For
the third time in two weeks, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have set fire to
the Kerem Shalom border crossing,
through which they get medicine, fuel and other humanitarian essentials from
Israel. Soon we’ll surely hear a great deal about the misery of Gaza. Try not
to forget that the authors of that misery are also the presumptive victims.
There’s a pattern here — harm yourself, blame the other — and it deserves to be highlighted amid the torrent of morally blind, historically illiterate criticism to which Israelis are subjected every time they defend themselves against violent Palestinian attack.
In 1970, Israel set up an industrial zone along the border with Gaza to promote economic cooperation and provide Palestinians with jobs. It had to be shut down in 2004 amid multiple terrorist attacks that left 11 Israelis dead
In
2005, Jewish-American donors forked over $14 million dollars to pay for
greenhouses that had been used by Israeli settlers until the government of
Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Strip. Palestinians looted dozens of the
greenhouses almost immediately upon Israel’s exit.
In
2014 Israel discovered that Hamas had built 32 tunnels under the Gaza border to
kidnap or kill Israelis. “The average tunnel requires 350 truckloads of
construction supplies,” The Wall Street Journal
reported, “enough to build 86 homes, seven mosques, six schools or
19 medical clinics.” Estimated cost of tunnels: $90 million.
Want
to understand why Gaza is so poor? See above.
Which
brings us to the grotesque spectacle along Gaza’s border over the past several
weeks, in which thousands of Palestinians have tried to breach the fence and
force their way into Israel, often at the cost of their lives. What is the
ostensible purpose of what Palestinians call “the Great Return March”?
That’s
no mystery. This week, The Times published an op-ed by Ahmed Abu Artema,
one of the organizers of the march. “We are intent on continuing our struggle
until Israel recognizes our right to return to our homes and land from which we
were expelled,” he writes, referring to homes and land within Israel’s original
borders.
His
objection isn’t to the “occupation” as usually defined by Western liberals,
namely Israel’s acquisition of territories following the 1967 Six Day War. It’s
to the existence of Israel itself. Sympathize with him all you like, but at
least notice that his politics demand the elimination of the Jewish state.
Notice,
also, the old pattern at work: Avow and pursue Israel’s destruction, then plead
for pity and aid when your plans lead to ruin.
The
world now demands that Jerusalem account for every bullet fired at the
demonstrators, without offering a single practical alternative for dealing with
the crisis.
But
where is the outrage that Hamas kept urging Palestinians to move toward the
fence, having been amply forewarned by
Israel of the mortal risk? Or that protest organizers encouraged women to lead
the charges on the fence because, as The Times’s Declan Walsh
reported, “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”?
Or that Palestinian children as young
as 7 were dispatched to try to breach the fence? Or that the
protests ended after Israel warned Hamas’s leaders, whose preferred hide-outsinclude Gaza’s hospital, that their own lives were at risk?
Elsewhere
in the world, this sort of behavior would be called reckless endangerment. It
would be condemned as self-destructive, cowardly and almost bottomlessly
cynical.
The
mystery of Middle East politics is why Palestinians have so long been exempted
from these ordinary moral judgments. How do so many so-called progressives now
find themselves in objective sympathy with the murderers, misogynists and homophobes of
Hamas? Why don’t they note that, by Hamas’s own admission,
some 50 of the 62 protesters killed on Monday were members
of Hamas? Why do they begrudge Israel the right to defend
itself behind the very borders they’ve been clamoring for years for Israelis to
get behind?
Why
is nothing expected of Palestinians, and everything forgiven, while everything
is expected of Israelis, and nothing forgiven?
That’s
a question to which one can easily guess the answer. In the meantime, it’s
worth considering the harm Western indulgence has done to Palestinian
aspirations.
No
decent Palestinian society can emerge from the culture of victimhood, violence
and fatalism symbolized by these protests. No worthy Palestinian government can
emerge if the international community continues to indulge the corrupt, anti-Semitic autocrats
of the Palestinian Authority or fails to condemn and sanction the despotic
killers of Hamas. And no Palestinian economy will ever flourish through
repeated acts of self-harm and destructive provocation.
If
Palestinians want to build a worthy, proud and prosperous nation, they could do
worse than try to learn from the one next door. That begins by forswearing
forever their attempts to destroy it.
