Palestinians are so tired of Hamas they’re longing for the good old days of Israeli occupation:
Asked a routine question about the 2006 Palestinian elections yesterday, Khaled abu Ahmed slipped off his sandal and used it to beat his head several times to demonstrate his remorse for voting Hamas. “We wanted change and reform,” he said. “We thought they would bring prosperity. We thought they were people who knew God. But, believe me, they don’t know God.”
He was standing outside his white goods shop in al Khawaja street, where the first intifada famously began 20 years ago and where the yellow flags of Fatah have recently begun to flutter obtrusively above many of the houses. Before the elections and the subsequent international boycott, he said, he used to make between £1,200 and £1,400 a month. Now, he said, thanks to closures and two years of only sporadic payments to public employees, he is lucky to make £25. “People have no money to buy anything,” he said, pointing to the street’s many shuttered shops. “We have been occupied by the Turks, the British, and the Egyptians,” he added, his voice rising rapidly. “We were occupied by Fatah and now we are occupied by Hamas. And the best of these occupations was by the Jews.”
That’s funny, I thought the Israelis are brutalracistZionistmurderers who deliberately target and murder civilians for no reason other than they’re brutalracistZionistmurderers.
Of course, the Independent (part of the U.K. Guardian media outlet) couldn’t let a pro-Israel remark stand unchallenged.
Mr Abu Ahmed, an angry man but as ardently nationalist as the next Palestinian, was being deliberately provocative of course. And it worked.
Hearing him, a passing bearded cyclist, Hamas supporter Omar Hamad, 37, stopped in his tracks and shouted: “You are talking only for yourself, not for the Palestinian people.”
Mr Hamad levelled the blame for Gaza’s ever deepening economic crisis on the emergency Ramallah government of President Mahmoud Abbas for sanctioning its isolation. “We Palestinians did these closures ourselves,” he said.
Well, the truth will out. That’s right, Hamad, you did it to yourselves. It’s the rockets and mortars and terrorism, which of course continues on a daily basis.
And of course, no Indy/Guardian article quote would be complete without reversing any possible negative spin for the Pals:
A telephone poll yesterday by Near East Consulting said that most Gazans oppose rocket attacks on Israel, do not regard the de facto Hamas government as legitimate, and support a peace agreement with Israel-the still distant goal of yet another meeting between Mr Abbas and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem yesterday.
And while the poll – accurate or not – will no doubt encourage Israel and the US in their belief that the continued economic misery of Gaza will eventually turn it against Hamas, there is no obvious mechanism for change as long as Hamas opposes the fresh elections Mr Abbas threatens from time to time.
Right. Because we can’t possibly bash Israel if the Gazans agree that the Palestinians are in the wrong.
The Independent isn’t part of the Guardian. I prefer the Guardian, a leftist newspaper fairly representative of all strands that comprise “The Left”, to the Independent: a postmodernist rag obsessed with climate change that seems unable to get foreign news right – calling the largely Orthodox-Christian, paleo-Caucasian Abkhaz separatists from Georgia “Turkic Muslims”, for instance – which is hardly surprising when Robert Fisk is its Middle East editor. It’s probably the UK’s major media organ of uncompromising anti-Israelism.
IIRC, the Arabs in Suez rioted and taunted the (corrupt) Egyptian police and officials by saying that the Israelis were better than they were.
chsw
The Pali Arabs are discovering the truth of Heinlein’s comment, that “Vox populi, vox dei” often translates as “My G-d, how did we get into this mess?”
They voted for Hamas primarily because Hamas promised to kill more Jews faster than Fatah. Had they paid attention to how similar groups ruled Afghanistan, Iran, and the Sudan, or to the murderous violence of such groups in Algeria and Iraq, they might have expected Hamas to be just as brutal and intolerant as they have proved themselves to be. But none of the Palis paid attention, they were too anxious for rulers who would intensify the Jew-killing.
They made their own bed, and now they discover it is a bed of nails. It’s what they deserve.