08/13/14 – Sandy Tolan – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey guys, welcome back to the show.
As promised, one more guest, Sandy Tolan at tomdispatch.com, the great Tom Englehart, and it'll be running.
I'm looking at it right now.
You guys will be able to see it tomorrow at antiwar.com as well.
Sandy is a Tom Dispatch regular.
He's the author of The Lemon Tree, an Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, and the forthcoming Children of the Stone, about the building of a music school under occupation in the West Bank.
Man, isn't that interesting?
Hey, welcome back to the show, Sandy.
It's good to talk to you.
And what a great article you've written here.
It's called Going Wild in the Gaza War.
Tom's got a great little introduction there and then his blown chances in Gaza, which is a very nice way of putting it here.
But it's a very good history of, more or less, since the democratic elections in Palestine in 2005, and the surprising victory of Hamas, and the history of how we got to the current crisis since then.
And I'm really happy that you wrote this thing.
It's really good.
And I was hoping that you could really help fill us in on, you know, especially that early period there, the first couple of years, because as I'm sure you're aware, there's a very popular Israeli talking point, which is that, well, we completely granted independence to Gaza back in 2005, and instead of making paradise, they decided to shoot their bottle rockets at us and force us to put them under siege.
And hey, maybe that's somewhat true.
I don't know.
But I sure would like to really have some details about what really went down with the American and Israeli engineered, in fact, election of 05, its results, and the aftermath.
So please do tell, sir.
Well, thanks.
First of all, Scott, thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's a complicated history, as is so much in the Middle East.
I think it's, in this case, I mean, go back for years or even centuries, but even to the late 19th century, if you want to.
But let's start in 2004, 2005, around the time that Ariel Sharon, 2005, when Ariel Sharon had decided to so-called disengage from Gaza, 8,000 settlers were removed, the settlements were removed, and basically the Israelis said, okay, now the Palestinians in Gaza, it's up to you to make your paradise, as you said.
I don't think they used those exact words, but you now have a free society.
Well, in fact, the occupation never ended.
Israel has always been in control.
There's a brilliant book by a guy named A.L. Weizmann called The Hollow Land, which is an architect's account of the architecture of the occupation, an Israeli architect, for that matter.
And it's a very critical account.
And in it, among other many things, he explains, as have others, that the occupation never really ended.
It's controlled.
Israel is controlling the skies above Gaza, the seas around Gaza, and the ability for people and goods to move in and out of Gaza.
It's no secret, and there's good reason why Gazans say that they're trapped in the largest open-air prison in the world.
So that's the context.
They never really were allowed for freedom.
The so-called corridor that was going to connect the West Bank and Gaza under the Oslo peace process never materialized, still hasn't to this day.
And Gazans felt increasingly frustrated, leading up to the 2006 election, with the corruption of the very pro-Western Fatah organization.
And Hamas was not elected because people wanted a terrorist movement in control.
They were not elected because suddenly people didn't care about having a just peace with freedom.
They were elected because of the corruption of Hamas, I mean, it's corruption of Fatah, rather.
Hamas has inability to deliver any modicum of freedom and a just peace.
So Hamas was elected.
Now, clearly, Hamas was responsible for terrorist acts in the past, as were some Israeli organizations going back to the 1930s and 40s, whose leaders later became prime ministers of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Per- I mean, excuse me, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin.
But what is clear and not as well known is that Hamas for years, and especially right after the 2006 election, was sending serious messages of reconciliation towards the Americans.
In a letter handwritten and given to Jerome Siegel of the Jewish Peace Lobby, and a professor based at the University of Maryland, he basically, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, offered to open a dialogue and pleaded, almost, to open a dialogue with the Bush administration.
And in it, he said, we are so worried about stability in this region that we would like to offer, we are willing to accept a state of Palestine on the 1967 borders and offer a truce for many years.
This was basically de facto recognition of Israel and an agreement to cease hostilities, which was basically two of the big things that the U.S., the U.N., Europe, and Israel were requiring.
So there's a lot of background here that Hamas has reached out, actually, again and again, and the answer from Israel, supported by U.S. hardware and political backing, has been war.
All right, well, thank you for being so polite, first of all, not correcting me when I said 2005, it was January 06 when they had the election.
So that's an important point to mention there, and sorry for the error.
But then, and the letter, you know, we may not even get back to it until after the break, but the letter and that entire theme is something that I want to go back to in just a minute, but I'd like to ask you a little more about the election itself, because I remember reading back then how they had this policy where, you know, of course, Israel collects all the tax money, and then they wouldn't give it to the Palestinian authorities, so they couldn't distribute it to pay all their employees and to pay off the people they needed to pay off in order to, frankly, buy their votes, American style, so they could win the election.
And I read Emily Houser wrote a thing for the Ford recently where she talked about one effort or another, I forget, that Condoleezza Rice had done to try to make it a little easier for Fatah to win the election and how the Israelis had stopped her.
And I just wondered whether you thought that maybe the Israelis deliberately rigged the election of Hamas in 2006 in order that they would have the excuse, divided and conquered and these guys are terrorists, so we don't have to talk to them.
The previous narrative had been, well, these guys aren't elected.
Fatah, you know, Arafat and his guys, they're not elected, so we don't have to talk to them.
Then Hamas gets elected and they go, well, they're terrorists, so we don't have to talk to them.
And I just wonder if you thought that was on purpose or not.
I rather doubt that Israel was able to rig the elections.
It may have ultimately served their purposes.
I didn't mean exactly like stuffing ballots, but they sort of, you know, set it up that way it seemed like maybe.
Elections were free and fair, and I think that the reason why Hamas was elected was, you know, as I said earlier, that they really wanted to, the people, not only of Gaza, but people in the West Bank were voting too.
They were tired of the corruption of Hamas.
I mean, they didn't get a full 50% of the vote of the Palestinian Authority is what I'm trying to say, yeah, of Fatah.
So what happened was that the, I mean, I think the idea that displacing Israel's hand is that you're suggesting, I think is a valid idea.
But I think, you know, it was really a surprise election.
I don't, I think everybody was stunned by the outcome.
All right.
I'm sorry.
You know what?
We're out of time for this segment.
Sandy, can you please hold on?
We'll be right back, everybody.
It's Sandy Tolan.
This article's at tomdispatch.com.
It'll be running tomorrow at antiwar.com.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm on Liberty Radio Network, full archives, more than 3,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
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All right, we're talking with Sandy Tolan.
He's written this great article for tomdispatch.com.
It'll be running on antiwar.com tomorrow, Blown Chances in Gaza.
And I'm sorry, I got us a little off track with what was going on with that election of 06 there, Sandy.
You can finish up on that if you want.
I think pretty much you'd made your point about it was pretty much was a surprise.
They didn't know what was going to happen.
But you do such a great job in your article of talking about what came after that, including, of course, as you mentioned, this letter from the leader of Hamas to George Bush saying basically like, hey, man, here's my handout.
Let's talk.
And then what happened?
So if you'd like to just go on with the story, you could go back if you want to the election.
Right.
Well, so.
So what what was established in 19 in 2006 during the Hamas election or after the Hamas election was that, you know, there was a really an outreach at that point by Hamas for some sort of reconciliation with the United States and by implication with Israel, because even though Hamas, you know, talks a hard line and saying that they want to basically eliminate Israel and if you look at the Hamas charter, it's it's disgusting.
Nevertheless, you know, as I said before, there are other organizations that have been considered terrorist organizations who said they would never compromise.
And then in the back channels, there are other signals.
This was a back channel offer for a serious discussion and and a willingness to go much further than Hamas had ever publicly said to create essentially what was the U.S. policy, which is the two state solution, and to offer a truce from.
These were the conditions, two of the large conditions that the U.S. and Israel had held over Hamas.
The fact that George Bush and the Bush administration did not even reply to that letter is not really surprising.
But nonetheless, it's striking and a striking piece of evidence that the U.S. and Israel were much more interested in smashing Hamas at the great human cost for the people of Gaza as they have been really several times in these wars over the last eight years.
And even at the time, John McCain said, well, yeah, of course you have to talk to Hamas.
So that just goes to show that it wasn't, you know, he wasn't saying, of course, you have to talk to Osama bin Laden.
He was saying you have to talk to Hamas.
And that was reasonable.
Right.
And you have, Scott, a number of people in the Israeli security establishment over the years who have said much the same thing, including a brigadier general who is the head of the Gaza division for the Israeli army, for the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, and the former chief of the Mossad, which is Israel's CIA.
They were both saying, look, you know, one of them said, you know, the devils of today could be people we could deal with tomorrow.
The devils of yesterday could be people we could deal with today.
They didn't listen to him.
And then more recently, Shmuel, Shmuel Zakai, former brigadier general, said, look, you can't just pound the people of Gaza and Hamas and expect them to not respond at all.
We need to engage them.
This kind of advice has been ignored.
And it was, again, in 2014, and this latest war was really as unnecessary or maybe even more so than all the others.
Well, now, can you take us a little bit through the cause and effect, maybe with an eye toward the debunking of this talking point, if you think it deserves debunking, about what exactly took place?
Of course, there's the Gaza bombshell, the coup, and Hamas ended up taking control of the whole strip, I guess, in 2007.
But, you know, if you could tell that story as fast as you can about how we got from the election of Hamas to the outright siege, because the Israeli story is they just kept shooting rockets at us.
And so that's all you need to know.
Well, I mean, Israel has had Gaza in a blockade for many years.
I mean, the sanctions were imposed immediately after the election in 2006, because even though it was a free and fair election, Israel and the West decided it would not contend with a terrorist organization.
And you know, as Avi Schleim, who's a former member of the Israeli army and a historian at the University at Oxford College in the UK, said, you know, here you have basically the oppressed who are getting sanctions put on them, and the oppressors are the ones who are imposing the sanctions with support of the international community.
Israel has put a siege on Gaza for many years.
The rockets are not justified, in my view, but they're in many ways a response to this intolerable situation and the human condition in Gaza, with increasing malnutrition, hunger.
And then the bombings take out not only targets, military targets, they're taking out schools, they're taking out refugee shelters, they're taking out power plants, and many more civilians have died than alleged combatants or combatants themselves.
So this situation continued all the way through up until 2014.
And in 2014, Hamas was no longer in control of its destiny to the extent it had been a little bit earlier, because Iran, Egypt, and Syria, for all different political and military reasons, had essentially withdrawn or sharply reduced their support to Hamas.
And Hamas was desperate.
And they came to Fatah again for a reconciliation agreement.
And they agreed to conditions they never would have agreed to before, because of the reality of the geopolitical reality.
And they basically were not quite on their knees, but basically saying, we will give over all this power to Fatah, which will essentially run this coalition government.
This was an amazing opportunity for Israel and the U.S., and the answer again, this time from the Obama administration and Prime Minister Netanyahu, was war.
Yeah.
I mean, this is just so incredible and important to emphasize here, I think, that what it means, that Hamas was willing to sign on from Fatah.
If you watch CNN, they'll go, oh my God, Fatah is getting in bed with Hamas, the terrorists.
But what was really going on, as you're saying, is Hamas is saying, okay, you guys take the lead and decide what we're going to do with the U.N., decide what we're going to do as far as talking with the Israelis, so we can go ahead and get a move on here with, you know, at least preserving the status quo, instead of sitting back and watching it just get worse and worse and worse forever.
Yeah, I mean, there's a good piece by Nathan Thrall, who's an analyst with the International Crisis Group and based in Jerusalem, in the New York Times on July 17th, and he says, the government could have served Israel's interests.
It offered Hamas's political adversaries a foothold in Gaza.
It was formed without a single Hamas member.
It retained the same Ramallah-based Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Ministers, Finance Minister, and Foreign Minister, and most important, it pledged to comply with the three conditions for Western aid long-demanded by America and Europe, nonviolence, adherence to past agreements, and recognition of Israel.
This is an incredible opportunity that was blown, another blown chance to avoid war in Gaza.
And as a result, instead, we have 1,900 Gazans dead by U.N. estimates, nearly three-quarters of those civilians.
Yes, that blown implies, you know, an accident, but as you talk about in here, Netanyahu deliberately lied the Israelis into this so-called war.
Yeah, I mean, the war is very popular in Israel, and there are complicated reasons for that.
I think a lot of it goes back to how deeply traumatized Israeli society is from the legacy of the Holocaust, that political leaders over the years, including Netanyahu himself, have not been shy to exploit.
And that's happened, in my view, in this terrible tragedy as well.
Yeah, but I mean, when you talk about the kidnapping of the boys and the Israeli police and intelligence services knowing good and well they were already dead, but pretending for three weeks or two and a half weeks or so that, oh, yeah, we're going to negotiate with Hamas and, oh, we know it was Hamas and all of this stuff in order to beat the drums and then even strikes on the 6th before the rocket attacks of the 7th in Gaza.
I mean, there are strong indications, as you say, that they knew well in advance that these teenagers tragically had already been murdered.
But what that indicates is what they were really wanting and looking for was a pretext to crush Hamas.
By some reports, only 10 percent of those interrogated, the 400-some people who were interrogated and many of them later put into Israeli jails without charge or due process, only 10 percent of them were actually questioned about the abductions of the teenagers.
What this indicates is that they were out to crush Hamas and crush the unity agreement.
And the irony is the unity agreement ain't dead.
Right.
Yeah.
All of it, basically.
And they didn't really accomplish their goals.
They didn't want to overthrow Hamas.
And they didn't.
Yeah.
And Hamas, you know, just like Hezbollah in 2006 when Israel pledged to crush it, you know, they may emerge stronger than before.
Right.
Which, in a twisted way, would also serve the Israelis' purpose that they can keep playing the how can we deal with people like this?
There's no one to talk to, you know, ad infinitum.
Yeah.
Well, you know, what my hope is that eventually the U.S. will come to understand that this kind of absolute unquestioning backing of a military alliance with Israel is not in the United States people's interest.
And we need to question this sort of absolute refusal to recognize that the rights of people to live and to live in freedom should not be trumped by domestic political considerations that don't even take into account the U.S.'s own true interests.
Right.
All right.
Well, we're already over time.
But thank you so much for your time, Sandy.
I sure appreciate it.
It was really good talking to you, Scott.
Good interview.
Great article, too.
And we'll be again posting it tomorrow, everybody, on Antiwar.com.
Thanks again.
OK.
Great.
Thanks so much.
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See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
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