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The
neoconservative strategy aimed at imposing US hegemony all over the world is
divided into several stages. The first one is to try and impose governments
loyal to Washington
interests, through a combination of economic, diplomatic and military pressures.
These wars and campaigns are led under the banner of “democratization,” but
rapidly these democratic claims are replaced by mere coups d’etats that do not attempt
to hide their unique objective: imposing a government faithful to the United States of America.
In most of
the cases, this phase ends with a blatant failure, and the US moves to the
second one: brutal destabilization, a policy of chaos and even the dismantling
of the state, as we witness in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and in a less radical
way, in Lebanon too, after the fiasco of the Israeli attack exactly one year
ago.
Due to the
favorable balance of powers for Washington,
the Palestinian national movement is obviously the laboratory of this
US/Israeli strategy, and it is therefore quite useful to analyze the chronology
of the neoconservative offensive in this arena.
This
offensive was already planned towards the end of the 1980s by think tanks in
which a relatively small group of Israeli and US neocons operated in a total
symbiosis, under the guidance of Benjamin Netanyahu and his close American
advisers. The aim of this strategy was to take back the (limited) achievements
of the Palestinian national movement, both on the level of recognition and on
the level of political autonomy. The “reconquista” strategy was initiated when
the process of decolonization—in the Palestinian occupied territories—seemed to
be at its peak. However, in reality, the Oslo
process that embodied this very partial decolonization was implemented at the
very moment in which the world was passing from the long wave of decolonization
(1945-1990) to a new era of re-colonization. The Oslo process is the very last moment of that
decolonization era, but its structural weaknesses and rapid failure testify
that it was already too late: the “global-reconquista” was already under way.
After the
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister, 1996-1998)
launched an international campaign to delegitimize the Palestinian national movement
and its leader, Yasser Arafat (the “terrorism campaign”), then Ehud Barak (Israeli
PM, 1999-2000) sabotaged the negotiated political process and launched the
military re-conquest, which would be finalized in the most brutal and bloody
way by Ariel Sharon (Israeli PM, 2000-2004).
It is only
after they have succeeded in smashing the Palestinian national movement and its
institutions in the occupied Palestinian territories that Israeli leadership attempted
to impose a Palestinian leadership that would be loyal to its interests and
plans, with Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen) at its head. The strong historical links
of Abu Mazen with the Palestinian national movement (he was one the founders of
Fatah) and his weak personality made him unreliable as a real collaborator,
despite his tendency to make huge compromises (which often bordered on mere
collaboration). Therefore, at first he refused to follow the US-Israeli advice
(orders) to provoke a civil war, and tried to find compromises between
weakening the resistance capacity of the Palestinians and maintaining the
integrity of the Palestinian society and national movement.
As a result
of Abu Mazen hesitations, Washington decided
to move into phase number two, and to play the card of a coup d’etat through
their man in the Palestinian leadership, the former chief of the Preventive
Security in Gaza,
Mohammad Dahlan. The attempted coup d’etat by Dahlan was, however, a total
fiasco: in less than six hours he was defeated by the Hamas militias, which
were supported by the great majority of the Gaza Strip population. Dahlan and
his gangs were obliged to flee the Gaza Strip, which was immediately punished
by an ever increasing state of siege, thus threatening an entire population with
starvation.
The failure
of Dahlan obliged Washington to put more pressures on Abbas, who has now
acquiesced to collaborate with the retaliation against the inhabitants of Gaza and with the repression against Hamas activists and
institutions in the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas
is losing the remainder of any legitimacy he still possesses, by agreeing to
establish an emergency government against the national unity government, which
was democratically elected by the Palestinian parliament, by accepting arms and
money from Washington to fight the biggest political movement in both Gaza and
the West Bank, by playing the Israeli game of selective political prisoners
release, but most of all by cooperating with the separation plan between a “Hamastan”
in Gaza and an alleged “Fatahstan” in the West Bank.
He may lose
his life too: the Palestinian population keeps a very strong patriotic
sentiment and definitely does not like collaborator. Abu Mazen is now perceived
by many as such.
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