Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: La guerra fra Hamas e Fatah: Made and censored in USA

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3184
As for the events that led up to Hamas' takeover and the Bush
administration's role in them, these were hardly a secret-at least for
the specialists who follow politics in the region closely. But
Americans who rely on the mainstream media for their news were left in
the dark as reporters did their best to keep any hint of the crucial
background out of their coverage.
The facts are no mystery. The previous February, Hamas and Fatah had
joined together in a national unity government in an effort to put an
end to street fighting and factionalism within the Palestinian
administration (Extra!, 9-10/06). The announcement of the power-
sharing agreement, forged under Saudi auspices at a summit in Mecca,
was greeted with nearly universal relief: "In the streets of Gaza,
Palestinians broke out in celebration as the agreement was being
announced, with members of Hamas and Fatah firing into the air," the
New York Times reported (2/9/07).
But while Hamas and much of Fatah were strongly supportive of the
power-sharing deal, the U.S. and Israel were not. Since Hamas' 2006
election victory, they had been unwilling to tolerate even Hamas'
presence in the government, much less the leading role the vote
entitled it to. Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who
largely supports the White House's policy of isolating Hamas, reacted
to news of the Mecca agreement by calling it a "considerable
embarrassment" for the Bush administration (Time, 2/9/07): "They were
expecting that [Abbas], backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, would be
moving into a process of excluding Hamas. . . . They didn't want him
to compromise with Hamas."
Since the whole idea behind the power-sharing agreement was to avert a
potential Palestinian civil war, it may seem as if the Bush
administration, by opposing the Mecca deal, was unwittingly making
such a conflict more likely. In fact, there was nothing unwitting
about it. The Americans had candidly sketched their strategy at a
November meeting of the International Quartet (made up of diplomats
from the U.S., the European Union, the United Nations and Russia),
where the American security envoy, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, had argued
that Abbas should be supported "by whatever means necessary to help
him take on Hamas," as the Economist put it (11/16/06). The other
three Quartet envoys "balked at this idea as 'tantamount to backing
one side in a future civil war,'" according to the magazine's
diplomatic source. But the U.S., in conjunction with a reluctant
Israel, went ahead and executed the policy on its own.
Over the months that followed, reports rolled in of weapons being
shipped to Fatah forces with an Israeli green light (Ha'aretz,
12/28/06); the arrival in Gaza of hundreds of fighters trained under
U.S. auspices in neighboring countries (Washington Post, 5/18/07); and
a White House request for $83 billion from Congress to finance "non-
lethal aid" to Fatah forces (AP, 1/19/07).
In Israel, it was obvious what was going on. Ha'aretz's chief
diplomatic correspondent, Akiva Eldar, noted (4/24/07) that "arming
the [pro-Abbas] Palestinian Presidential Guard is part of Elliott
Abrams' plan to bury the Mecca agreement." (See The Return of Elliott
Abrams)
The Israeli paper's Palestinian affairs reporter, Danny Rubinstein
(4/24/07), discussed the "preparations that Fatah is making for
renewing the bloody battles between the organizations" and pointed out
that Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan was "getting a lot of money from
the United States and is training thousands of recruits." Israeli
opposition leader Yossi Beilin, an architect of the Oslo accords,
warned (Ha'aretz, 4/17/07) that "arming one element in the PA due to
the intention to see Fatah twist Hamas' arm soon could end up as a
terrible boomerang."
If any proof were needed that the U.S. was trying to foment a civil
war, it arrived just as the violence in Gaza was reaching a crescendo-
in the form of an internal report by Alvaro De Soto, the U.N. envoy to
the Quartet, that was leaked to the London Guardian (6/13/07). In De
Soto's report, the full text of which can be found at the Guardian's
website, the Peruvian diplomat wrote:
The U.S. clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas -
so much so that, a week before Mecca, the U.S. envoy [presumably
Assistant Secretary of State David Welch] declared twice in an envoys'
meeting in Washington how much "I like this violence," referring to
the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were
being regularly killed and injured, because "it means that other
Palestinians are resisting Hamas."
To summarize: At a moment when violence in Gaza was a top story in the
world media, it was disclosed by a U.N. diplomat who worked closely
with the U.S. that a leading American policymaker in a private meeting
had openly rejoiced at the violence and saw it as proof that American
policy was working.
One might think that would count as major news. Not for the U.S.
media. Although a handful of outlets mentioned the leaked De Soto
report, including AP (6/13/07), NPR (6/13/07), CNN (6/13/07) and the
L.A. Times (6/14/07), all of these omitted any reference to the
anecdote about the U.S official-even though it had been specifically
highlighted in the Guardian article that was the source of the story.
The McClatchy News Service did report the quote in a July 4 dispatch,
but the story ran in only two papers found in the Nexis database, and
both of them removed the line about the American envoy's remarks (San
Jose Mercury News, 7/5/07; Newsday, 7/8/07). Only Newsweek (in a June
25 story about the flight of the Gazan middle class) and the
Washington Post (near the end of a brief June 14 story on the inside
pages) reported the comment in passing.
The events in Gaza represented a failure of U.S. policy, of course,
but only because of the way they ended. Washing-ton officials had
sought to foment a civil war in hopes that Fatah would prevail. In the
end, they succeeded in bringing on the conflict-but the wrong side
won. Hamas had essentially carried out a preemptive counter-coup
against elements of Fatah that the U.S. had been helping to prepare
for a civil war. The former director of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy, put
it very simply (New Republic Online, 7/3/07): "An American plan to
create a viable Fatah force in the Gaza Strip to crush Hamas
backfired."
This was the simple truth that virtually no American journalist was
willing to disclose. In the wave of reporting and commentary that
followed the Gaza fighting, journalists felt free to describe Hamas'
victory as "a massive setback for the United States, which backs Fatah
leader and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas" (CNN,
6/14/07) (who never pretended otherwise), but they scrupulously
avoided any allusion to the fact that the U.S. had sought the
Palestinian confrontation in the first place.
In a typical article analyzing how the Hamas victory illustrated the
"failure of Bush's Middle East vision," the Washington Post (6/15/07)
rehearsed the recent history of U.S. policy while carefully
airbrushing out the Bush administration's barely concealed
machinations for a coup d'etat: Following Hamas' 2006 election
victory, the article explained, Washington "organized a financial
boycott" in an "effort to showcase Abbas as a moderate." But then
Abbas "agreed to a unity government" with Hamas. Just as the U.S. had
"begun delivering nonlethal aid" to bolster Abbas' forces, "Hamas
decided to strike and seize Gaza."
Wait: If the parties had reconciled, why was the U.S. aiding one
side's fighters? The Post article tactfully declined to explain.
In a news analysis the day after the Gaza takeover (6/14/07), New York
Times reporter Helene Cooper wrote without irony that "America's
options are limited in part because its role has been limited, with
the Bush administration pursuing what for the most part has been a
hands-off policy toward the Palestinians." As evidence of the hands-
off policy, Cooper pointed to a statement from White House
spokesperson Tony Snow, who with a straight face had "said that the
hope of averting a wider civil war remained largely in the
Palestinians' hands."
The specialists who did not have to rely on the mainstream U.S. media
for their information knew better. "Everybody knew a force was being
trained in the Gaza Strip to confront Hamas," a former senior Israeli
government official told McClatchy (7/4/07) in the story that was run
by only two papers. "To assume that Hamas would sit idly by and wait
for this to culminate in success was very short-sighted." Reading the
coverage of the Gaza takeover, however, what "everybody knew" seemed
to be one of Washington's most closely guarded secrets.

policy was working.
Peccato che tali affermazioni non sono mai state dimostrate vere, e
valgono quindi meno di zero.
<CUT del resto delle stronzate>
-Stefano