Tested by Zion (47 page)

As to Condi, her post-Mecca actions may also have a personal element: asserting her own leadership as a world statesman in an area (unlike Iraq or Afghanistan) where her stewardship was clear. But she was also trying to hold together thin and strained threads in the Middle East, trying to show the Arabs and Europeans – as I had said to the Cantor group – that there was a peace process. One can caricature this activity as reminiscent of Peter Pan: The peace process was like Tinkerbelle, in that if we all just believed in it firmly enough it really would survive. But as Sharon had said in explaining his Gaza disengagement initiative, vacuums can be dangerous in the Middle East. She was trying to prevent one and to a large extent using the best tool she had: herself, her own presence in American diplomatic activity in holding meeting after meeting and making trip after trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah. I did not think this effort would result in any peace agreement, and on this Condi and I disagreed all along. But the least one can say for her approach is that she did prevent any Arab or EU initiative, directly or through the UN, that would have made matters worse, such as by legitimizing the Hamas role in the PA. UN envoy de Soto, who had astonished Welch and me by announcing after the 2006 Palestinian election that he planned to meet with Hamas officials, continued to press Kofi Annan for permission to do so.
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Rice's activities helped prevent such moves toward Hamas, no small gain under the circumstances (which included continuing Russian contacts with Hamas).

Long before my “off the record” remarks on Capitol Hill, Condi was well aware that, increasingly, I did not see eye to eye with her on policy matters and did not believe this tension with the Israelis was productive for us. She was acute enough to see it even had I not expressed it, usually to Hadley and
to the president, but not to her directly. I worked for Hadley and the president, not for her and the State Department, so it seemed to me doubts and objections should go up my chain. It is also true that I did not believe repeated objections would have gotten me anywhere with Condi, who achieved so much in life and in government because she was a determined and formidable figure once she had made up her mind. The two people who could change her mind were Hadley and the president, so I made my complaints and addressed my arguments to them. Condi never let any of this affect our personal relations; usually, she was as friendly and warm as she had been during the first term when I had been her chief assistant in pushing the president's line on Middle East policy.

Two other matters worth noting occurred in May 2007. First, the ceasefires between Israel and Hamas, and between Hamas and Fatah, were being blown away. Rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from Gaza were increasing and by May running at 30 a day. Beginning on May 16, air attacks by Israel returned fire on terrorists in Gaza. On May 18, Israeli retaliatory strikes killed seven Palestinians in Gaza. Israelis were killed by Qassam rocket fire from Gaza on May 21 and May 27, in the city of Sderot near the Gaza/Israel border. Often, responsibility for the attacks was claimed by smaller Palestinian terrorist groups rather than Hamas, but it seemed clear that Hamas was either behind them
or at least not acting to prevent them. In addition to the Israeli-Palestinian violence, violence between the PA and Fatah on the one hand and Hamas on the other was returning. Severe fighting erupted on May 15, and roughly 50 Palestinians were killed in the factional bloodshed that lasted about three weeks. Despite whatever was going on at the political level where a national unity government was theoretically in place, in the streets these rivals were fighting it out for control of Gaza. On May 23, less than two months after the national unity government was sworn in, Abbas and Haniyeh met to discuss how to stop the escalation of violence between Fatah and Hamas. Their efforts showed no success.

Second, in mid-May, we received an urgent request to receive Mossad chief Meir Dagan at the White House. Olmert asked that he be allowed to show some material to the president, but we headed that off with a suggestion that he show whatever he had to Hadley and
me first. The vice president joined us in Hadley's office for Dagan's show-and-tell. What Dagan had was astonishing and explosive: He showed us intelligence demonstrating that Syria was constructing a nuclear reactor whose design was supplied by North Korea – and doing so with North Korean technical assistance. Dagan left us with one stark message: The bottom line was clear to all Israeli policy makers who knew about this, and it was that the reactor had to go away.
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There then began a four-month process of extremely close cooperation with Israel about this reactor. As soon as our own intelligence had confirmed the Israeli information and we all agreed on what we were dealing with, Hadley established a process for gathering further information, considering our options, and sharing our thinking with Israel. This process was run entirely out of the White House, with extremely limited participation to maintain secrecy. The effort at secrecy succeeded and there were no leaks, an amazing feat in Washington – especially when the information being held so tightly is as startling and sexy as this was. Initially, there were doubts that Syrian president Assad could be so stupid as to try this stunt of building a nuclear reactor with North Korean help. Did he really think he would get away with it – that Israel would permit it? But he nearly did; had the reactor been activated, striking it militarily could have strewn radioactive material into the wind and into the Euphrates, along which it lay and which was its source for the water the reactor needed for cooling. When we found out about the reactor, it was at an advanced construction stage, just a few months from being “hot.”

The consideration of what to do about the reactor continued alongside the tense Rice-Israel diplomatic meetings, but the two did not collide. For the most part, this was because different personnel were involved: military and intelligence personnel uninvolved in peace negotiations were the key interlocutors for Israel in considering the al-Kibar reactor, as were individuals on the vice president's staff, sympathetic to Israel's position. The work on al-Kibar was a model both of U.S.-Israel collaboration and of interagency cooperation without leaks. Papers I circulated to the group were returned to me when meetings ended or were kept under lock and key; secretaries and executive assistants
were kept out of the loop; meetings were called under vague names like “the study group.”

What to do about the al-Kibar reactor lurked in the background as, in the foreground, intra-Palestinian violence continued and escalated into June. The International Red Cross
estimated that between June 8 and 15, 550 people were wounded and at least 155 killed.
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Fighting had burst out again, especially after June 10; on that day, Hamas forces threw a Fatah official off the top of a 15-story building. Fatah fighters attacked Ismail Haniyeh's house that day, and the following day his house and Abbas's Gaza residence were hit. Hamas began more systematic assaults on Fatah strong points on June 12, and position after position fell; on June 13, the headquarters of the National Security Forces, one of the PA security organizations and therefore Fatah-controlled, was occupied. On June 13, one of the key offices of the Preventive Security Organization
(PSO), another PA force and one directly controlled by Mohammed Dahlan, fell to Hamas. On June 14, Hamas occupied the PSO's main office in Gaza, taking control of all the arms, ammunition, and vehicles stored there. Hamas was steadily rolling over the Fatah forces that on paper greatly outnumbered its own, and by June 14, the battles were over. On that day President Abbas formally dissolved the national unity government
. Hamas controlled Gaza, Fatah controlled the West Bank, and a state of emergency was declared in both. A new government was appointed on June 17, with Salam Fayyad as prime minister. The government of Egypt denounced the Hamas takeover in Gaza as a “coup against legitimacy”
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and publicly accused Iran of fomenting the violence: The Egyptian foreign minister said, “Iran's policies encouraged Hamas to do what it has done in Gaza.”
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I remembered ruefully Omar Soliman's confident assurances to Hadley and me that Egypt would never permit a Hamas takeover of
Gaza; that Egyptian bluster had proved to consist of words without any real-world content.

Why had Hamas acted? Why had the continuing Fatah-Hamas violence led this time to an escalating confrontation and finally a Hamas takeover? There were accusations by Hamas and its supporters that it was self-defense because the Americans were arming Fatah/PA forces to crush Hamas. That we were arming them was not true because all our aid was nonlethal, but that we were seeking to enlarge and professionalize the PA security forces was, of course, true. That had been the task of Gen. Ward and Gen. Dayton. Dayton told a congressional committee in May, just weeks before the Hamas takeover, that “[t]he situation has gotten to be quite dire in Gaza; we have a situation of lawlessness and outright chaos. This chaotic situation is why the [US] is focused on [helping] the legal, legitimate security forces in our effort to reestablish law and order.”
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From our perspective, we had made the demand of professionalization since 2002, when Arafat was in control of the 13 rival gangs he called security forces. Moreover, the Roadmap had clearly spelled out
the need to eliminate terrorist organizations and all “militias” so that the PA government had a monopoly on arms. This was the “one gun” phrase President Abbas used so often. In theory, had the Dayton program continued on year after year while Hamas forces grew no stronger, we might have reached the point where PA forces could defeat Hamas. Ward and Dayton had faced the great frustration of having to achieve a task, professionalization of the PA forces, without any resources to work with; they were forced to be all talk until the fall of 2007, months after the Hamas action, when the first funds arrived. The first PA forces did not arrive for training at the Jordan International Police Training Center until January 2008. From that point on, their progress was remarkable. It was unfortunate that these Palestinian police were sometimes referred to as “the Dayton forces,” but it was also a tribute to the work Gen. Dayton was leading.

In fact, it was ironically Hamas that made Gen. Dayton operational because he could not work with the national unity government
. Once Hamas acted in Gaza and President Abbas dissolved that government, the way was finally clear for serious efforts to train PA security forces. Meanwhile, Hamas forces had steadily grown stronger because of the aid they were receiving from Iran. In earlier years, there had been a debate as to whether there existed or could possibly exist close ties between Iran and
Hamas, given that Hamas was a Sunni Islamist group that was part of the Muslim Brotherhood
whereas Iran was Shia. That question was answered clearly by Iran's pouring of money and weaponry into Gaza for Hamas, once the Israelis left the Philadelphi Strip separating Gaza from Egypt. By June 2007, we saw, Hamas was well organized and well armed, a tribute to the outside help it was getting but even more to its superior organization and dedication. Once again, Dahlan had proved to be better at padding the payroll than taking risks or inspiring his troops.

For Hamas, then, this may have been the optimal moment to act – with Iranian support available and after it had concluded there was a conspiracy to crush it, but before the balance of forces began shifting due to any actual American training of PA security forces. The pattern of unity meetings and even unity governments, then more Fatah-Hamas violence, and then more unity efforts was now broken. When I later asked Jake Walles, who had been our ambassador to the Palestinians as consul general, for his explanation of the Hamas coup, he wondered about what could have been the Hamas view of the world that month:

I think that Hamas really did believe that we were conspiring with Dahlan to bring them down. I don't think we were in the sense that they believed we were, but…all that spring before it happened, there were repeated clashes in Gaza between Fatah guys, meaning Dahlan's people, and Hamas. They were battling over who was in charge.…And we were meeting with Dahlan.…It wasn't a secret that I would meet with Dahlan, and that you guys would come out and we'd meet with Dahlan, and when Abu Mazen had meetings with the Secretary, Dahlan was there. So, I think Hamas put all of this stuff together, and I think they felt that there was a risk that this “conspiracy” would topple them – this nonexistent conspiracy. So rather than wait for it to happen, they
just pulled the plug.…I always felt that their priority was control of Gaza and control of a piece of territory. And that's important to them as a movement, and also to the Muslim Brotherhood more generally. And so I think it appealed to them to take over Gaza. And when they saw that they could do it, they didn't hesitate.
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It can also be argued that the Hamas takeover was the inevitable result of Israel's withdrawal. One version of that theory even suggests that Sharon foresaw this happening and welcomed it as a way of forestalling movement to Palestinian statehood, but most criticism simply suggests that Gaza disengagement was a terrible error for Israel. Far from allowing Israel to “disengage” from Gaza, the removal of all IDF forces led to thousands of rockets and mortars, the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, the Hamas takeover, and ultimately the “Gaza War” of December 2008 and January 2009. Neither at the time, in June 2007, nor later did it seem to me inevitable that Hamas would conquer Gaza. Tougher action by Egypt and the PA from the time of disengagement in the summer of 2005 onward might have avoided it; so could have Israel, which tolerated attacks from Gaza far longer than anyone had anticipated.

In retrospect, the turning point that led to the Hamas takeover was not the 2005 disengagement but perhaps the PLC election of 2006 and the Mecca Agreement of February 2007 – just four months before the fighting that led to the Hamas victory. There were three possible paths after that. Taking one path, Hamas could change or appear to change, suggesting that it might accept some of the Quartet Principles or using ambiguous language to that effect. Doing so would have quickly undone Quartet unity, and the Russians, some in Europe, and many in the UN bureaucracy would have strongly backed Palestinian unity governments. This outcome was very likely had Hamas shown any ideological flexibility or greater tactical agility in dealing with Western diplomats. Or, following a second path, we could have given up on the Quartet Principles and simply accepted Hamas as it was – a terrorist group, but one with which we simply had to negotiate. In the absence of compromises by Hamas, we would have had to compromise. However, that outcome was unacceptable to the president, not least because we were involved in a global war on terror. The implications of such an ideological collapse would have undermined efforts far removed from the Palestinian territories. Such an outcome was also unacceptable to the Israelis, who were not going to negotiate with an Islamist group dedicated to destroying their state through constant acts of terror.