War and Piece:

May 16, 2008

MJ: Bush's politicking at Israel's Knesset neglects his role in Hamas' election win

... Beyond the fact that Bush's own administration has repeatedly offered to negotiate with Tehran should Iran suspend uranium enrichment, and that his top diplomat in Iraq has talked with his Iranian counterparts, as well as his former ambassador to Afghanistan, both with the White House blessing, as well as the ongoing negotiations with Pyongyang, Libya, and the Syrian deputy foreign minister's visit to Annapolis; beyond those recent demonstrated exceptions in action to Bush's rhetoric (I guess the word for it is "hypocrisy"): It's also worth pointing out, as several Israeli security officials and political observers have recently done to me here, a bit of recent history Bush neglected to mention at Israel's parliament. That Israel and the Palestinian Authority have chiefly him to thank for Hamas having a degree of political legitimacy it otherwise would not have had. After all, they point out, it was the Bush administration that "twisted the arm" of Israeli and Palestinian leaders against consideridable resistance and skepticism on their part to allow the Palestinian militant group Hamas to run in 2006 Palestinian elections that Hamas won -- an outcome to its interventions that the Bush administration once again failed to anticipate.

"It never occurred to them, as in Iraq, that the two goals – regime change and democracy – may not work together," Jerusalem-based writer Gershom Gorenberg recently told me. "That psychology left them open to the idea that on the one hand they can have their cake and eat it too. You could get rid of Arafat, have democratic elections and you will get Republicans." Or so the Bush administration wished.

“And the Israelis completely didn’t agree,” Gorenberg added.

Such Israeli (and Palestinian moderates') skepticism about the Bush administration's naive and wishful thinking that elections would swiftly topple extremists proved correct. "This administration, which says it has a principled approach [of not talking to terrorists], is the very administration that in 2006 twisted the arm of the Israeli government and of the Palestinian authorities and forced them both to accept Hamas as a participant in the elections," former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy told me. "When the result of the election was a surprise, the immediate reaction was, 'Okay, We don’t like this result, so we’ll change the rules.' ... The administration is inconsistent in its approach."

And equally inconsistent in the case of Hezbollah, Halevy adds.