The problem with democracy is that people tend to get exactly the kind of government they deserve: Offered the chance to choose their own parilamentary leadership last year, the Palestinian people jettisoned the corrupt Fatah personality cult – one that in the wake of Yassir Arafat’s death, lacked any particularly charismatic personality – and selected their militant Islamist political oppenents in Hamas.
Hamas was born in the first Intifada and, apart from its political wing has a dedicated military wing which continues to fight for a one-state solution to the problem of Palestinian homeland: Push the Jews into the sea, and no more problem! After their elevation to the parliamentary marjority, chin-pulling western pundits also reminded us that Hamas was very active in charities, school and social programs – orphanages, and so on.
Choosing Hamas was not just a vote for change, it was also a chance to stick a finger in the eye of the international community – a short-sighted decision, since the international community, whose charity distributions to the local government substituted in Gaza and the West Bank for an economy ever since the second Intifada made paying work in Israel hard to get to, responded by largely shutting those payments off.
And with Hamas violently purging Fatah from Gaza – 24 Palestinian deaths yesterday alone – those social programs aren’t looking so good anymore either. Well, except maybe for the orphanages – that product line may in fact be booming:
(I)n Gaza City, hundreds of members of the Fatah-allied Bakr clan, who have engaged in fierce battles with Hamas in recent months, surrendered Wednesday to the militants, witnesses said.
The Bakr clan, numbering thousands of people, lives in a seaside neighborhood. Some 200 of the Bakr men are armed militants.
On Wednesday afternoon, Hamas forces entered the area and led hundreds of men, women and children, their hands raised behind their heads, to a nearby mosque, said local resident, Nael Ghoben.
Witnesses reported that after the surrender, two Bakr women tried to leave the area and take a sick girl to a hospital, and were shot on the street by Hamas gunmen…
In Gaza City, a civilian was killed Wednesday when some 1,000 Palestinians marched through the streets chanting “stop the killing” – only to draw gunfire from Hamas militants at a nearby police station seized from Fatah a day earlier.
Several hundred tribal leaders, women, children and Islamic Jihad militants turned out for the protest, which was initiated by Egyptian mediators.
Witnesses said Hamas gunmen shot at the protesters as they approached the house of the Bakr family – Fatah loyalists – trapping the demonstrators.
Protester Bilal Qurashali said he saw a man shot in the head. “We are unable to get out.” The place is closed, he said.
Health officials said another 14 protesters were wounded by bullets and brought to the hospital in civilian cars because ambulances couldn’t navigate the heavy fire.
Separately, Hamas gunmen opened fire from a high-rise building at about 1,000 protesters in Khan Yunis, wounding one and breaking up the demonstration.
Talk about chickens coming home to roost.
With Hamas under retaliatory pressure in the Fatah-dominated West Bank, it looks more and more like the proposed two-state solution to Palestinian nationhood visualized in the Oslo Accords might end up being a three-state solution: Israel bordered to the southwest by a Hamas-dominated Islamist slum, and to the east by an only scarcely less-hostile West Bank (mis)governed by Fatah.
This self-inflicted misery seems almost inevitable – so long as the Palestinian people hitch their destiny and aspirations to the suicide bomb and Kalashnikov they will be governed by fanatics with rifles. At some point, enough of the violent men may have died to let the voices of reason rise above the sound of the guns.
We can only hope that there are any voices left by then.
They dug their graves, now they get to lie in them.
Abba Eban: The palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Abba Eban: The jews are a people who don’t know how to take yes for an answer.
Golda Meir also made a comment about the palestinians not being able to govern until they love their children more than they hate the jews.
A joke (?) I once heard: A scorpion is waiting by the Sea of Galilee, trying to get across. After a while, a frog comes along, and the scorpion asks to be carried across. “I can’t do that,” replies the frog, “because you’ll sting me and I’ll die.”
“No, said the scorpion, that won’t happen. If I did that, then we’d both die.” They argue back and forth, and finally the frog is convinced. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. “Why’d you do that?” asks the frog. “now we’ll both die.” “So?” replied the scorpion. “That’s the middle east.”
If anyone ever wondered what Iraq would look like if we left, this is it. If it’s possible, maybe Lex can pull up the piece that I linked to shortly after Ariel Sharon had his coma. It’s prophetic. I believe it was last spring.
RPL, I recall a slighty different ending to the frog scorpion parable…that goes someting like this… the frog asks, “why did you do that?… now we’ll both die… the scorpion answers…why are you surprised ?… I’m a scorpion… it’s what scorpions do…its my nature…
Both endings send the same message…these people are hard-wired scorpions unafraid to die and take the rest of us with them. Best
Sounds like Darwinism is hard at work. Maybe the survivors will be willing to use a little common sense.
Shipmates,
The first thing folks have to realise is that there are no “Palestinians”. There is no such animal. It’s a made-up name for a made-up people composed of refugees from all over.
Rather than deal with the refugee problems after ’48, and all through the intervening years, the United Nations has ignored it where possible, and condemned Israel, a nation recognised by the United Nations, when something had to be done.
The Arab states? Islam? All preach absolute intolerance of Israel, even when they make overtures of friendship. Their schools teach that the Jews are subhuman, deserving of elimination, in the same manner that another nation once taught.
I have no pity for the “Palestinians”. They have had 2 generation’s worth of opportunity to resolve the issue of where they will or will not live, and in every case, have chosen the path most likely to bring death, bloodshed and misery upon themselves.
The saddest part of all is the way that AP, Reuters, and so many other Palestinian apologists continue to enable all of this misery. If any of them truly wanted peace, they could have it at any time.
IMHO, and my opinion only, this whole tragic saga will end only when the “Palestinian” people decide they’ve had enough, and vote to lay down their arms, or when everyone else has had their full of the duplicity, arrogance and mind-numbing stupidty of the “Palestinians” and decide to halt that Islamic political experiment once and for all.
Respects,
SnakeEater:
I had actually heard your version first; my old Rabbi told that version at Rosh Hashanah services one year, and I thought it would be appropriate for this topic.
AW1 Tim:
You’re right about the Palestinians; that term was created by the British. James Dunnigan and his co-authors once wrote a piece that summarized the Middle East. It basically boiled down to the fact that Israel is surrounded (the Israeli point of view), and there were 7 points of view for the Arabs; any combination up to and including all 7 represented their point of view. One of the points was: Israel is a tough little nut, but one that could be safely ignored if not for those troublesome Palestinians.
As everyone who follows the middle east knows, the Palestinians are used as a convenient distraction to keep the people in other countries from seeing how bad things are in their own respective countries. If this weren’t the case, then there would have been more of an international outcry when Kuwait expelled the 250,000 Palestinian guest workers after Desert Storm.
Well, at the rate they are going, the Palestinians may not need so many orphanages if they keep killing their children. Now they don’t even want a cease-fire.
I’m too American to wrap my brain around their thinking. Anyone who thinks it’s honorable and praiseworthy to try to kill others with indiscriminate suicide bombing or shelling neighborhoods filled with noncombatants isn’t worth spit. How they can devalue the lives of their children and families is completely past my comprehension.
I guess when so many are packed so closely together with such continuous distruction going on around them everywhere, then life must not mean much to them.
I remember a parable from a long, long time ago. Three men are in a boat and see their mothers, wives, and children drowning. Who does each rescue? I don’t remember who rescued who(they were either three religions or three nationalities which were basically the three religions), but I remember the reasons why. The one who rescued his mother perceived that his elders were the best to save. The one who rescued his wife did so because they could have more children and his mother was past having more children. The one who rescued his child did so because his mother had lived her life and so had his wife, but the child hadn’t had time to live yet.
It was an interesting discussion and revealing in how others can think so differently from each other and truly be thinking in a way others don’t get.
Oh well. If Hamas and Fatah keep killing each other, then perhaps someone will get tired and put a stop to it. Especially once the top tier leaders keep getting assassinated and they have to go deep into the ranks for replacements. Maybe the fervent will die out and the practical will rise up.
Doubtful though.
This is admittedly a completely unfair observation, but I have met exactly one Palestinian in my life, and I have yet to meet a more entitlement-minded, opportunistic, and manipulative person than this guy was.
I say that it’s an unfair observation in that I don’t believe in painting an entire culture with such an incredibly narrow brush, but there it is. My statistically insignificant sample set of one seems to me to be writ large in the whole Palestinian situation. Unfair as that may be, of course.
During the year prior to the Israeli pull out from Gaza the two guys that started the Protest Warrior org. made a film titled Entering Zion. They went to the Jewish settlements in Gaza and interviewed a number of people. Terrific footage of the greenhouses, housing units, schools, etc. I understand that within a week of the Israeli pullout the greenhouses, which were actually purchased by Bill Gates and given to the Gaza gov’t, were torn to shreds. Looted and smashed.
I think that most everybody that followed events in Gaza and the West Bank predicted that the Palestinians would be unable to govern themselves. I will say this, it is going to be really hard for the Arab world to put an anti Jew spin on video of Palestinians executing each other in the streets and their own hospitals.
This is my first visit to your site; I’m truly sorry it took this long but am overjoyed I found it.
Your site is no nonsense and straight to the point… rare.
Your commenters are intelligent and I will send your links out whenever I have the chance.
Great work.
Sometimes, a War of Attrition is the best one can expect….Best to let this “domestic dispute” play out with total silence.
Bottom line: Zero sympathy here, ala Snake and Byron.
b2
B2, I think it was Henry Kissinger, commenting on the Iraq/Iran war in the 1980s, who is supposed to have said, “to bad they can’t both loose”…for me the same sentiment applies here. Best
AliV, Welcome aboard old sport(or is it young Lassie)…a very decerning fellow/lady, you are…intellegent commentators…indeed… Best
Web Reconnaissance for 06/14/2007…
A short recon of what?ǂ
Web Reconnaissance for 06/14/2007…
A short recon of whats out there that might draw your attention….
SE #12
I don’t know if he was the first to say it, but I heard HK say that very thing in person in a QA session following a speech back in the early 80′s. That sentiment certainly describes my feelings about the various murderous Palestinian factions.
Daveg, I also know exactly one Palestinian. His kids are in my Boy Scout Troop. He’s a physician. He’s hard-working and makes a very good dollar and his wife and 4 sons lack for nothing. Although he has great demands on his time he makes time to work with our Troop, more time than most of the fathers who have more time than he does do. I wish I had 10 more Dads like him.