By Bret Stephens
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
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 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza in a bloody coup
against its rivals in the Fatah faction. Since then, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and
other terrorist groups in the Strip have fired nearly 10,000 rockets and
mortars from Gaza into Israel — all the while denouncing an economic “blockade”
that is Israel’s refusal to feed the mouth that bites it. (Egypt and the
Palestinian Authority also participate in the same blockade, to zero
international censure.)
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-outs include 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.
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