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Understanding What Hamas Wants

northernlou

Idi Admin
Understanding What Hamas Wants
Five observations about the Gaza conflict, including praise for
an ex-president's insight into the particular nature of Hamas' evil


Jul 18 2014

1. We can thank former President Bill Clinton for perfect clarity in his comments about the chaos and horror of Gaza. In an interview on Indian television, Clinton—who told us in his memoir that Palestinian self-destructiveness (in the form of Yasir Arafat’s various delusions and prevarications) undid his effort to bring about a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict—blames the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gaza affiliate, Hamas, for adopting a policy of deliberate self-murder in order to present Israel with a set of impossible dilemmas. “Hamas was perfectly well aware of what would happen if they started raining rockets in Israel,” Clinton said. “They fired a thousand of them. And they have a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so that the rest of the world will condemn them.”

This is the manner in which Hamas works: It builds reinforced bunkers for its leaders (under hospitals and other must-avoid targets) but purposefully neglects to build bomb shelters for the civilians in its putative care. From their bunkers, the leaders order rocket teams to target Israeli civilians. Hamas, which was responsible for the deaths of several hundred Israeli civilians during the second Palestinian uprising alone, has lately been less effective at killing Israelis, but nevertheless, the rockets keep launching.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the institution that cares for Palestinians but whose actual raison d'être is the perpetuation of the stateless status of the descendants of refugees from 1948, recently tweeted this thought to its followers:

“Palestinian children in #Gaza are experiencing severe trauma for the 3rd time in 5 years. The effects are lasting.” Entirely, miserably, true. An alternative to this current horrible reality presented itself in 2005, when the Israeli government—after years of foolish and destructive colonization—expelled thousands of Jewish settlers from Gaza and then withdrew its army. The Palestinian leadership could have taken the opportunity created by the Israeli withdrawal to build the nucleus of a state. Instead, Gaza was converted into a rocket-manufacturing and -launching facility. But here’s a bit of good news:

The people of Gaza, who suffer from Hamas rule, appear to be tired of it. In a recent Pew poll, 63 percent of Gazans surveyed disapproved of Hamas. Perhaps this is because the people have come to realize that Hamas has brought them nothing but grief, sloganeering, and military defeat.

...Hamas has been shown to be almost entirely friendless in the region. The Egyptian government blames Hamas for this conflict, as do commentators across the Gulf. Relations between Hamas and its traditional backers, the Iranians and the Syrians, have deteriorated markedly. Hamas is in a weaker position than it has been in years...

continued ... http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/understanding-what-hamas-wants/374656/
 
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