So Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Palestinian government today, with US approval. Here’s State Department spokesman Sean McCormack this afternoon, publicly decrying violence in Gaza:
…we haven’t seen the spread of violence in the West Bank and I think everybody’s glad for that and everybody’s pleased for that. Nobody wants to see violence.
Yes, the US sure hates all this violence!
Here’s Condoleezza Rice, speaking in public on February 15, 2007, after Fatah and Hamas agreed in Mecca to form a unity government:
Americans did not want to see Palestinians killing Palestinians. Palestinians should be living in peace among themselves and with Israel. And I know how difficult it was to watch the violence and to watch innocent people lose their lives. And so the calm, the hopes for a ceasefire between the Palestinian factions, that’s something we very much support.
This violence! We hate it!
Now, here’s David Welch, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and US Envoy to the Middle East, speaking in private several weeks before Rice. This appears on p.21 of the leaked report (pdf) by Alvaro de Soto, former UN coordinator for the Middle East:
…the US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fateh and Hamas — so much so that, a week before Mecca, 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”.
(via Paul Woodward at War in Context)
For further evidence of US efforts to foment civil war between Hamas and Fatah, see here.