Monday, December 31, 2012

What Other Land Border?

Perhaps the Israelis haven't been starving and impoverishing Gazans after all. Perhaps it is the fault of Palestinians for choices they've made.

Egypt's Islamist government has opened their border to Gaza to allow construction material in to Gaza:

Islamist-led Egypt allowed building materials into Gaza via the Rafah crossing on Saturday for the first time since Hamas seized control of the Palestinian enclave in 2007, an Egyptian border official said.

Huh. So all that outrage about Israel "blockading" Gaza from the land and sea was a bunch of bunk since there was another crossing to Egypt that could have been used had Egypt allowed it? Indeed, according a Hamas propaganda officer:

Rafah had been closed for goods for so many years and we always hoped such a policy would change, without exempting the Israeli occupation from their responsibilities. Israel must end the closure and reopen all crossings with Gaza.

It's pretty funny that the Palestinians themselves wanted the Egyptians to open their border, confident that Israel could still get blamed for "blockading" Gaza.

Also, what occupation? Isn't it about time that Hamas admit that they control Gaza and that their are no Israelis occupying the area? Is a simple admission of reality too difficult to manage?

The reality is that Israel didn't block food and medicine. Yes, Israel blocked a lot of building materials since Hamas tended to use them for bunkers rather than schools and houses (except for houses for the ruling elites, of course).

And recall that Hamas chose to smuggle in rockets rather than goods to alleviate their purported suffering.

On the bright side for Israel, the Palestinians are losing their ability to spin any ass-kicking they endure when they provoke a war with Israel into a diplomatic win:

Years of exaggerating their losses, and deliberately trying to get their own civilians killed (for propaganda purposes) has caught up with the Palestinians, who are now being accused of war crimes (for using those tactics. This was because Israel was able to provide enough video evidence of Palestinians in Gaza firing rockets from residential neighborhoods, as well as Arab language media stories discussing the use of this tactic to persuade Western media and war crimes researchers that they were being played by the Palestinians. This scam has been going on for more than a decade, but in the West it was not fashionable to question the Palestinian claims, even though details of the deception were openly discussed in Arab language media. But with the spread of the Internet, more and more photographic and video evidence of the deceptions was seen by more people.

I look forward to the day when Palestinians try to build a better future rather than simply take joy in killing a few Jews and accepting the deaths of more Palestinians as simply the price to make the Jews look bad for fighting back.

Rejecting Palestinian propaganda claims would go a long way to reaching that day when Palestinians accept the reality that Jews couldn't care less about harming Palestinians since Hamas and Fatah are doing that job better than any Israeli plot could inflict.