by Boaz Bismuth
Rebuilding Gaza is in Israel's interest. The logic is that if my neighbor is happy, I'm happy.
But what is one to do
when that neighbor voted to give Hamas a majority in parliament in a
democratic election in 2006? A year and a half later, in June 2007,
boosted by the electoral backwind, Hamas seized control of the Gaza
Strip. The rest is history, and, unfortunately for us, it is also
reality.
Our problem is that
even after 51 difficult days of fighting this summer, our Palestinian
neighbor still does not understand that the way to rebuild Gaza is not
through the bank ($4 billion), but by removing Hamas from the picture.
That is not so simple (as we know better than anyone else), but we would
have expected the Palestinian Authority to at least show aversion
toward the rogue movement, rather than embracing Ismail Haniyeh's party.
This was expressed in PA President Mahmoud Abbas' speech at the U.N.
General Assembly. A speech, which, by the way, adapted itself to match
public opinion in Gaza (a political horizon?).
The world got together
for Gaza in Cairo on Sunday. The donor conference was held to recruit
funds for the people of Gaza. Israel has no problem with this. In fact,
Israel, for those who may have forgotten, became a fundraiser for the
Palestinians at the Paris conference in 1994, following the Oslo
Accords.
For those who have
forgotten, those were the days when Yasser Arafat played the part of
Malala Yousafzai, the young woman from Pakistan (remember the Nobel
Peace Prize?). It took several years before the world realized what
Arafat did with the money. We were more naive then. Nowadays, it is a
bit more difficult to convince us that money for tunnels will be used to
rebuild buildings. Several years have passed since the Paris Protocol,
and from the world's perspective, the Israeli occupation is still the
source of the problems in the Middle East, and maybe also in Kashmir.
If someone could
promise us that the money would help the citizens of Gaza, I might even
have sent over my own modest donation. After all, "Far better a neighbor
that is near than a brother far off" (Proverbs 27:10). But with Hamas
still in the picture, and Abbas competing with Haniyeh over who is more
extreme in his policies on Israel in order to win the hearts of Gazan
voters, it is clear that the donor conference is not going to build a
new Middle East, or even a new Gaza.
It is difficult for the
world to grasp that Israel has its own sizeable interest in Gazans
having good lives, because we are close by, and when a Gazan sneezes, we
have to blow our noses, and vice versa. This is not the case with the
British, the Russians, the French or the Koreans.
$4 billion for the
residents of Gaza? Yes. $4 billion for Hamas terrorists? No. If only
naivete could be bought with money. What will we do when we run out of
that commodity?
Boaz Bismuth
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10219
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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