Rockets from Gaza due to lack of salaries? I think not

Just when you think someone would properly hold Hamas accountable for its rocket fire into Israel along comes Nathan Thrall in The New York Times who blames the war on Israel because Hamas has not been able to pay salaries.

He writes,

AS Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities and Israel follows up its extensive airstrikes with a ground operation in the Gaza Strip, the most immediate cause of this latest war has been ignored: Israel and much of the international community placed a prohibitive set of obstacles in the way of the Palestinian “national consensus” government that was formed in early June.

And what is one of those obstacles?

Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one…

This, my friends, is just another instance of the West’s patronizing of Palestinian terrorists.  In other words, the Palestinians cannot help but be violent when a crisis (of their own doing) erupts.

I was able to have a letter in response to this column printed in The Times.

It reads

Re “How the West Chose War in Gaza” (Op-Ed, July 18): I disagree with Nathan Thrall that the absence of pay to civil servants is the reason for war in Gaza. War has broken out because Hamas does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. A look at the Hamas charter and listening to the spoken words of Hamas leadership would convince all but the most jaundiced of that.

Hamas made a choice when it took over Gaza. Instead of building an economy and housing for Gazans by using the many tons of concrete and other building materials that were allowed into Gaza, it used them to build tunnels to smuggle weaponry from Egypt and to cross under the border of Israel for future attacks against its citizens, as demonstrated this week.

It’s not the West’s failure that brought about war, but Hamas’s refusal to live peaceably side by side with Israel.

STEPHEN M. FLATOW

The above link will bring you to the full column.  My letter can be found on line here.   

 

Well, that’s what I think.