Our new president’s first act of international diplomacy, so we’re told, was to dial up Mohammed Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and leader of Fatah, which, as we all know, is the political faction that controls the West Bank. Palestinian sources say Obama pledged to “work with [Abbas] as partners to establish a durable peace in the region”; Obama’s spokespeople wrote in a press release that Obama called to express his desire to “consolidate the ceasefire by establishing an effective anti-smuggling regime to prevent Hamas from rearming, and facilitating in partnership with the Palestinian Authority a major reconstruction effort for Palestinians in Gaza.”
It is both telling and timely that Obama’s finger, after spinning the globe, landed on Israel and the Occupied Territories, rather than, say, Afghanistan, Iraq, China or Venezuela. In fact, at certain points during the campaign, our new president vowed to “bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and…give them a new mission,” as his first major act. But as we know, Gaza just blew up, and it’s going to fall to Barry to put it back together. In his inaugural address, he made overtures to the Muslim world for “a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” and after chatting up Abu Mazen, he called Ehud Olmert, Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah II of Jordain. To boot, this all comes after Obama’s first official act as president was a proclaim of a “National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation.”
The obvious question in all this is — where are the Gazans represented? Why no call to Hamas leaders in Damascus, even when such loopy luminaries as Jimmy Carter are pushing him to do so? I think because Obama’s got a head on his shoulders and knows that direct negotiations with thugs isn’t really an option.
In reading about this, an interesting fact I found is that as of April, some surveys had Fatah running just 7 points below Hamas in polls among Gazans. This implies that Hamas was merely better-armed, rather than wildly more popular, when it ran Fatah out of the Gaza Strip after protracted street-fighting last year. Cozying up to Abbas and trying to foist the moderate party back onto to the people of Gaza, especially because of Obama’s much-sounder credibility than Bush’s with the Muslim world, might be seen by the rest of the world as a rather patronizing act, but patronizing is certainly better than war. What’s more, if it’s still the case that Fatah’s support base in Gaza hasn’t completely eroded (which is tough to imagine, since Gaza is about 2 million people who are ruled by folks who insist on firing rockets from their schools and provoking IDF incursions), it seems expedient for Obama to be in immediate and close touch with Abbas.
Earlier today, Ezra Klein had this to say about it:
I’m not sure what the administration has in mind by a “partnership with the Palestinian Authority [for a major reconstruction effort for Palestinians in Gaza.” Hamas is the democratically elected government in that area. The Gazans hate Israel, hate America, and are suspicious that the Palestinian Authority is colluding with both. For Israel to bomb Gaza and then work with American to install the Palestinian Authority seems like the sort of plan that could, in the long-term, destroy the PA’s local legitimacy.
But that’s just it — It’s not the Gazans who hate Israel and America, it’s Hamas, and any moderates who just want peace or who happen to support Fatah are by definition not suspicious of them. They are the constituency whose hearts Obama and Abbas need to capture. But further, Klein’s argument really doesn’t make any kind of sense. If Hamas is the legitimate government in Gaza, what legitimacy does the PA/Fatah have left to destroy? Things are going quite well in the West Bank, aside from some scattered bad behavior on the part of Israeli settlers — so why would a Fatah power play for Gaza “destroy the PA’s local legitimacy,” and in what locality?
- TF100D
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