[spectre] Pinochet in Palestine (?)

[Louise Desrenards]

This information is not a disinformation but coming from intellectual
Palestinians living in Gaza and being materialists from their own part... It
is a question may be that only surprises any one not being informed of what
happened in Gaza since Arafat was dying ( although he was sick, probably not
having died from disease but from poisoning ).

This extreme speculation as predictable analysis of the real situation of
Palestinians as people cannot be countered but only be moderated ‹or denied.
Not pretending to the truth but understanding the most close the pragmatic
situation.

It is a question as hypothesis which this speculation installs from the
common signs between the horizon of Oaxaca (remembering the US intervention
in South America in the former times) and the horizon of Palestine.

Every one, having thought that may be there was not radical misalliance
between UE and the part of the Palestinian power that UE had financially
helped by the way of Israeli distribution (Oslo convention), at the moment
UE decided for stopping the help at the moment Hamas was elected, cannot
refuse of consider this view possibly explaining a part of mortiferous
confusion between Palestinian people in which Israel has justified military
persecutions. 



On 18/11/06 9:34, "Natalie Gravenor" <gravenor at eyzmedia.de> probably wrote:

> Is this credible or maybe some disinformation to sow dissent among the
> Palestinians?
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Louise Desrenards" <louise.desrenards at free.fr>
> To: "Spectre" <spectre at mikrolisten.de>
> Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 7:43 PM
> Subject: [spectre] Pinochet in Palestine (?)
> 
> 
>> 
>> Pinochet in Palestine
>> 
>> Joseph Massad* looks at the similarities between
>> regime change in Chile and Palestine and condemns the
>> collaboration between Fatah and Palestine's enemies
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------
>> Before the United States government subcontracted the
>> Chilean military to overthrow the democratically
>> elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, it
>> carried out a number of important missions in the
>> country in preparation for the coup of 11 September.
>> These included major strikes, especially by truck
>> owners, which crippled the economy, massive
>> demonstrations that included middle-class housewives
>> and children carrying pots and pans demanding food,
>> purging the Chilean military of officers who would
>> oppose the suspension of democracy and the
>> introduction of US-supported fascist rule, and a major
>> media campaign against the regime with the CIA
>> planting stories in newspapers like El Mercurio and
>> others. This was in a context where also the Communist
>> Party and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR)
>> criticised and sometimes attacked the Allende regime
>> from varying leftist positions.
>> 
>> The Chilean example is important to keep in mind when
>> one looks at the Palestinian situation today, as it
>> functions as a sort of training video for US-planned
>> anti-democratic coups elsewhere in the world. Not only
>> are the US and Israel financially backing the open
>> preparation for a coup to be staged by the top
>> leadership of Fateh (and in the case of Israel
>> allowing weapons' transfers to Palestinian Authority
>> [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas's Praetorian Guard), but
>> so are the intelligence services of a number of
>> Israel-and US-friendly Arab countries whose
>> intelligence services have set up shop openly in
>> Ramallah more recently, making their longstanding and
>> major, though understated, involvement in running the
>> Palestinian territories more open and shameless.
>> Indeed the intelligence "delegation" of one such Arab
>> country has rented out a multi-story building in
>> Ramallah to conduct their operations there.
>> 
>> Israel has helped this effort all along by kidnapping
>> and arresting Fateh members who resist the
>> collaborationist policies of the top leadership. As
>> for the leadership itself, it has periodically purged
>> members of Fateh who oppose its policies, and
>> marginalised those in the Diaspora who continue to
>> resist them. The Fateh/PA coup leaders consist of
>> Abbas and the ruling triumvirate of Mohamed Dahlan,
>> Yasser Abd Rabbo, and Nabil Amr. The profiles of these
>> three make them well suited for the tasks ahead.
>> Dahlan is universally known as America's and Israel's
>> main corrupt military man on the ground. Abd Rabbo
>> (aka Yasser Abd Yasser, literally "Yasser worshipper
>> of Yasser" on account of his subservience to Arafat)
>> is the architect of the Geneva accords, which
>> recognise Israel's right to be a racist Jewish state
>> as legitimate and reject the right of Palestinian
>> refugees to return as illegitimate. He recently upheld
>> the Israeli position when fighting with the Qatari
>> foreign minister and his staff during the latter's
>> visit to the occupied territories. Amr is the former
>> PA information minister, and a former visiting fellow
>> at the Israel lobby think tank the Washington
>> Institute for Near East Policy. He is also the
>> speechwriter for Abbas and Dahlan.
>> 
>> Abbas and these three have undertaken not only to
>> launch massive strikes by the Fateh security thugs
>> that they have armed to police the territories on
>> behalf of Israel, and strikes by the bureaucracy that
>> staffs the PA ministries, but also have coerced large
>> numbers of Palestinians, including teachers and
>> professors, under the force of guns, to uphold a
>> strike against Hamas, when most of them had voted for
>> Hamas in the first place and refuse to strike.
>> Palestinians who have fought for decades to keep their
>> schools and universities open against Israeli
>> draconian closures and suspension of Palestinian
>> education, are now forced by Fateh and its armed thugs
>> to stop the Palestinian educational process with
>> strikes against Hamas, and threaten to shoot people if
>> they refuse to follow Fateh's coup directives.
>> 
>> In addition, Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate have
>> organised demonstrations in Ramallah by middle-class
>> Palestinians, including housewives, who brought out
>> their pots and pans, in a scene borrowed from 1973
>> Santiago, in demonstrations against Hamas. The
>> Fateh-controlled press, especially Al-Ayyam is
>> fomenting major anti-Hamas propaganda campaign in
>> preparation for the coup and is thus playing the same
>> role as El Mercurio did in Chile. Al-Ayyam is aided in
>> its efforts by the anti-Hamas secular Palestinian
>> intelligentsia, most of whose members are on the
>> payroll of the bankrollers of the Oslo process and its
>> NGOs. These old leftist Palestinians, like their
>> counterparts in Lebanon, are better known today as the
>> right-wing left, as they take up right-wing positions
>> while insisting that they are still leftists based on
>> positions they had held in the 1980s or earlier.
>> 
>> The plan is that the Fateh/PA rulers would do their
>> utmost to provoke Hamas to start the war at which
>> point Fateh, with the aid of the intelligence services
>> of friendly Arab countries, as well as assistance from
>> Israel and the US, would crush Hamas and take over.
>> Indeed, the first unsuccessful round took place when
>> the Israeli government kidnapped a third of the Hamas
>> government, both cabinet ministers and parliament
>> members, and placed them in Israeli jails. This was
>> not sufficient to bring Hamas down, and not for lack
>> of help that Fateh rendered the Israeli occupiers.
>> Aside from the initial burning of the Legislative
>> Council building, Fateh thugs have also burned the
>> prime minister's office, shot at his car, burned
>> offices in different ministries several times,
>> harassed and threatened Hamas ministers and
>> parliamentarians whom Israel failed to kidnap and
>> arrest, refused to allow the government ministries to
>> operate, and so forth. Hamas however, is wisely
>> adamant that it will respond by force only when Fateh
>> launches an all-out war to bring about its planned
>> coup, but not before.
>> 
>> Fateh's planned coup is not only based on the
>> popularity of Hamas and its electoral victory but also
>> on Hamas's increased ability to defend itself against
>> Fateh forces. If the US and Israel armed Fateh thugs
>> under Arafat's leadership to crush the first
>> Palestinian Intifada and any remaining resistance to
>> the occupation since 1994, today, Hamas is almost as
>> well- armed as Fateh forces and can defend the rights
>> of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation
>> and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help
>> to enforce it. This is where the situation today
>> differs measurably from that of the mid-1990s. To
>> offset this new balance of forces, the United States
>> government, according to the Israeli newspaper
>> Haaretz, has been training Abbas's Praetorian Guard in
>> Jericho for over a month with American, British,
>> Egyptian, and Jordanian military instructors, and is
>> providing arms to them in preparation for the
>> confrontation with Hamas. The Israeli cabinet in turn
>> has recently approved the transfer of thousands of
>> rifles from Egypt and Jordan to Abbas's forces. The
>> Israelis also approved a US request that Israel allow
>> the Badr Brigade -- part of the Palestine Liberation
>> Army currently stationed in Jordan -- to deploy in
>> Gaza. These steps have been conceived by General Keith
>> Dayton, the American security coordinator in the
>> occupied territories, who wants the Badr Brigade to
>> function as Abbas's "rapid reaction force in Gaza". As
>> a possible step to increase its security and military
>> roles in the occupied territories, the Jordanian
>> government recently established a legal committee to
>> review the provisions of Jordan's decision to
>> "disengage" from the West Bank announced on 31 July
>> 1988, effectively suggesting the possibility of a
>> reversal of part or all of these provisions. More
>> recently, the Israelis intensified their bombings and
>> killings in Gaza, most recently in Beit Hanoun
>> murdering over 50 Palestinians in a few days.
>> 
>> Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling triumvirate are reticent
>> at the moment to start an open war for fear of a
>> public backlash. They prefer to remove Hamas through
>> imposing a "national unity" government that would
>> undercut Hamas gradually and peacefully. However,
>> Abbas and his triumvirate are quickly losing patience.
>> Indeed, in a hastily-arranged meeting of the
>> Diaspora-based Fateh Central Committee set to convene
>> in Amman three weeks ago to ratify the coup plans,
>> members of the committee opposed Abbas's US and
>> Israel-supported coup, which forced Abbas to cancel
>> the meeting altogether claiming falsely lack of quorum
>> as the reason. This speaks to Abbas's desperation in
>> engineering the coup without adequate preparation.
>> Indeed, rumour has it across the occupied territories
>> that the desperate attacks committed recently against
>> Palestinian Christian churches were the work of
>> undercover thugs. Those who sent them want Palestinian
>> Christians and the world at large to think that these
>> were Hamas acts in response to the pope's racist
>> pronouncements against Islam. Hamas duly condemned the
>> attacks. Few in the occupied territories believe that
>> Hamas was behind them and most know that they were the
>> work of undercover agents.
>> 
>> The Fateh plan is simple: where Israel and its
>> Lebanese allies failed to crush Hizbullah in the Sixth
>> war, Fateh and its Israeli allies will succeed in
>> crushing Hamas, even if the ongoing Israeli war
>> against Hamas and the Palestinian people becomes an
>> all-out Seventh war. The flurry of visits by
>> Condoleezza Rice to the area in the last few weeks
>> hoped to put the final touches on this plan. If Hamas,
>> like Hizbullah, could be provoked into a military
>> response, the coup planners believe, then Fateh's and
>> Israel's wrath (backed by the US, Jordan, Egypt, and
>> Saudi Arabia) would be unleashed to finish Hamas off.
>> The Fateh leadership and its thugs are sharpening
>> their knives for the showdown. Hamas has remained calm
>> despite the pressure.
>> 
>> In the meantime, Ramallah proper (excluding the
>> surrounding villages), continues to be what many now
>> refer to as the Palestinian Green Zone, sheltering, in
>> addition to the intelligence staff of Israel and
>> Israel-friendly Arab countries, those Palestinians who
>> are paid and protected by the Oslo process, whether
>> the Oslo bureaucracy, its technicians, and hired
>> intellectuals, or the business and middle classes
>> recently habituated to the new name-brand consumerism
>> that the Green Zone can offer. This opulent life
>> contrasts with the life of the rest of the
>> Palestinians outside Ramallah who live in misery,
>> hunger, and under the bombardment of the Israelis and
>> the attacks of savage Jewish colonial settlers, not to
>> mention the harassment by Fateh thugs. In Ramallah
>> itself, the trigger-happy thugs shoot at random during
>> their demonstrations, injuring and sometimes killing
>> passers by "in error". Even the few secular
>> intellectuals who deign to oppose Fateh inside
>> Ramallah are harassed in different ways. Some of them
>> experience mysterious robberies that are repeated
>> every time they make anti-Fateh statements. The
>> preservation of Ramallah as the Green Zone is
>> paramount to Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate, whose
>> fear of any reform introduced by Hamas would strip the
>> elite of the benefits of corruption and the dolce vita
>> that Fateh-rule has ensured for them.
>> 
>> Meanwhile, Abbas and his triumvirate will continue to
>> treat Hamas the way Israel has treated the PLO and
>> other Arab countries all along. In the interminable
>> negotiations that Hamas held with Fateh to avert a
>> showdown, whenever Hamas would agree to a Fateh
>> demand, Fateh would up the ante and insist on another
>> concession or claim that its initial demands always
>> included the now expanded terms, even though they did
>> not. Moreover, Fateh would also publicly interpret
>> Hamas's concessions as having included things that
>> Hamas had not agreed to at all. If this is reminiscent
>> of the post-Oslo negotiating strategy that the
>> Israelis used successfully with Arafat, this is
>> because it is the same strategy. Abbas has gone so far
>> as to walk away from negotiations, and refuse to speak
>> to Hamas leaders, just as the Israelis have done often
>> with the PA. Moreover, if the Israelis would often
>> carry undercover attacks against Western interests to
>> implicate Arab governments, the clearest example being
>> the infamous Lavon Affair of the mid-1950s targeting
>> Egypt, similar operations are being committed to
>> implicate Hamas by undercover agents, like the recent
>> example of the attacks on the churches illustrates.
>> There may be many more such operations being planned.
>> 
>> Whatever fig leaf still covered the Fateh leadership's
>> complete collaboration and subservience to Israeli
>> interests has now fallen off. As a result, there is
>> very little left that can restrain Fateh's actions.
>> The next few weeks will be decided by how much Fateh
>> leaders are itching for a fight to save their skins
>> and fortunes, and how much patience Hamas can muster
>> in the face of so much thuggery. In the meantime, what
>> has been unfolding in the Palestinian territories is
>> nothing short of the Chilean script.
>> 
>> Pinochet is in Palestine. His success however remains
>> far from certain.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Source http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
>> 
>> * The writer is associate professor of modern Arab
>> politics and intellectual history at Columbia
>> University. He is the author of The Persistence of the
>> Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the
>> Palestinians (Routledge, 2006).
>> 
>> 
>> //////////////////
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe
>> Info, archive and help:
>> http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
>> 
>> 
> 
>