Which Would You Choose?

Here are two articles that show the difference between living under Palestinian rule and living under Israeli rule.

The first one describes the human rights situation in Gaza over the past year.

Palestinian Mazen Shahin says the torture he suffered in a month spent as a prisoner of the Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip was worse than the several years he spent in Israeli jails.

He says he will never forget his time in Mashtal prison: "It was a lot worse than being in jail in Israel," he told AFP at his modest home in Khan Yunis refugee camp in the south of the Palestinian territory.

The Israelis arrested him four times and he spent "several years" behind bars inside the Jewish state, said Shahin, a member of the Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

Sadly, the article buys the Hamas propaganda that this was carried out by rogue elements of the security forces and that the public can now complain if they wish. No doubt, those who dare to complain will be given their own private tours of the Hamas penal system. A place where:

He says he had the soles of his feet beaten with heavy electric cables. His captors also made him suffer the indignity of shaving his head and beard.

"They told me I was not a religious person and that I wasn't allowed to pray because God would not hear my prayers,"

By the looks of it, Meshtal prison makes Abu Ghraib look like a sanatorium.

The second article deals with Palestinian collaborators with Israel who now live in Sedorot - the same town that is constantly bombarded by missiles from Gaza. According to the Guardian - a newspaper that rarely if ever has something positive to say about Israel, these collaborators unanimously asserted like "Samir" that:

"I'm very happy that I helped the state of Israel. Here everything is straightforward, not like with the Arabs. Here there is a law and there are rights."

So basically, people prefer to live under a rain of deadly missiles rather than live in Gaza under Islamofascists. Ponder that the next time you hear about how some leftist, "peace-loving" organization or Carterite has expressed their solidarity with the Palestinians. Too bad Rachel Corrie did not live long enough to enjoy the type of hospitality reserved for Alan Johnson and Mazen Shahin.

Viva al Nakba!

Although this time of the year should arguably be a time of reflection for what the Palestinians call al Nakba or "The Catastrophe" (i.e. the day on which the State of Israel was created), the Palestinians have once again shown their political maturity by killing at least 40 of their compatriots in the last four days. In running street battles that would not be out of place in Baghdad or war-torn Beirut, Fatah and Hamas are squaring off for the second time in less than a year.

Once again we are witnessing the complete dissolution of law and order in the Gaza Strip. As I have pointed out in other posts, this has been going on for some time now, but has only been sparsely covered by the media because most reporters have shied away following Alan Johnson's abduction back in March. With the resignation of Hani Qawasmeh, the Interior Minister, one can be assured that this situation will only continue to deteriorate.

I find it is interesting then that one would never know that all this chaos was going judging by the websites of such perennial whistle blowers as the International Solidarity Movement for Palestine (ISM) or Human Rights Watch (HRW). Of course this is not to say that these organizations have forgotten Israel/Palestine, rather that their attention is clearly elsewhere.

For example, the ISM is an organization noted for its history of using "human shields" to prevent activities that they oppose. In the past this has meant concerted efforts to prevent the bombing of Iraq and the positioning of activists in the path of backhoes laying the groundwork for the Israeli security fence. In fact, it was this type of activism that led to the death of Rachel Corrie, the American martyr and patron saint of the anti-Israel leftist movement in the United States.

So I find it interesting that the ISM website sees fit to decry the situation at Bir Zeit University, which is suffering under "...the full weight of Israel’s occupation" which has:

"...brought down on it intermittent months-long closures and restrictions that still threaten its existence today. Other Palestinian universities also face continual punitive action from the Israeli military, all deliberately designed to create fear and uncertainty in the students and academics in order to undermine the universities themselves." (See here)

Apparently it is irrelevant that Bir Zeit has long been a stronghold for radicalism that counts Marwan Barghouti and the Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayash as graduates or that the list of Palestinian universities they are refering to includes An-Najah University. An-Najah, which claims to be "the largest, oldest, and most prestigious university in Palestine" famously distinguished itself as the place where students took time out of their busy class schedules to memorialize the horrific Sbarro restaurant bombing. But this is ancient history and does not address the charge that Israel is "deliberately" creating "fear and uncertainty" to "undermine the universities".

Of course what the ISM fails to mention is that on Sunday, the same day that they issued this repudiation of Israel, Ali Sharif, a religious studies professor from Gaza, was kidnapped from his home and beaten up by masked gunmen who took him and drove off. As he was a Hamas supporter, it is assumed that those kidnapping him were from the Fatah or PLO. In fact, the ISM also fails to mention that all the universities in the Gaza strip have been closed down since the fighting started.

Human Rights Watch, which also has a checkered history with regards to both Israel and Jews (see for example) has usually been quick to expose what it has called Israel's "war crimes" or to condemn it for being on the wrong side of international law. For example, when Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader and co-founder of the Hamas terrorist organization, was assassinated in 2004, HRW chose to focus on the bystanders (some of which were his bodyguards) that were killed rather than the fact that he was basically using the civilian population as human shields. At the time, the head of HRW, Kenneth Roth decried, "Israeli indifference to the same body of international human rights and humanitarian law that prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians."

Yet now that Gaza has unravelled and mortars are flying in civilian areas, there seems to be no outrage and certainly no expectation that either Hamas or Fatah show restraint. It used to be said that higher standards were expected of Israel because it controlled the Gaza Strip and was a government and thus bound by international agreements. Well, Israel is long gone from the streets of Gaza and both Hamas and Fatah are the government yet the double standard continues.

So I will wait to see if either the ISM or Human Rights Watch bother to mention the shooting of an ambulance today that led to the brain death of the paramedic. Will they send out action alerts to their members to serve as human shields between Fatah and Hamas? And will they campaign against the numerous checkpoints set up in Gaza by the opposing sides on the grounds that they limit the movement of the Palestinian public and thus amounts to collective punishment?

Unfortunately, condemning Palestinians for the widespread and systemic human rights abuses does little for your "street creds" in the liberal "progressive" movement. Even worse, it could cost you your friends and funding. No, it is much better to close an eye to the catastrophe that is Gaza and blame Israel for everything. Viva al Nakba!