faction in a January 25 election and holds 74 seats in parliament.

Abbas said Palestinian officials would discuss the issue with two US envoys who are set to arrive next week.

He also said he would meet with Hamas leaders on Monday to discuss forming a unity cabinet and his call in a parliament speech for the government to recognise past peace deals with Israel and commit to pursuing statehood through talks.

"I would like to listen to them directly and to know what their positions and opinion are," he said.

Hamas had swiftly rejected Abbas's call after the speech. The group says it want to avoid confrontation.

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's choice for prime minister, said earlier that "everything will be on the table" during the talks. Haniyeh, 43, is widely viewed by Palestinians as a pragmatist who has forged good relations with rival factions.

"We want to avoid any sharp debate especially while the (Israeli) occupation refuses to recognise Palestinian rights and refuses to recognise the agreements signed with the (Palestinian) Authority," Haniyeh said.

HAMAS SEEKS WIDE COALITION

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that on Monday leaders would meet heads of other factions, including militant groups, in a bid to form "the largest national coalition possible".

Washington and its allies have urged nations to boycott Hamas, which has masterminded nearly 60 suicide attacks against Israelis since the uprising began, unless it disarms and recognises the Jewish state and past peace deals.

But Russia has said it would invite Hamas leaders for talks in Moscow. Abbas said the world should "not punish the Palestinian people for their democratic choice".

Washington and the European Union, which has also threatened to halt aid, do not want to push the Palestinian Authority to collapse or to seek funding from states such as Iran.

In an apparent nod to international calls to avoid adding to Palestinian hardship, interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's cabinet decided against implementing tougher measures Israeli defence officials had proposed to try to weaken Hamas.

These had included a ban on the entry of Palestinian workers into Israel – several thousand are allowed in daily – and a tightening of restrictions on the movement of Palestinians between the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

Instead, the cabinet announced a permanent halt to the monthly transfer of about $50 million in tax revenues Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians each month. Israel said last month such payments would no longer be automatic.

The cabinet also said in a statement that Israel would ask international donors to discontinue all financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, save for "humanitarian assistance provided to the Palestinian population".

In fresh violence, Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians in Balata refugee camp in the West Bank during a stone-throwing confrontation while an airstrike in Gaza killed two Palestinian militants who the army said had been planting a bomb.