What if the Bush Administration did not push for all-Palestinian elections in January 2006?

[raharris1973]

What if the Bush Administration did not push for all-Palestinian elections in January 2006? This was part and parcel of the process leading a Hamas led Palestinian Authority government over Israeli-evacuated Gaza and various West Bank towns, where other parties like Fatah still operated, but that led to international sanctions of the PA government because Hamas did not change its ideological commitments on winning election.

This was following by violent Hamas-Fatah conflict, resulting in Hamas one-party/leading party rule over Gaza and the ouster of Fatah, and takeover by Fatah of Palestinian towns and villages in occupied West Bank surrounded by Israeli occupied territory and settlements and their ouster of Hamas.

Battle of Gaza (2007) - Wikipedia​

en.wikipedia.org

Pushing for a Palestinian vote was a particular quirk of the George W. Bush administration. I doubt Ariel Sharon was planning on dictating open elections would be held in Gaza or other Palestinian Authority administered places when he came up with and decided upon the Gaza disengagement plan a couple years earlier. While pro-Israeli policy is par for the course for American administrations, insistence on Arab partners having elections is not. And many Americans and westerners suspected if you asked for the voice of the Palestinian people, they wouldn't like what they heard.

In Israel, only one faction Natan Sharansky's affirmative supported Palestinian elections, everybody else seemed to go along as part of working with the Middle East Quartet, US-EU-(maybe Russia was in it).

If the Fatah -dominated PLO security forces are left in charge of evacuated Gaza without being forced to allow power sharing elections with Hamas, could they have kept Hamas out of power and kept international sanctions going along with cross-border/zonal produce trade, even as the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks proceed no further?

Or would Hamas likely find a way to successfully uprise and overthrow the Fatah dominated PA beyond the latter's ability to contain, leading to a Hamas controlled interior Gaza like OTL 2007-2023, or an Israeli invasion at whatever point Hamas would be overthrowing the PLO?

All in all, would things have matched the occasional outbreaks of larger Hamas-Israel fighting that broke out every couple years around Gaza from 2007-2022, with Gaza blockaded the whole time, or would there have been less large scale fighting (despite probable outbreaks of some kind), or actually more and earlier episodes of large-scale Gaza fighting resembling 2023, in the 2010s instead, with Hamas unable to discipline Gaza and make people bide their time?

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Interesting Israeli 2016 report cited in the wiki article about Battle of Gaza of 2007 between Fatah/PLO and Hamas. It was a 10 year assessment of good idea/bad idea about the Israeli Gaza withdrawal. It's conclusion from the Exec Summary at the time was:

www.molad.org/images/upload/files/Disengagement-Eng-report-full_final-for-website.pdf

Eleven years on and looking ahead, is Israel in a strategically better position than it would have been without leaving Gaza in 2005? Our analysis shows that the general answer is: yes. Despite the challenges that have developed since the withdrawal, Israel has benefited from its redeployment along the Gazan border. This does not mean that the actual implementation of the withdrawal was optimal.

History from 2016 through 2023-2024 in particular might shine a different light or cast a different shadow on that conclusion, but it is what they said at that snapshot in time.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

The Bush Administration pushed for Hamas participation on the theory that participation in electoral politics would moderate them. The example they pointed to was Hezbollah ... who proceeded to trigger a war the following month. Whoops!

Hamas would throw a stink if they weren't allowed to participate, and the PA would be seen as somewhat illegitimate due to a massively popular party not being allowed to participate. I don't think they'd be in a political position to make a peace deal, but they would exert enough control over the political and security situation to make Olmert's push for further unilateral pullouts possible. The Lebanon War contributed a lot to preventing this, but it was the combination of the Lebanon War and Gaza going badly that soured a lot of people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/22/AR2006082201088.html

ERUSALEM, Aug. 22 -- The Israeli government's plan to dismantle some Jewish settlements in the West Bank and redraw the country's borders is being shelved at least temporarily, a casualty of the war in Lebanon, government officials said.

The plan, which propelled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to victory in March elections and was warmly endorsed by President Bush as a way of solving Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, is no longer a top priority, Olmert told his ministers last weekend, according to one of his advisers.
Instead, the government must spend its money and efforts in northern Israel to repair the damage from the war and strengthen the area in case fighting breaks out again, Olmert said.
"I've decided to invest most of my energy and the government's energy in rehabilitating the north," Olmert said Monday in the northern community of Kiryat Shemona.
"This is a national new priority. It takes precedence for the moment over realignment" of the settlements, Miri Eisin, an adviser to Olmert, said Tuesday. "At the moment there will be no withdrawal."
Even without the financial considerations, the plan for unilateral withdrawal from some settlements is dead, other political figures and analysts said. The seizure of Israeli soldiers and the renewed fighting in the Gaza Strip -- from which Israel withdrew last year -- and in southern Lebanon -- from which Israel withdrew in 2000 -- have left the Israeli public with little appetite for additional pullouts.
"It's not operative or realistically possible today," said Dan Schueftan, deputy director of national security studies at the University of Haifa and a proponent of the plan. But he predicted that "inevitably, we will have to come back to it."
Olmert's plan could have required the removal of about 70,000 of the estimated 250,000 West Bank settlers. The exact lines of the proposal were never made public, however, and some in his government talked of evacuating fewer settlers.
Now, "it's not relevant. It's not the right time to discuss the matter," the minister of immigrant absorption, Zeev Boim, a close Olmert associate, said through an aide Tuesday.
The plan has been at the center of political debate in Israel since last August, when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled Jewish settlements in Gaza and pulled out the Israeli troops guarding them. Olmert, who became acting prime minister when Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke in December, won the elections in March and formed a government on the promise to extend the withdrawal to outlying Jewish settlements in the West Bank. He promised that if there was no agreement from the Palestinians, Israel would unilaterally set its own borders around the remaining settlements.
Olmert sought endorsement for the plan during trips to London and Washington, where Bush embraced it as filled with "bold ideas." As recently as 10 days ago, Bush asked Olmert in a phone conversation, "What about that plan you presented to me?" Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported.
But low-scale clashes with Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip intensified this year, and on June 25 an Israeli soldier was seized at an army border outpost by Palestinians who tunneled across from Gaza. Seventeen days later, two more Israeli soldiers were taken by Hezbollah militia fighters on the Lebanon border, and Israel found itself fighting on two fronts.
Critics said the attacks from southern Lebanon and Gaza showed it was folly to have abandoned those areas without a deal to ensure some authority remained there to curb attacks.

No Hamas Government = no escalation in Gaza conflict (in which Israel started preemptively attacking Hamas rocket launch sites) = no 2006 Gaza War = no double-whammy which kills hopes for unilateral withdrawal.





I suppose the price of withdrawal would be higher after the Lebanon war, and so the result would be some settlements (the Hebron line?) not getting dismantled.

The Palestinian Prime Minister would likely be Salam Fayyad - a person who has said Jews can be citizens of a Palestinian State and said Right of Return should just be for diaspora people to move to a Palestinian State. So theoretically, the settlers east of the wall who aren't uprooted could just be Palestinian. Given that they're essentially in three little consolidated cantons (Beit El-Ofra, Kiryat Arba, and Eli-Shilo), I suppose that would be pretty manageable. But I also am skeptical Abbas (the actual final decider) could swallow a deal.

Salam Fayyad - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Here, the policy of PA cooperation would actually be rewarded with further withdrawals though - which moderates things in Palestine a bit. Gaza under the PA (and not Hamas) also would continue to get outside investment and not suffer from Hamas rule, which would mean it could be a fairly wealthy city.

If Bibi gets power in 2009 still, the amount of settling he does would be fairly contained. It would either be west of the wall or in the few zones east of the wall. Even though settlements would be a provocative issue, they'd be a relatively contained one. The sense of constriction and being choked by expanding settlements wouldn't be there.

 

[Charles EP M.]

I get the feeling the short term works fine - no civil war, no blockades, no split etc - but beyond that, it entirely depends on Fatah being able to claim more legitinacy than Hamas to Palestinians, show "I can get stuff out of Israel", and have the force to hold its own in conflict. Otherwise Hamas, which is still around, rises up later than OTL.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

I get the feeling the short term works fine - no civil war, no blockades, no split etc - but beyond that, it entirely depends on Fatah being able to claim more legitinacy than Hamas to Palestinians, show "I can get stuff out of Israel", and have the force to hold its own in conflict. Otherwise Hamas, which is still around, rises up later than OTL.

The Second Intifada killed the pro-peace left. The wombo-combo of Hezbollah and Hamas both attacking in 2006 put a dampener on the "screw it, we're gonna downsize our West Bank presence mostly unilaterally" center and center-right.

Bush was supportive of the Sharon-Olmert downsizing idea, and the US basically imposed Salam Fayyad on the Palestinians as Prime Minister. My guess is you'd have an okay alignment there for the process of Palestinian Institutional Statebuilding. The dilemma with Palestinians is that when Israel made peace with Jordan or Egypt, they had functional states to make peace with. The Israelis made semi-peace with the PLO, but the Palestinians' institutionally were unable to do peace stuff or govern themselves or enforce a peace within what could become their own borders in a similar way. So building Palestine was something that needed to be done. The Fayyad-Olmert combo probably is the best alignment of leaders methinks.

Also, Abbas and co (not Fayyad, who is very anomalous by Palestinian standards, and ironically had a political attitude more akin to the Yishuv than to most Palestinian political figures) looked at the emergence of Hamas after 2005 and thought "ooo we can leverage this to our advantage." Supposedly (this is through word of mouth) Abbas embraced something like the Olmert proposals in the 90s, but by 2008 thought that the Palestinian political position was firmer and he could get more, because Hamas had emerged as a threat. Without the emergence of Hamas in Gaza, Abbas maybe doesn't get those sorts of ideas.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

IIRC, Billions were pledged for investment into the Gaza Strip because people rally wanted to make the pullout work. Hamas not running the place like a plague of locusts would be a big boon for economic development. Dahlan, I assume, would remain Gaza strongman. Dahlan was corrupt, but he was machine boss corrupt (i.e., siphon stuff off the top) which meant he wanted growth and development.

The Gaza Airport and Seaport developing would be significant. And without high unemployment, Hamas would have fewer people to recruit. Palestinian political ideology with its less-than-practical demands might remain, but fewer people would engage in violence in order to advance it simply because they have other things to do. A lot of Hamas recruitment isn't so much "desperate people wanting revolution" as it is "poor people wanting employment."

Also (speculating) I suppose the "realignment" would be more conservative based on the following. The wall would be a bit different to account for two major highways near'ish to the green line. Areas where settlements remain beyond the wall are in blue.