The link on the front page reads ‘Hamas militants fire rockets into Israel’, and the article has a different headline that reads ‘Deadly infighting rages in Gaza’. The battle is one sided, with Hamas sending mortar rounds into the compound of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is a member of the Fatah party. Fatah was voted out of power in favor of Hamas, and the Palestinian state has since been cut off from international aid. Israel’s wall continues to zig and zag its way through the West Bank, and the checkpoints continue to prevent Palestinian Muslims and Christian citizens from engaging in the commerce that allows them to live. New Israeli settlements in Gaza continue to be built.
There is not enough money for the Palestinian state to pay for teachers, police, civil servants or to maintain the infrastructure. This was possible up until Hamas was elected. It wasn’t an attack on Israeli troops or civilians after Hamas was elected that prompted this cutoff of foreign humanitarian aid, but merely the outcome of the election itself. Almost as if the United States had absolutely zero capacity for understanding the fact that there would be no chance for a viable state to emerge or function in Palestine without this money, the amount of State Department information released regarding this ongoing situation is scant, and what we are made aware of in terms of US policy in the region, is motivated more by our own domestic politics than the reality for those living their lives in the midst of all this misery.
I point out the mistake on Yahoo’s front page this morning for the simple fact that by characterizing the events of the past couple days in Gaza as an attack on Israel, the US population is less likely to understand that what has actually broken out is a civil war. Equivalent to Democrats in Congress launching mortar rounds aimed at the White House, for the Palestinian state, this outbreak of violence is symptomatic of what our policy has wrought so far. From Gaza to the West Bank is a chunk of Israel that Palestinians are loathe to attempt crossing very often, if at all, and from within the isolated Gaza Strip, a civil war has ensued...one that will end the lives of innocent civilians, and for what?
Our country has kept the Saudi royal family in billions up to their necks for generations, yet we can’t provide the same amount of aid we had before? Saudi Arabia has been and will continue to export the capital necessary to carry out terrorist operations in several countries, yet they are excused and dealt with as equals (in spite of their historic failings in backing US counter-terrorism plays within the region), and the Palestinians, who are not sitting on oil, have nothing to fall back on in terms of the US besides unjustified condemnation and punishment. Who is the loser in all of this? If you believe it is somehow Israel, you are misinformed. The Palestinian government is killing itself, and since Israel happens to own everthing that surrounds these people, couldn’t it be possible that the real story isn’t at all about how it was somehow a "victim" here?
Couldn’t our news agencies call this one correctly? After they failed to look out for our interests in the run-up to our occupation of Iraq, perhaps they owe us one?