Robert Satloff, the Executive Director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, addressed the Institute’s special Policy Forum yesterday. The Institute has published his address: “Hamas and the Second Six Day War: Implications, Challenges, and Opportunities.”
It is a very perceptive analysis, worth reading in its entirety. Satloff argues that the principal responsibility for the creation of Hamastan lies with the Palestinian people and their president:
We need to remember that the same Palestinians who reportedly tell pollsters they support a two-state solution with Israel gave their vote to the party that opposes any peace with Israel in January 2006. We need to remember that Palestinian president and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, who has repeatedly said he rejects violence and endorses the two-state solution, legitimized Hamas’s rejectionist alternative by entering into a power-sharing agreement with the group in the February 2007 Mecca accord. . . .
There are some in the administration who are saying "I told you so" — claiming that the Palestinians needed a political horizon to have something to fight for, that if only we had articulated a detailed vision of the eventual Palestinian future and sketched clearly the borders of the Palestinian state and the defined pathway that would reach it, then Fatah fighters would have had the ideological fire in their bellies. Advocates of this point of view, I am afraid to say, are operating under a delusion. As a forty-eight-year-old Fatah military officer was quoted as saying after his arrest and subsequent release in Gaza last week: "We decided to surrender because we didn’t feel that our commanders and leaders were behind us. Many of our commanders had fled to Ramallah and Cairo, where they were issuing orders to us from air-conditioned hotel rooms."
In essence, Fatah lost because the rot was too deep, and the equivocating answer that Fatah was offering the Palestinian people — sometimes working hand-in-hand with Hamas, sometimes opposing Hamas — was murky, muddy, and muddled. This was not, at the core, an American problem and was not fixable by American solutions.
It certainly isn’t now, for reasons set forth today in American Thinker: “Blaming Bush for Gaza.”
But the United States, joined by the weakest, least experienced and most tired Prime Minister in Israeli history, now appear poised to double down on Mahmoud Abbas, and send hundreds of millions of dollars to a party viewed by Palestinians as not only corrupt but demonstrably inept — without even a requirement that Abbas first commence “sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure” — even in the rump state of the West Bank.
Is this really what George W. Bush envisioned in his landmark speech on June 24, 2002?