The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza
The Trump administration’s conference on the situation in
the Gaza Strip this week “focused on the need for the Palestinian Authority to
take control over Gaza,” a White House official told the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz. If that report is accurate, it means that the United States still
doesn’t understand the basic problem in Gaza—or how to solve it.
The idea that Hamas is the “bad guy” and the Palestinian
Authority is the “good guy” is a fallacy that began with the signing of the
Oslo Accords in 1993, and is still the mindset of too many people in
Washington.
The attempts to distinguish between the “moderate” P.A. and
the “extremist” Hamas always foundered on the reality that the P.A. regards
Hamas as its brother, not its enemy. Brothers may quarrel from time to
time—they may get into a scuffle now and then, or even try to kill each
other—but they remain brothers.
The P.A. leadership promised, as part of Oslo, to disband
all terrorist groups, seize their weapons and outlaw them—in short, to put them
out of business. But here we are, 25 years later, and Hamas still has active
terrorist cells throughout the P.A.-controlled parts of Judea and Samaria.
There’s no doubt that the P.A. has the means to eliminate
Hamas in the territories; it has one of the largest per-capita security forces
in the world. Yet it has never even outlawed Hamas. It has never made a real
effort to capture its members or confiscate its weapons. It has not extradited
a single Hamas terrorist to Israel, even though the Oslo agreement obligates it
to do so.
Even The New York Times, a longtime cheerleader for the
P.A., has occasionally conceded that Hamas and other terrorists roam free in
P.A.-run cities. On March 23, 2014, the Times reported that Israeli troops were
forced to enter the Jenin refugee camp in pursuit of terrorists because although
Jenin is under the “full control” of the Palestinian Authority, “the
Palestinian [security forces] did not generally operate in refugee camps.”
When the P.A.’s newspapers, television and radio glorify
terrorists as “martyrs” and “heroes,” they don’t talk about only Fatah
terrorists. They glorify Hamas murderers, too.
When the P.A. pays salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the
families of dead terrorists, they don’t give out the payments only to Fatah
members. They pay Hamas murderers and their families, too.
So there’s no reason for surprise that the P.A. boycotted
this week’s conference on Gaza in Washington. No matter how hard the State
Department crowd wishes it, the P.A. is not going to fight Hamas for control of
Gaza. In fact, it’s not going to fight Hamas at all.
The solution to Gaza’s various ills is not to pump more
international money into the region. That has been tried for decades, and it
hasn’t worked. The solution is regime change. But a change from Hamas to the
P.A. —even if it were possible and even if the P.A. were amenable to that—
would not represent genuine change. It would mean replacing one corrupt,
violent Palestinian dictatorship with another corrupt, violent Palestinian
dictatorship.
Not every group of people with a grievance deserves, or is
ready for, self-rule. Some have too little experience with the culture of
democracy to establish and run a free society; the last thing the world needs
is more dictatorships. Some are too violent to live in peace with their
neighbors; that is the danger Israel faces.
For years, advocates of Palestinian statehood urged Israel
to grant self-rule to the Arabs in Gaza. They claimed that if the Gazans were
allowed to rule themselves, they would become peaceful neighbors since surely
they wouldn’t want to risk losing their self-rule. It would be an experiment to
see if giving them a fully sovereign state could succeed. Yitzhak Rabin took
that risk (my family paid a high price for it) and then Ariel Sharon decided to
take that risk.
The tens of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza at Israel
over the years have demonstrated that the experiment was an abject failure.
Gaza proves that the Palestinian Arabs are not yet ready for self-rule. Neither
conferences in Washington nor handouts from the international community will
change that.
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