It's the Brian Larosho on WNYC. Good morning everyone and first of all today thanks to Michael Hill and Nancy Solomon and the whole morning edition team. This is our

full membership drive and we're not going to talk about it now except to say that that dollar for dollar match is still in effect. This is the only matching period during the Brian Larosho this whole full membership drive. So keep those donations coming dollar for dollar match and effect listeners who haven't gotten to it yet or who want to up your donations. Thank you so much. 888-376-WNYC or at WNYC. We'll begin today with a piece of history of how

Hamas came to power in Gaza with one of our frequent guests Fred Kaplan who writes about world affairs and military affairs for Slate. His latest article is called George W. Bush helped Hamas come to power. In Bush's NIFT about the magic of elections he ignored a crucial point about democracy. So some of this comes from a book that Fred wrote back in 2008 called Daydream Believers. How a few grand ideas.

This is wrecked American power and how sad in a way that something Fred documented 15 years ago becomes relevant again today in the way that it has since October 7th. So hi Fred welcome back to WNYC.

Good to be here.

Remind us of some basics here. Hamas was elected by the people of Gaza in 2006 without a majority of the votes. What were the basic results?

The basic result was that Hamas won about 44% of the vote. Fatah, which is now known as the Palestinian Authority, got 41% but they had a weird electoral system sort of like what we'd have and so Hamas won about 75 seats against Fatah's 41 seats.

They couldn't agree on a power sharing arrangement. There was a war between Fatah and Hamas, a civil war that went on for nearly a year.

There was then a unity government but Hamas broke the terms, started throwing Fatah officials off the roof of the parliamentary building.

Many of the others fled and Hamas seized control and there hasn't been an election since so when people went when when when Joe Biden says that Hamas doesn't stand for the Palestinian people at least historically he's right at least not for all of them and when people say well they won an election so all the people they're responsible for whatever they do.

Hey, that's not true even historically and be the median age of people in Gaza is about 18 which means that half the country wasn't born when the last election was held we don't really know what they think so let me let me pull the lens out for the bush angle of this and then we'll kind of dive back in on some of those individual pieces that you just reference to because some of them are so interesting and important.

You're right that the 2006 election took place at all in Gaza because of the naeftay of President Bush naeftay that led him to what belief.

That freedom and democracy were sort of the natural states of humanity and that all you had to do was to topple a dictator and the democracy as we know it would flow forth like lava from a volcano.

He was convinced in this toward the end of his first term you might remember in his second term is is inaugural address he talked about his mission of spreading democracy around the world and there were things going on then that looked very encouraging there was the orange revolution in Ukraine there was the cedar revolution in Lebanon Iraq had just had its first post Saddam election remember all the voters with their purple thumbs and there had been a national there had been a

a territory wide election in Gaza and the West Bank which Fatah had had won they were now the Palestinian authority and so the israel was pulling out of Gaza are you sure on who is really one of the most hawkish prime ministers israel that ever had just decided it wasn't worth the trouble anymore they were withdrawing there is going to be a vacuum.

And George W. Bush persuaded fatah the Palestinian authority to hold an election parliamentary election in the election that they had just won Hamas and islamic jihad had boycott of the election they didn't boycott this one.

But how tried to get the United States to to pressure to try to get the United States to talk israel into canceling the election they didn't and so the results were there and and there was even a deputy secretary of state Robert Zalak who later became the president of the world bank who told secretary of state

that he was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president of the world bank who was the president

Well, one really interesting thing in your article is that you have Bush being influenced by the renowned Russian dissident who became an Israeli government member Natan Shoransky and Shoransky himself had written a book called The Case for Democracy but you make it seem like Bush only read the first chapter. What's the Natan Shoransky connection here?

Well, Shoransky, he was one of the great dissidents in the Soviet Union. He was a colleague of, you know, of all the other great dissidents. He was put in jail for nine years and the gulag was let out when Gorbachev came to power, immigrated to Israel, came a hero, not only to Israel, but also among neo-conservatives in the United States. And he gave a speech at an American Enterprise Institute forum saying that the tensions between

Israel and Arabs are not some tribal conflict, but the first chapter of the 21st century world war between democracy and terrorism, which, you know, oversimplified things, but Dick Cheney was at that speech, he introduced him to Bush and Bush was very influenced by this. However, yeah, one point that Shoransky made was that democracy doesn't just mean elections.

You need democratic institutions, courts, a free press, a civil society. The whole point of democracy is that you have institutions and entities that can mediate conflicts peacefully.

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