Photo by Eliran t – Own work, CC0, Wikipedia
Twenty years ago exactly, Israel began its disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Every last civilian and soldier would leave the enclave, though evidence of the Jewish communities would remain in the form of greenhouses, roads, and other infrastructure that was gifted to the Palestinians as they began their first serious experiment in independent self-rule.
What ensued was anarchy and violence. Even the greenhouses were destroyed and looted, an unsubtle metaphor for the unfolding disaster, the self-nakba of the Palestinians.
Much of the debate around the disengagement centers on the question of whether it was a mistake to offer the Palestinians in Gaza freedom, independence, and peace, since they razed all three to the ground. And of course Hamas is the villain of the entire tragic episode; no one else even competing for the title.
But there is another villain that, less than Hamas but more than anybody except Hamas, deserves the scorn of history.
A new working paper by the cognitive scientist Netta Barak-Corren of Hebrew University sheds some light on this topic, though it isn’t the focus of her research. Barak-Corren was studying aid diversion in war zones, including but not limited to Gaza. But she offers crucial context about the primary aid agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, that paints a clear picture not only of the agency’s problems but of its quasi-governmental status.
“There is abundance of evidence to indicate … that the relationship between UNRWA and Hamas was symbiotic to a degree that UNRWA sustained much of the Hamas apparatus in Gaza, via various methods, allowing Hamas to build and sustain its war machine and authoritarian rule,” Barak-Corrin writes.
The UN agency was Gaza’s largest employer and at one point provided four out of every five Gazans with some form of aid, she writes. It is, alone among refugee agencies, a “permanent state of affairs” rather than a temporary solution to a particular postwar problem.
Palestinians are the Arab world’s hillbillies. What do we expect of the them?
This article substantiates the role that the UN and UNRWA have played up till now. They have coerced Israel to perform activities that no normal thinking party to the ongoing war would even consider, such as providing water, food, power, fuel, medication and a host of other things and the thanks Israel gets are more demands for more aid and the transfer of people into and out of the Gaza Strip.
We hear often that people travel to visit Brussels, to Moscow, to the UN or Qatar. How do they get in and out? The war Israel is fighting has never been seen before. The result is always the same. Israel is to blame for everything.
If Israel were to perform only some of the crimes she is accused of, the Gazans would be either gone or dead. It’s time to end this war but the only solution is total defeat of Gaza including all terror organizations and anyone who attempts to shoot at an Israeli. Nothing less will do or accomplish the required solution. Israel should then continue with Judea and Samaria because if elections were held there, Hamas would win by a large majority, so in order to avoid that inevitable result and start over where Israel left off with the Gaza Strip, clear out J&S starting immediately. The UN and the EU will scream – let them! They scream all the time anyway.