Palestinian Lives Don’t Matter*
*Unless Israel is to blame.
Opinion Columnist
· March 21,2019
The peopleof the Gaza Strip are protesting again, and soldiers are shooting again, andcivilians are being victimized again. Only this time you may have missed thestory, because these protests barely rated a buried paragraph in most Westernnews accounts.
That’s odd:Some media outlets are prepared to devote months of journalistic effort inorder to trace the trajectory of a single bullet that accidentally kills aPalestinian — provided the bullet is Israeli.
Thedifference this time is that the shots are being fired by Hamas, the militantIslamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, when it usurped power from itsrivals in the Fatah movement in a quick and dirty civilwar. Since then, no genuine elections have been held, and no dissent brooked.
The current round of demonstrations, which beganlast week, comes in reaction to years of Hamas’s economic mismanagement, pricehikes and recent tax increases. This is not for lack of funds on Hamas’s part:Since 2012, the group has taken in over a billion dollars from Qatar alone to pay the costs of fuel, humanitarian aid and civil-servant salaries.
Where thatmoney goes is another question. In 2014, The Wall Street Journalreported that Hamas had spent some $90 million building attack tunnels into Israel, at an average cost of nearly $3 million a tunnel. The material devoted to each tunnel, the Journal reported, was “enough to build 86 homes, seven mosques, six schools or 19 medical clinics.” Three wars against Israel, each started by Hamas, have also taken their toll in lives, injuries, infrastructure and isolation.
All this hasmeant suffering and deprivation for the people of Gaza, irrespective ofanything Israel does. In February, Amnesty Internationalreported that the Palestinian journalist Hajar Harb had been tried in absentia by Hamas for publishing a report on al-Araby TV detailing alleged corruption in the Ministry of Health. Hamas officials have also reportedly enriched themselves by controlling the underground trade in goods, from poultry to furniture to cars, between the Strip and Egypt.
And soGazans are making their despair known. Hundreds took to the streets last week,only to be shot at, clubbed and arrested by Hamas security forces.
“Thecrackdown on freedom of expression and the use of torture in Gaza has reachedalarming new levels,” noted Saleh Higazi of Amnesty. Incidentsinclude the arrest of human-rights activists, the beating and jailing ofmore than 15 local journalists, and violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators“using sound grenades, batons, pepper spray, live ammunition and physicalassaults.”
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Hamas bills itself asa “resistance” movement, and such movements, from the Irish Republican Army tothe Viet Cong to Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, tend to behave in strikingly similar ways:fanatical, thuggish, militaristic, hypocritical and corrupt.
To thesegroups, liberation rarely means more than the replacement of some form offoreign occupation with local despotism. They avow democracy but never hold atruly fair election. They create secret police, parallel security services,politburos, inner- and outer-party structures. They make war on their neighborsto distract from their inevitable failure to create prosperity at home. Theirleaders preach struggle and martyrdom while living lavishly.
Nor shouldyou be surprised by the scantiness of Western coverage: It would complicate aconvenient narrative of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that holds that theformer isn’t just the principal oppressor, but the only one. That feeds intothe larger progressive fiction that the great crimes of the post-World War IIworld are the ones the West perpetrated on the rest of the world. In fact, farworse were the crimes of non-Westerners — Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein,Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Nicolás Maduro — perpetrated against their own people.
The same goesfor the Palestinians. More have died in Syria in the last decade, mainly on account of the depredations of the ostensibly pro-Palestinian regime of Bashar al-Assad, than have been killed by Israel. And Palestinians continue to be the victims of leaders who see no reason to subject themselves to regular elections, or financial audits, or criminal investigations, or any other mechanism of political or moral accountability.
That lack ofaccountability is chiefly a Palestinian failure. But it’s abetted by Westernjournalism that, with some honorable exceptions, for too long has been depressingly incurious about any form of Palestinian suffering for which Israel cannot be held responsible. That is sometimes a function of ideological bias, but it is also a failure of basic reporting.
Israelis andtheir friends abroad often complain about slanted coverage that seems to findfault in everything they do, while finding excuses in everything theiradversaries do. If the protests in Gaza demonstrate anything, it’s thatPalestinians hardly benefit from the coverage, either.
Palestinianlives and livelihoods should matter despite who harms them. A worldthat shrugs at Hamas’s abuse of its own people merely licenses the abuse tocontinue, unchecked.
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