Marin Voice: Hamas must pay before ceasefire is granted
A ceasefire in Gaza is a bad idea. In recent days, we have seen students from university campuses around the country, protests in Washington, D.C., the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and even Pope Francis all echoing the same line: cease fire. They’re all wrong.
Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 Israelis. Most were shot or killed with rockets. Women were raped and infants were mutilated, while over 200 Israelis and foreigners were taken hostage.
What is a proper response? A few targeted bombings and then a ceasefire seems weak and impotent in reaction to what was the greatest attack on the Jewish faith since the Holocaust. In order to hold true to the promise of “never again,” Hamas cannot remain in power.
Certainly, justice is needed for the Israelis so brutally murdered and abused, but justice is needed for more than just them.
Justice is needed for the people of Gaza. The 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are forced to live under horrid conditions, chiefly because their civil authority, Hamas, is clearly more interested in killing Israelis than ensuring the welfare of the people they rule.
Israel granted self-government to Gaza in 2006 and fully withdrew its military. In the free elections that followed, Hamas, a terrorist organization with the openly stated goal of the destruction of Israel, won. In 2007, Hamas assumed absolute authority, breaking away from the more moderate Palestinian authority. In reaction to this new terrorist state, Israel and Egypt began a strict blockade of Gaza which persists to this day.
Gaza receives a remarkable amount of foreign aid. The United Nations and the countries of Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the U.S., as well as the European Union, have collectively spent in excess of $10 billion on aid for Gaza in the last decade.
One specific project saw the EU spend nearly 100 million euros on miles of water pipelines so as to provide the people of Gaza with more clean drinking water. Given the numbers, one would think the extremely high amount of foreign aid poured into Gaza would be enough to stabilize the area; however it is not. The problem is that Hamas redirects the aid for use in terrorist activities.
Hamas itself released a video earlier this month showing their process of digging up those EU-funded water pipes and refashioning them into rockets to be fired at Israeli civilians. Hamas is open and prideful of their willful destruction of internationally donated infrastructure meant to help the Palestinian people in order to retool it to kill Israelis. How can a ceasefire stop that process?
Allowing Hamas to remain the authority in the Gaza Strip does nothing to change the situation for the better for Gazan civilians. It allows the cancer of Hamas to persist in its oppression of the people of Gaza and in the unjustifiable slaughter of Israelis. For the people of Gaza to be free, and the people of Israel to be safe, Hamas must go.
Calling for a ceasefire is a utopian, naïve idea that draws a false equivalence as to what each side of the conflict is trying to do. Hamas wants to kill Israelis, and happily disregards the detrimental effects of this effort on their own people.
Israel wants a government in Gaza that will not kill Israeli civilians, and ideally manage the Gaza Strip well enough that Gaza can rise to join the international community of states.
Both sides are not morally equivalent; they don’t have remotely similar goals.
Demanding a ceasefire on the part of university students, politicians and many other protestors accomplishes just one thing: inflation of their own egos. It’s a facile position that grants unearned virtue. Sure, every good person wants peace, and calling for an immediate ceasefire is an effort-free way to show that they’re good people too; it’s inconvenient that the geopolitical reality gets in the way.
A ceasefire is a possibility. Once Hamas is removed from power, and a competent government is installed that will actually take care of the people in Gaza, properly administer international aid, and not reroute that aid in order to murder innocent Israelis, then we can have a ceasefire.
Marcus Gerstein, of Corte Madera, is a local business owner earning a master’s degree in international affairs at American University’s School of International Service.