Over at TPM, Josh Marshall writes
on Israeli settlements in the West Bank:
Whatever you can say about Palestinian terror attacks or
missiles into Southern Israel and whatever you can say Israeli
incursions and aerial attacks, the situation is insoluble
without dismantling those settlements. And that is why Hamas,
as much as it thrives on war and confrontation, is a
distraction -- for some an intentional one, for others
unintentional -- from this core point.
Hamas may simply be a "distraction" for Marshall, typing on his
keyboard in a secure location. But I can assure you that it's
more than a distraction to the Israelis who have seen their
children and families blown to pieces by Hamas suicide bombers.
And its more than a distraction to the citizens of southern
Israeli towns, who have to leave under the fear of constant
rocket attacks, with a siren giving them just 15 seconds to seek
cover -- meaning people are worried about taking showers lest
they be caught off guard, mothers are afraid to wear seat belts
thus losing a few seconds in which they could be securing their
children, and people endure restless nights.
The West Bank settlements that Marshall sees at the "core" of the
issue did not exist when the Palestinian leader the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem stayed as Hitler's guest during World War
II and advocated exterminating Jews in the Middle East, nor did
they exist during the four major Arab-Israeli wars between 1948
and 1973, nor did they exist during the Munich Massacre at the
1972 Olympic Games carried out by the Palestinians against
Israeli athletes. When Israel had settlements in Gaza, that was
cited as a reason for Palestinian terrorism against Israeli
civilians. Yet, after Israel forcefully evacuated thousands of
its own citizens from Gaza settlements and destroyed them, it did
not alter Hamas's behavior at all. In fact, things only got
worse. Hamas used the increased autonomy to build a network of
hunderds of tunnels allowing them to smuggle guns and explosives
in from Egypt, they fired rockets into southern Israel, they
incited a factional civil war among Palestinians and drove rival
Fatah out of Gaza by gunpoint. No, the core issue is not
settlements. The core issue is that there's a significant number
of Palestinians/Arabs that cannot accept any Jewish presence in
the region.
