Tested by Zion (34 page)

But the Palestinian elections were first. Indeed, they were held the very day after Olmert spoke in Herzliya, on January 25. Hamas won 44% of the vote versus 41% for Fatah: 440,000 votes for the Hamas-linked party “Change and Reform” versus 410,000 for Fatah. (Several smaller parties, including Salam Fayyad's and one representing the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP), split the rest of the vote.) Despite the close margin, it was a shocking victory for a terrorist group, one that had not been predicted – neither by the Israelis, Americans, Fatah leaders, nor Palestinian pollsters. Going into Election Day, we nervously anticipated that Hamas would do well – but did not believe it would win. The Palestinian electoral system provided for both proportional representation and constituency voting; each voter received two ballots, one for the national race and one for his or her local race. In the national race, Hamas prevailed by three points, but the victory was magnified by its success in the constituencies, where a disorganized Fatah had often presented two or even three candidates who then split the vote and lost to a Hamas candidate. In the end, Fatah had 45 seats in the PLC, whereas Hamas had 74. The terrorist PFLP won three seats; Salam Fayyad's moderate “Third Way” party and Mustafa Barghouti's “Independent Palestine” each won two.

Fatah had been the leading element in Palestinian politics for 40 years, so this was a stunning defeat. Prime Minister Qurie (Abu Ala'a) resigned immediately. In Washington, we scrambled; this Hamas victory was unthinkable, and there were no plans for what to do next. No one had even bothered to write a planning paper on “What to Do If Hamas Wins,” for no one had thought that outcome possible.

First, we had a legal problem. Hamas was a terrorist group, officially designated by the U.S. government, so we could not give it any funds or allow funds to be given to it through the U.S. financial system. Legally, we had to treat Hamas as we treated al Qaeda
. Lawyers at both the Treasury and State Departments explained the impact of Hamas's victory. The PA was a parliamentary system and, in fact, a key goal of the United States in the Arafat era had been to expand the powers of the prime minister. After the election, Hamas would have a majority in the PLC and control the cabinet. Legally, that meant the whole PA was under Hamas domination and could not be given a dime. For those of us working on the policy end, that conclusion went too far. We resisted it for legal as well as policy reasons. We did not want all foreign aid, on which Palestinians depended to keep their economy afloat, to be cut off overnight. We did not want to abandon President Abbas; we wanted him to resist Hamas and keep the fight going. We wanted the Hamas government to fail unless Hamas changed its line and its conduct, but there had to be an alternative.

Abbas and other parts of the PA system not subordinate to the PLC became that alternative. The president was, after all, separately elected and under the
PA's Basic Law was not subordinate in any way to the legislature, so we could go on funding the Office of the President – and any PA body under Abbas rather than the PLC. We could fund the Presidential Guard, for example, which was one of the security forces. Mayors were separately elected, so perhaps aid going directly to cities and towns rather than the PA itself could continue. Aid going through UN bodies or providing direct assistance to the people could also continue, so long as it went around Hamas.

As time went by, we were able to tighten the financial noose on Hamas by using the financial system itself. We considered monies sent to the PA to be money sent to Hamas, a crime under U.S. law. U.S. banks were accordingly told not to forward or handle such transfers, and they did not do so. Nor did any bank operating in the United States, including Middle Eastern and even Palestinian banks. Soon enough, a financial boycott of Hamas was in place, and both we and the Israelis were surprised at the speed with which it became effective.

But the legal and financial reaction to the Hamas victory was the easy part; most of it was driven by our own counterterrorism laws. Figuring out what had happened in the elections and how to react politically were the tougher tasks. The debate over why Hamas won continues to this day, but the Bush administration immediately proffered the Fatah corruption theory. Fatah was redolent with corruption and Palestinians were tired of it. Fatah had not delivered, nor had it reformed in the year since Arafat's death. Jake Walles recalled his conversation with Secretary of State Rice, noting that it was 14 months since Arafat had died and two and a half years since the Aqaba summit had supposedly begun a new peace process:

I remember the day after the election Condi called me and said, “What happened?” I told her I thought there were three reasons: one was corruption; one was that Fatah ran a bad campaign; and third, that there was no peace process.…Abu Mazen and Fatah, their whole story was “We want peace.”…They had nothing to point to to say that “This is how we can achieve it.” And that's after Abu Mazen took over from Arafat, so there should be no objection from the Americans now. Arafat's gone, but there was no process.
⁵

The “bad campaign” theory was widely popular; indeed, at a meeting with Abbas later that year (in September at the UN General Assembly), President Bush noted that Fatah had never had real competition until the January election and simply did not know how to campaign. This was certainly true but did not explain how Hamas had managed to master the art so quickly. Hamas had better slogans, better campaign materials, and better candidates: A good proportion of those running on the “Change and Reform” ticket were professionals – engineers or doctors, for example – who may well have looked far more attractive than Fatah careerists.

I thought there were deeper reasons for the victory, though 20–20 hindsight was of limited help. Fatah was not a democratic political party and had never been one, nor did those who ran it really seek to make it one. It had been
a vehicle for Yasser Arafat, totally dominated by him, and a ruling party in the typical Arab sense: It governed but did not seek the consent of those it governed. As the months passed after Arafat's death, there was no reform in Fatah; later, as the years passed, there was still none. Palestinians noticed. It was not just that Fatah was corrupt or unfamiliar with free elections but that it was simply not a democratic political party at all.

Fatah was also a secular party, whereas Hamas was of course Islamist. For a long time people had been saying that this was a problem for Hamas because “Palestinian culture is secular,” but that point of view was increasingly outmoded. Palestinian society was part of the Arab and Muslim world, where the Islamist trends were clear (and became clearer after free elections were held in 2011 in Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt). As in Cairo and Amman or, for that matter, in Lahore or Algiers, more women covered their heads and more men attended mosques as the years passed. The rejection of Fatah was in part, I thought, far deeper than a protest against graft; it showed a desire for a society more closely guided by Islam. The Arab nationalism of Nasser and Arafat was a phenomenon of the past, while Islam's strength was growing.

Finally, there was another factor that was equally disturbing: Perhaps Palestinians
were
voting for “armed struggle.” This was certainly not our public line, which focused on Palestinians’ fatigue with Fatah corruption. But one very bright line between Fatah and Hamas was violence against Israelis: Abbas and Fatah had abandoned it, in principle anyway, after Aqaba, whereas Hamas was dedicated to it. Perhaps Palestinians did believe that terrorism had gotten the Israelis out of Gaza and was an essential part – even the heart – of any effort to get a state. If that was true, our long-term efforts for peace were doomed.

If we had missed all of this and for that reason had been confident of a Fatah victory, so had Fatah. Abbas later told the president (at their September 2006 meeting) that he and his associates had all believed they would win. One myth that deserves killing is that the PA/Fatah leaders never wanted elections and were forced to hold them by the United States – that these elections were the product of the Bush administration's foolish demand that elections be held everywhere at once, whatever the local conditions. It is true that we favored elections; how could we not? How else could a new and legitimate leadership, one that would be capable of taking difficult decisions for peace, be chosen after Arafat's death? But the Palestinian leadership wanted elections too and told us so; they too saw elections as the means to legitimize their own positions. They also appeared to understand that the elections were an important argument for Palestinian sovereignty: Free elections were evidence they could govern themselves and strengthened their demand that they should be allowed to do so. Free elections were a powerful argument that it was time for Israel to stop governing Palestinians. The presidential election of January 2005 suggested to them that the formula worked. The PLC elections would further strengthen their hand, they thought, because they would both entice Hamas into the political system and then defeat it. That would make it easier
for them to govern and to negotiate with the Israelis. It is true that they became very nervous in the final days before the PLC elections, and some of them – it remains unclear whether this was the unified view of the PA leadership – looked for excuses to postpone the election yet again. But the claim that those elections were simply George Bush's idea, imposed on unwilling Palestinians who knew better, is false.

Beginning with the September 2005 Quartet meeting, we had been moving to a new position on Hamas's participation in the elections. Rejecting the idea of banning them, instead we had said the true test would come later and would involve their possible role in the PA government. An armed group could run but could not then participate in the government unless it made certain pledges and took certain actions to renounce violence. In a news release issued after a brief meeting in London on January 30, 2006, just five days after the Hamas victory, the Quartet expanded on this approach:

The Quartet congratulated the Palestinian people on an electoral process that was free, fair and secure. The Quartet believes that the Palestinian people have the right to expect that a new government will address their aspirations for peace and statehood, and it welcomed President Abbas’ affirmation that the Palestinian Authority is committed to the Roadmap, previous agreements and obligations between the parties, and a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is the view of the Quartet that all members of a future Palestinian government must be committed to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Roadmap. We urge both parties to respect their existing agreements, including on movement and access. Mindful of the needs of the Palestinian people, the Quartet discussed the issue of assistance to the Palestinian Authority.…[T]he Quartet concluded that it was inevitable that future assistance to any new government would be reviewed by donors against that government's commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Roadmap. The Quartet calls upon the newly elected PLC to support the formation of a government committed to these Principles.
⁶

This was a remarkably tough line for the Quartet – that is, the EU, and Russia, and Kofi Annan – to adopt within days of the Hamas victory. We were delighted. In plainer English, what had the Quartet just said? It had enunciated what soon became known as the three “Quartet Principles”: Hamas must abandon violence and terror (in Quartet language, “be committed to nonviolence”), recognize Israel's right to exist, and accept all previous agreements between the Palestinians and Israel. If it did not do so, the statement politely threatened, it was “inevitable” that aid to the PA would be cut. The price of acceptance was not immediate disarmament, but it was very high: Hamas would have to abandon all acts of violence and terror and agree with Abbas that armed resistance was over. It would have to abandon its Charter, with its goal of eliminating Israel. It would have to accept the Oslo Accords and every agreement made since then, agreements in which Arafat and the PLO had accepted the right of Israel to exist permanently. At the press conference after the Quartet meeting, Rice and Solana made all this clear. Rice said, “[T]here
are a set of obligations that have been taken by Palestinian leaders over more than a decade and those obligations are noted here. It is incumbent now on all to insist that any future Palestinian government will indeed live up to those obligations.” Solana then chimed in: “What I would like to say on behalf of the European Union is that once these conditions are fulfilled, the European Union will stand ready to continue to support the Palestinian economic development and democratic stability, but it has to be compliant with all these conditions which are here.” Annan answered a reporter's challenge that the Quartet was refusing to respect the election result: “I think the fact that one has indicated that these three principles or requirements has [sic] to be met doesn't mean one is walking away from Hamas. If Hamas accepts them and transforms itself from an armed movement into a political party respecting the rules of the game and representing its people, I think the international community should be able to work with them.”
⁷

The Quartet Principles soon achieved what may have appeared to be canonical status. Visiting Jerusalem right after the election, German chancellor Merkel told the press that the Hamas victory “means that continued cooperation will only be possible under three conditions: Hamas needs to recognize the existence of Israel; Hamas has to prove that the use of violence is out of the question; and Hamas needs to respect and accept steps in the peace process reached so far.”
⁸
But we in the administration were under no illusions about Quartet and wider international solidarity. This Quartet Statement was a victory, but it could be undermined quickly. The Russians and some in the UN bureaucracy wanted very much to talk to Hamas despite its status as a terrorist group and before it had made the slightest gesture toward fulfilling the Quartet Principles. The UN special envoy for the Middle East, Alvaro de Soto, immediately made plans to meet with Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader who was the likely PA prime minister (and did get the post). Fortunately, David Welch and I found out about de Soto's plans and immediately blocked them. Smiling photos of the UN's top official in the region meeting with terrorist leaders were not what we had in mind for keeping the pressure on Hamas.