Imposing collective punishment on the people of Gaza is not only inhumane; it is also incapable of producing results that benefit Israel or the two main rivals of Hamas: Fatah and Mubarak’s Egypt. By knocking down the Rafah barrier and forcing Mubarak to tell Egyptian police to let Gazans enter Egypt, Hamas placed itself in the position of defending Palestinians under its rule from the two states, Egypt and Israel, that have turned Gaza into a shutdown prison.
The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, no less than Mubarak’s Egypt and Abbas’s Fatah, ought to be appealing to the populace of Gaza rather than driving it into the arms of Hamas. The current siege policy follows a narrow-minded, obtuse military logic. It assumes that if Gazans are subjected to ever worse deprivation, they will eventually prevail on Hamas to stop the rockets falling on the Israeli town of Sderot.
This punishing of an entire population to change the conduct of its rulers rarely has the desired effect. Olmert would be wiser to follow Yitzhak Rabin’s dictum: to negotiate for peace as if there were no terrorism, and to fight terrorism as if there were no peace negotiations. If this also means arranging a cease-fire with Hamas so that current negotiations with Abbas have a better chance to succeed, Israel should pursue that cease-fire. Access the full article>>