The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza - by Stephen M. Flatow

No matter how hard the State Department crowd wishes it, the Palestinian Authority is not going to fight Hamas for control of Gaza. In fact, it’s not going to fight Hamas at all.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
16 March '18..

The Trump administration’s conference on the situation in the Gaza Strip this week “focused on the need for the Palestinian Authority to take control over Gaza,” a White House official told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. If that report is accurate, it means that the United States still doesn’t understand the basic problem in Gaza—or how to solve it.

The idea that Hamas is the “bad guy” and the Palestinian Authority is the “good guy” is a fallacy that began with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and is still the mindset of too many people in Washington.

The attempts to distinguish between the “moderate” P.A. and the “extremist” Hamas always foundered on the reality that the P.A. regards Hamas as its brother, not its enemy. Brothers may quarrel from time to time—they may get into a scuffle now and then, or even try to kill each other—but they remain brothers.

The P.A. leadership promised, as part of Oslo, to disband all terrorist groups, seize their weapons and outlaw them—in short, to put them out of business. But here we are, 25 years later, and Hamas still has active terrorist cells throughout the P.A.-controlled parts of Judea and Samaria.

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