The George W. Bush administration deserves plenty of blame for what’s happening now in Israel and Gaza.
The world has been struggling to find a good historical parallel for the vicious and horrific surprise attack Hamas launched against Israel on October 7.
It is often said that 10/7 is the new 9/11. But 10/7 was more like a prison riot.
For nearly two decades, the Gaza Strip has been bottled up and almost completely blocked off. It has been widely compared to an open-air prison. Israel and the United States have tried to seal Gaza, isolating its nearly 2 million residents on a tiny, impoverished strip of land. Washington and Tel Aviv thought that would let them keep Hamas at arm’s length.
Instead, it just turned Gaza into an overcrowded penal colony where the most radicalized and violent gang leaders eventually gained control. Mass murder and hostage taking have been the result.
Sealing off Gaza didn’t solve anything. Instead, its problems festered until they finally exploded last weekend.
In the days since the carnage erupted, the American media has offered precious little context to the violence. But it really isn’t that difficult to look back over U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian policies and politics of the last 20 years and understand how we got here. Like so much else that has gone wrong in the Middle East in the 21st century, the George W. Bush administration deserves plenty of the blame for what’s happening now in Israel and Gaza.
In the years immediately after the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush doubled down on his enterprise in the Middle East by proclaiming that he wanted to spread democracy throughout the region. So he pushed for elections in Gaza without thinking things through, just as he had in Iraq. Hamas gained power in Gaza after the 2006 elections there, leaving Palestinian territory badly divided between Gaza and the West Bank, where Fatah, a bitter enemy of Hamas, remained in charge.
By then, Israeli politics were increasingly dominated by right-wing leaders. After the second Intifada began in 2000, the Israeli left had largely collapsed, and most Israelis had dropped their support for the “two-state” solution, under which Israel would agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Instead, Israel bricked itself up. It built walls and expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank while blockading Gaza.
