Eyeless on Gaza

Zalman Shoval
Op-Ed/JPost
02 February '10

Last week, 54 members of the US House of Representatives, including such long-time opponents of Israel as Jim McDermott of Washington and Keith Ellison from Minnesota (both Democrats), signed a letter asking President Barack Obama to pressure Israel to “ease the blockade on the Gaza Strip.” The 54 congressmen asked the president to “press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza, to ease the movement of people in and out of Gaza and also to allow the import of building materials.”

Ellison, America’s first Muslim member of the House, had previously criticized the congressional resolution to reject the notorious Goldstone Report which Alan Dershowitz has rightly labeled “a defamation written by an evil man,” comparing it to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

One may assume that some of the signatories, perhaps ignorant of the facts, were indeed motivated by a genuine concern for the lot of people living in Gaza, but most were clearly prompted by their antagonism toward Israel. Not only that by no objective judgment could the majority of the population in Gaza be held totally noncomplicit in, or at least unaware of, Hamas’s terrorist activities against Israeli civilians. Nor is it a secret that Gaza is still ruled by an organization which denies Israel’s very right to exist and is actively engaged in planning terrorist activities even as I write this article.

But on a practical level, it is hard to believe that the initiators of this appeal do not realize that “movement of people in and out of Gaza” means allowing the movement of terrorists into Israel, as well as into Egypt or Jordan. Is is it just ignorance which turns their minds away from the plausibility that at least some of the “building materials” imported into Gaza would be used not for rebuilding civilian houses, but for restoring the Hamas infrastructure?

(Read full article)
.