Commentary Magazine..
30 April '15
Yesterday, a small left-wing fringe group organized demonstrations in three Israeli cities to protest the ongoing blockade of Hamas-run Gaza. In Jerusalem, the protest brought out a few dozen persons in front of the prime minister’s residence where they freely paraded with signs and apparently held forth in front of a rapt press corps eager, as always, to find Jews willing to criticize their country’s government. No one interfered with them and when they were done spouting off about the supposed injustices being done to a terrorist government that had rained down thousands of missiles on Israeli cities and used tunnels to try and conduct murder raids on civilians, they went home having encountered no interference from Israeli authorities. But a group in Gaza that tried to hold a protest earlier that day about the Hamas regime’s lack of interest in rebuilding the strip after the war they launched last summer wasn’t so lucky. And therein hangs a tale of why the push for a two-state solution that remains a priority of the Obama administration is based more on fantasy than reality.
The Gaza demonstration involved 400 persons and took place in a neighborhood that was destroyed in last summer’s fighting. Its purpose appeared to be to promote more reconstruction of homes in the strip as well as to call for the ever-elusive Palestinian unity at a time when Gaza is ruled by Hamas while the West Bank remains under the thumb of Fatah. It also must be understood in the context of what’s been going on in Gaza as Hamas has been reportedly rapidly rebuilding their terror tunnel infrastructure on the border with Israel while also replenishing their rocket arsenal. Both of these endeavors are being conducted with the material and financial help of Iran and are clearly the priority of the Gaza government over the rebuilding of homes wrecked in Hamas’s unnecessary war.
But rather than merely let the 400 demonstrators have their say, Hamas acted in characteristic fashion for a tyrannical terrorist regime and brutally suppressed the protest. Hamas police entered the crowd and severely beat several demonstrators while arresting others in the guise of keeping the peace.
What have these two events to do with the two-state solution, support for which U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice said today was the measure of the next Israeli government? Everything.
The point isn’t just that Israel is a working democracy where the views of even a splinter group that seemed to sympathize with a terrorist government in Gaza was allowed to protest in front of the prime minister’s house while Hamas runs a police state. It’s that the government in Gaza is for all intents and purposes the independent Palestinian state that President Obama and his administration continue to advocate as necessary to peace. But far from being a force for peace, the Iran-funded Hamasistan in Gaza was and remains a permanent threat to peace. More than that, and just like the actions of the supposedly more moderate Fatah in Gaza, the Hamas government is an undemocratic and brutal regime determined not only to suppress dissidents but to treat the welfare of ordinary Palestinians as being less important than their mission of fomenting an endless war against Israel. Nor should it be forgotten that the purpose of that war isn’t to speed an Israeli retreat from the West Bank but to “liberate” all of “occupied Palestine,” a term by which they mean pre-1967 Israel as well as the disputed territories beyond the “green line.”
Additionally, this Hamas-run Palestinian state was created by Israel taking a risk for peace when it removed every single soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005. But rather than this becoming a step toward peace, what Israelis soon learned was that former Prime Minister Sharon had traded land for terror, not peace.
These parallel demonstrations are a reminder of the contrast between the conduct of a free society, even though it remains under siege from foreign foes, and a terrorist state. But they also illustrate the absurdity of a call to repeat the Gaza experiment in the West Bank. A two state solution might be ideal but not under the current circumstances. That Obama continues to expect Israel to do such a mad thing speaks volumes about his lack of concern for the Jewish state’s security as well as of his poor grasp of the realities of the Middle East even after more than six years in the White House.
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/04/30/two-demonstrations-and-the-problem-with-two-states-israel-gaza-hamas/
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