{"id":2033,"date":"2014-08-25T19:36:47","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T19:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/?p=2033"},"modified":"2014-08-25T19:36:47","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T19:36:47","slug":"gaza-a-lost-opportunity-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/gaza-a-lost-opportunity-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaza \u2013 A Lost Opportunity Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Barry Rosenfeld
\nRead Part 1<\/a> \u00a0 Read Part 2<\/a> Read Part 3<\/a>
\n\"Gaaza\"<\/a>
\nThe following is the fourth and final part of a short history of the Gaza Strip and Israel\u2019s involvement with it.<\/p>\n

With regard to the question as to whether or not the establishment of a two state solution might not resolve the present conflict going on between Hamas and Israel, Harvard professor and renowned lawyer Alan Dershowitz dealt with this in an article in the English language Jerusalem Post when he wrote, \u201cThe reality is that Hamas\u2019s rocket attacks against Israeli cities and civilian targets have little to do with Israel\u2019s occupation and settlement policy on the West Bank. Even if Israel were to make peace with the Palestinian Authority, the rocket attacks from Gaza would not stop.\u201d He makes a very good point when he says that the disengagement of August 15th, 2005 is proof of this. At that time there was no siege of Gaza and the Palestinians were given the opportunity to build what Dershowitz calls a \u201cSingapore on the Mediterranean.\u201d He goes on, \u201cInstead, Hamas engaged in a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, murdering many members of the PA, seizing control of all of Gaza, and turning it into a militant theocracy. It used the material left behind by the Israelis not to feed its citizens but to build rockets with which to attack Israeli civilians. It was only after these rocket attacks that Israel began a siege of Gaza designed to prevent the importation of rockets and material used to build terrorist kidnap tunnels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dershowitz also shatters the myth that both sides are equally to blame for the carnage by pointing out that the targeting of Hamas of civilian targets is a war crime under international law as is \u201cfiring these rockets from hospitals, schools and houses in densely populated areas, in order to cause Israel to kill Palestinian civilians.\u201d Describing it as the \u201cdead baby\u201d strategy Dershowitz argues that \u201cIt deliberately puts Israel to the tragic choice of attacking the rockets and killing some children who are used as human shields, or refraining from attacking the rockets and thereby placing its own children at risk.\u201d (JPost)
\nIn fact it seems that in the eyes of the world\u2019s media Israel can do no right as typified by an article in the Guardian which blames the current conflict on the 2005 disengagement saying that it gave Israel the opportunity to claim that it was working toward an agreement with the Palestinians but in fact was only maintaining the same occupation in a new and different guise since it still controlled the airspace and borders of Gaza. What choice did the people have but to elect an extremist terrorist organization to lead them and continue the \u201cstruggle.\u201d One can only imagine a similar Guardian article sometime in the future if Israel were two come up with a two-state solution only to find itself the continuing target of Palestinian attacks and defending itself from a much smaller and much more vulnerable piece of land.<\/p>\n

Writing in the Washington Post about the present conflict and its roots in the disengagement of 2005, Charles Krauthammer asks, \u201cAnd how did the Gaza Palestinians react to being granted by the Israelis what no previous ruler, neither Egyptian, nor British, nor Turkish, had ever given them \u2014 an independent territory? First, they demolished the greenhouses. Then they elected Hamas. Then, instead of building a state with its attendant political and economic institutions, they spent the better part of a decade turning Gaza into a massive military base, brimming with terror weapons, to make ceaseless war on Israel.\u201d He then goes on to describe how instead of forming a new Palestinian state they took all of the resources they had, the materials given to them to build an infrastructure, the money sent to them by the European states, to build tunnels and weapons. \u201cThey spent millions importing and producing rockets, launchers, mortars, small arms, even drones. They deliberately placed them in schools, hospitals, mosques and private homes to better expose their own civilians,\u201d writes Krauthammer. He concludes that Hamas does not expect to harm Israel with its rockets but only to draw Israeli fire to kill its own people, mostly children, so as to garner world sympathy.
\nHopefully if the Israeli people have learned anything from this latest round of fighting it is that a two state solution is an impossibility when you are dealing with those who are only working for your complete destruction. It appears that the state of Israel given to the Jewish people by God, must be constantly on its guard. As the world becomes an increasingly colder place for the Jewish people, this is the one place where they know they can find safety and security even if it is at a price, a very dear price.<\/p>\n

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By Barry Rosenfeld Read Part 1 \u00a0 Read Part 2 Read Part 3 The following is the fourth and final part of a short history of the Gaza Strip and Israel\u2019s involvement with it. With regard to the question as to whether or not the establishment of a two state solution might not resolve the more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2046,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[67,355,356,75,135,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-2033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israeli-news","8":"tag-gaza","9":"tag-gaza-withdrawal","10":"tag-gush-katif","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-israel-news","13":"tag-news-from-jerusalem","14":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2033"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2047,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033\/revisions\/2047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejerusalemgiftshop.com\/israelnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}