The biggest spectacle of the week was the “breakout” from Gaza of several hundred thousand Palestinians, after Hamas agents took out much of the high wall that separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt, in a series of explosions after months of undermining the structure with acetylene torches and similar labour-intensive tools.
The media accounts of this event were incoherent, and understandably so. For even people in the Bush administration were puzzled, and I found myself being asked if I could explain it to more than one of them. When the people who supposedly control the CIA and the State Department are reduced to asking armchair journalists to explain breaking news, well: the world is in a fine state, isn’t it?
My first comment, at least to them, had to be: “So why did you fire all your neoconservatives?”
This is the abusive term the “liberal” media used to describe a small group of invariably Jewish intellectuals who played advisory roles in the Pentagon and White House during President Bush’s first term. They were very American Jews, incidentally, not Israelis—but we’ll concede they were naturally disposed to the survival of the tiny nation that holds a significant proportion of the world’s Jewish population. It is an interest that coincides with America’s desire to survive, and the significance of these “neoconservatives” was that they could speak Arabic, Turkish, Persian. They knew the region intimately, and a large part of their function, at senior levels of the U.S. government, was to explain nuances of foreign language and thinking to people who speak only English, if that.
I am thinking of one in particular, who once briefed the White House on the nature of Gaza’s population. The word “Palestinian” is used to describe them for reasons of political correctness, but among the first things to know is that the Strip was part of Egypt prior to 1967, and to this day, the Arabic spoken there is closer to Cairo’s than to Jerusalem’s. Between those people, and the “Palestinians” indigenous to the West Bank (who were Jordanians, prior to 1967), are many differences in style and outlook. To call them “one people” is misleading.
What these two “Palestinian” peoples have in common is political radicalization. Indeed, there was one thing the Israelis did wrong, when they were stuck with the “occupation” of both territories, after the Six Day War. They failed to inculcate self-government on a modern western model. It is too late for that, now, and both territories will remain, for the foreseeable future, in the grip of murderous political and religious fanatics, styled “Fatah” (West Bank culture) and “Hamas” (Gaza culture), competing to attack Israel in the moments when they are not attacking each other.
The antecedents of Hamas are the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and there should be no illusions about them. The Egyptians themselves know what they are dealing with, and that is why the Egyptian government was maintaining a wall between Gaza and current Egyptian territory even more formidable than the wall Israel maintains. For Gaza has become a cancer that threatens the domestic peace of Egypt more than Israel—whereinto Hamas merely lobs Kassam missiles.
More things to know. There has been, recently, no “Israeli blockade,” such as has been mentioned ad nauseam in the media. Israel and Egypt conduct more or less the same policies in managing the border, and both are happy to let goods and services—other than weapons—into Gaza. Neither is eager to let anyone or anything out, for obvious reasons.
Take for example the endless media reports of poor Gaza Palestinians suffering from power shortages. Most of the electricity for the territory is supplied from Israel, from a single generating plant in Ashkelon. This has continued to flow, under contractual arrangements, while demand has been outstripping supply on the Gaza side. Israel herself has power-supply problems, and one of them is that Hamas continues to fire Kassams daily towards Ashkelon.
Let me parse that out. Israelis working in the Ashkelon power plant routinely risk their lives, to supply electricity to Gaza.
Hamas blew up the wall with Egypt, quite obviously, to facilitate major weapons shipments. The masses who then availed themselves of the openings in the wall went shopping. Much of this was, in effect, a duty-free binge, for things like cigarettes, which are taxed much higher on the Gaza side, as almost everything else is by Hamas. Israel has nothing to do with that.
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