The 2014 Gaza war looks more and more like a sports competition between the leaderships of Israel and Hamas, to see who will emerge more stupid and evil. So far "my" side (that would be Israel) is winning, but it's a very close contest.
The bitter irony, known to everyone not blinded by either side's propaganda, is that Hamas flinging rockets into Israeli population centers has made Gazans far less safe. And Israelis would have enjoyed a far safer and more relaxed summer, had their government not leveraged - with unprecedented, jaw-dropping cynicism - the triple kidnap-murder in the West Bank (according to all signs, the act of a couple of criminals working alone) into an all-out jihad against Hamas in Gaza.
Of course, this bloodfest could have been easily been stopped short, had the Obama administration acted with even a fraction of the responsibility it had shown in previous iterations. For me at least, supporting this war marks the low point of Obama's tenure so far. But that's really a topic for an entire different diary.
Here I wanted to give some context for Gaza.
The indiscriminate jailing of Gaza's residents - all 1.8 million women, men and children - and their periodic slaughter by the hundred, are being marketed to the world, and staunchly defended by American politicians of all stripes - as an inevitable security measure.
Nothing could be further from the truth; this can be easily figured out just from the disastrous track-record of this approach in achieving the stated goal. The idiom defining insanity as repeatedly attempting the same thing and expecting a different result, applies here; unless the objective is not the stated one (which is what I suspect).
And then there's the history.
Those who make excuses for the treatment of Gaza by the world, would have you believe that Gaza's history starts in 2007, or in 2005. Attempts to go a bit further and understand what that place had been in recent decades, are met with snorts and suggestions to perhaps start 3000 years ago. But this being a reality-based community, I hope people are willing to try and figure out the 1's in the 1+1=2. It is really rather straightforward.
Consider, for example, this passage:
I hated Gaza and its inhabitants. Everything in the amputated town reminded me of failed pictures painted in grey by a sick man. Yes, I would send my mother and my brother's widow and her children a meagre sum to help them to live, but I would liberate myself from this last tie too, there in green California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven years had filled my nostrils. The sympathy which bound me to my brother's children, their mother and mine would never be enough to justify my tragedy in taking this perpendicular dive. It mustn't drag me any further down than it already had. I must flee!...When I went on holiday in June and assembled all my possessions, longing for the sweet departure, the start towards those little things which give life a nice, bright meaning, I found Gaza just as I had known it, closed like the introverted lining of a rusted snail-shell thrown up by the waves on the sticky, sandy shore by the slaughter-house. ...When I arrived my late brother's wife met me there and asked me, weeping, if I would do as her wounded daughter, Nadia, in Gaza hospital wished and visit her that evening. Do you know Nadia, my brother's beautiful thirteen-year-old daughter?
..."Nadia! I've brought you presents from Kuwait, lots of presents. I'll wait till you can leave your bed, completely well and healed, and you'll come to my house and I'll give them to you. I've bought you the red trousers you wrote and asked me for. Yes, I've bought them." It was a lie, born of the tense situation, but as I uttered it I felt that I was speaking the truth for the first time. Nadia trembled as though she had an electric shock and lowered her head in a terrible silence. I felt her tears wetting the back of my hand.
"Say something, Nadia! Don't you want the red trousers?" She lifted her gaze to me and made as if to speak, but then she stopped, gritted her teeth and I heard her voice again, coming from faraway. "Uncle!"
She stretched out her hand, lifted the white coverlet with her fingers and pointed to her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh.
Is this passage from 2014? 2012? Perhaps 2009?No. These excerpts are from Ghassan Kanafani's 1956 story, Letter from Gaza. The bloody incident referred to in the story is Israel's shelling of downtown gaza with 120mm mortars in April 1956. The Israelis claimed Egypt's military (then in control of Gaza) had fortified positions inside the city. Only decades later did Col. M. Bar-On, then General Dayan's chief of staff, admitted that it was a lie: there was a deliberate command to bomb downtown Gaza regardless of military targets (h/t Dr. Yehuda Shenhav-Shaharabani, who uploaded a Hebrew translation of this story and the context last week)
So no. This is not about Hamas, not by a long shot. Hamas are just the incredibly flawed messenger currently trying to make (in the worst possible way) Gaza's case against the world.
But really, when you've been deserted to your cruel fate, in broad daylight and plain sight, time after time after time after time after time after time after time - who is really the chief culprit here?
A bit more below the fold.