Hamas? What’s That?

Eugene Robinson is always good for a silly column about once a week, but this one seems siller than most.

Robinson is trying to have both sides of the Gaza pullout and doesn’t do very well with it at all. His argument, such as it is, is that it’s good that Israel is pulling out of Gaza but that the people who are leaving Gaza have been betrayed, so it’s bad.

Perhaps you could make the argument that there are no winners in this Gaza pullout, though I don’t think such an argument would be convincing. You certainly can’t make that argument when you make up your own facts to bolster your journalistic sorrow.

Look, I’m sorry that Robinson’s heartstrings have been tugged by the images from Gaza the past few days. It stinks on toast that these people, many of whom have lived there for almost forty years, now must leave. That doesn’t in any way give him the license to make things up, which is exactly what he’s done to make his point.

I’m pleased that the Palestinians are joyously reclaiming land that was taken from them in 1967, and I hope this is a step toward the viable Palestinian state they deserve.

BZZZZZZZT! Wrong.

The Gaza strip wasn’t taken from Palestinians in 1967. It was taken from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War. I don’t know if Robinson knows about that, but Israel was attacked by, among others, Egypt, and won the war in less than a week. Before that Palestinians lived there at the sufferance of the Egyptian government, who essentially maintained it as a desolate slum.

So, Israel didn’t take the land from Palestinians. It won the land in a war from Egypt. Want to blame someone? Blame Egypt for that one, man.

Next, Robinson decides where the Gaza residents should assign blame.

They should also blame every one of the many Israeli politicians who used them like pawns all those years and now are forsaking them for the greater good. They should blame the hawks who encouraged them to move to the occupied territories as a way of staking a claim to Greater Israel. They should blame the doves who disingenuously allowed them to stay in Gaza so that one day they could be used as a bargaining chip.

Yes, they should blame Ariel Sharon and the other leaders who planted the dream in their minds, nurtured it, encouraged it to take root and grow and blossom — and then killed it. It was an overzealous dream, a foolish dream, a dream so single-minded and devoid of empathy — this land is ours, although we have just arrived; you are usurpers, although your great-grandfathers turned this soil — that it was always precarious, a castle made of Gaza sand. Imagine living amid such hatred and resentment that you have to sling a loaded Uzi over your shoulder to take your family to the beach.

Well, isn’t that just a bit…umm..untrue? There was no land turned by those who lived there before. The Gaza strip was a desert, nearly uninhabitable. Yet the settlers cultivated it, grew cops, made a life there where no one had made a decent one before. They turned a wasted slum into something worth having.

Do you notice, though, who isn’t mentioned in Robinson’s list of People to Blame?

Where’s Hamas – you know, the people who make it necessary for residents there to carry Uzis when they go farm the land that wasn’t farmable before they got there?

In fact, where in any of Robinson’s column is any mention of the people who murder children in schoolyards and restaurant diners? You won’t find it and that is where Robinson is disingenuous. See, has the Palestinians – led by Chief Bad Person Yasser Arafat – had stuck by the UN resolutions on Gaza, Israel would have left years ago. Instead, Arafat decided to pimp out his people for cash and a Nobel Peace Prize and the suffering that so aggrieves Robinson is the result.

I’d suggest that he, instead of weeping silently over his keyboard, implore the Palestinians to make a real nation for themselves, starting in Gaza. If they don’t, and they continue on the path they have – the path that Robinson can’t seem to remember – they’re going to have a very short and violent life as a soverign nation.

And that would be a real tragedy.

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Category: Our Foreign Policy