[Peace-discuss] Re: US support for democracy in Palestine

[Robert Naiman]

>From today's NYT:

"Those who believe Mr. Abbas, who leads the Fatah party, Hamas's main
rival, did have the power to do so say that even an emergency
government must be ratified by the legislature. But with at least 39
Hamas legislators from the West Bank now being held in Israel jails
without charges, and the rest boycotting the meeting, it was not
possible to muster a quorum of the 132-member legislature...

In the January 2006 election, Hamas won 74 seats and Fatah 45. Now,
though, with only about 35 Hamas legislators not in jail, Fatah would
have a majority of the votes if a quorum were to be attained."

Hamas Boycotts Legislature Meeting
Steven Erlanger, New York Times, July 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/world/middleeast/11cnd-mideast.html

On 7/11/07, David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20070704/wl_mcclatchy/20070704bcmideastgaza_attn_national_foreign_editors_ytop
>
> This article, which appeared on the front page of the N-G Commentary section
> on Sunday, explains (unintentionally) a lot about why Americans are so
> "confused" about the Israel-Palestine conflict. It simply takes for granted
> that it's acceptable for the most powerful country in the world to violently
> overthrow a democratically-elected leadership in the weakest non-country in
> the world. It implies that this is a moral choice on the part of U.S.
> leaders, because Hamas is defined as a violent Islamist movement that wants
> to overthrow Israel. The rest of the article assumes that the U.S. would
> have wished for Fatah to dominate Gaza, which is not at all apparent. They
> simply wish for there to be ongoing chaos, with the focus on
> inter-Palestinian conflict rather than on Israel of the U.S.
>
> "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, so
> much so that, a week before Mecca [where the two factions met in
> February 2007 and under the auspices of King Abdullah agreed to a unity
> government] the US envoy 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.'"
>
> --Alvaro de Soto, UN Special Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace
> Process, in the final report he wrote before resigning in May 2007;
> Hamas won a democratic election in January of 2006 but didn't exactly
> benefit from the Bush administration's brave attempt to bring democracy
> to the Middle East.
>
> ###
>
>
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