Hamas

 

Of ocurse I am going to take the opportunity to talk about the Hamas attack on Israel.

 

First, I'd like to talk about my background, or baggage, regarding the country.  I have lived in Israel, some years ago.  This was not for religious reasons; I spent several months there working on a movie.  During pre-production, weeks of location scouting and shooting the movie, I was all over the country, and spent a fair amount of time in the West Bank, where we also shot.  This included a lot of places that normal tourists would not see, including predominantly Arab areas such as East Jerusalem, the Arab quarter of the old city, Ramla and the southern part of Jaffa, which is predominantly Arab.  It also included heavily Orthodox areas like Mea Shearim.  I dealt with Israeli Arabs, Palestinians and Bedouins. 

 

Here are a few things I believe I learned there:  First of all, the Palestinians I knew were perfectly normal people with the same interest in living a safe, secure life as people everywhere else have.  Sure, long established brainwashing tactics seem to convince a steady stream of young victims to give their lives in futile acts of terrorism, but these certainly do not represent the people I knew.  God knows, the right in my country has also succeeded in generating a seemingly endless supply of crazed terrorists, without them being anything but a tiny minority of the population.

 

Second, I saw a country that works better as a multiethnic culture than almost anywhere else I have ever been.  All Israeli citizens are guaranteed by law equal rights.  We have heard the word "apartheid" virtually welded to the name of Israel, but in fact, Israeli society and law represent the exact opposite of apartheid.  I spoke of Palestinian victims; let me now speak of the willing suckers throughout the world that, without a shred of personal experience of Israel, have accepted a malicious lie, one rendered even more hateful by the fact that every one of the Arab countries that surround Israel practices open apartheid, something of apparently no concern to a single one of these people who ignorantly spit out the calumny against Israel.

 

Is there racial prejudice in Israel?  Yes there is, as there is almost everywhere.  But let me tell you that it is nowhere as intense as, for example, another place I have visited to work on a movie: the Mississippi Delta.  Race hatred is many times worse there, but in the narrative, financed by billions of dollars of Arab oil money, Israel is the most hateful country on earth.  The accusation that Israel practices apartheid is a vicious lie.  But like all right wing lies, the constant repetition of it year after year leads many people to fall for it. 

 

What is the appropriate response to this war of hatred?  Here are my initial suggestions.

 

First, Israel has provided electricity and water to Gaza for decades.  It has now become intolerable for Israel to aid the war against them this way.  This is one action that has already been taken.  The Palestinians receive more foreign aid than the entire continent of Africa.  Let them use that money to provide these services, demonstrating for once that they are not subhuman savages incapable of living on their own, instead of extorting help from their enemies.  In particular, the Sinai desert, right across the Egyptian border, is an area ideally suited to the construction of solar power plants, such as we see in the desert now outside of Los Angeles.  These could have been built cheaply and easily over the years in cooperation with Gaza’s Egyptian allies. Why has Hamas not spent the money to do this long ago, removing a major dependence on Israel?  And much of Gaza’s need for water could have been met by the construction of desalinization plants, a technology developed in Israel, which Israel is happy to share with the world. Let Hamas prove they are capable of running their own country without extorting aid from its enemies.

 

Second, here is something that few people realize:  80% of Palestine’s foreign sales are to Israel.  This must stop immediately; Israel must make it a crime to purchase any products from Gaza.  Once again, the insanity that these people survive only through the largesse of their enemies must stop.  Let those who supposedly support the Gaza government buy their products.  This Israeli action will bring an almost immediate complete collapse to what is already a nearly dead economy, but that’s what happens when you gun down people at a concert, and rape and kill old women and drag their bodies through the streets, or kidnap children and keep them in animal cages, threatening to kill them. 

 

Third, it is time for the world to recognize that Israel left Gaza 18 years ago.  There is no Israeli “occupation” of Gaza; that claim is just one more insane piece of lying propaganda.  The miserable economic condition of the people of Gaza is totally the result of the corrupt theft of its resources by their own government.  It is the responsibility of the people of Gaza to deal with this situation.  Only a decent government will ever bring them a decent life; nothing Israel can do will change this.

 

Finally, no one, ever again, in the entire world, who talks about the “open air prison” or the Israeli “blockade” should be tolerated in decent society.  Anyone who claims that they cannot now see the result of leaving the border between Israel and Gaza open, or of failing to monitor boat traffic in and out of Gaza is a liar.  As long as Hamas remains in control in Gaza, Israel can never allow a single person or vehicle to enter or leave the country without being sure that it carries no military personnel or equipment.  It would be insane for any country to do anything different in the face of a genocidal enemy like Hamas; no country but Israel would ever be criticized for taking this action.

 

Finally, it is a fatal error to ignore the fact that the Hamas covenant calls not just for expelling every Jew from Israel, but it also calls for the extermination of every Jew in the world.  Hamas must change that, and acknowledge the right of Jews to live.  Otherwise, they are nothing but a genocidal cult of monsters, that are the enemy of every decent person in the world.

 

And that, in my opinion, is just the beginning.  Only the people of Gaza can truly stop this insane criminality.  Israel must do what is necessary to force them to face reality.  Notice that I have not suggested any military actions here.  I know I am incapable of making judgments about that, and I know that military actions in the past, even when clearly unavoidable, have failed to stop the perverted combination of fanaticism and corruption that drives the absentee Hamas leaders.  Where military action makes sense, I am sure the Israelis will act.  I am just trying to consider what non-military actions are possible.

 

And I would like to add one more demand to this list.  Throughout the world, refugees are defined as people who have themselves fled from wars, famines, or other intolerable situations.  Throughout the world, that is, except in Israel, where a perverse act by the UN group that handles Palestinian affairs has redefined the word to include all descendants of those people who actually fled, resulting in generations of helpless victims who are held by the millions in concentration camps run by their Arab brothers in surrounding countries, including Gaza, where they are subject by their own people to barbaric conditions that destroy their lives and fill them with hopelessness and hatred.  Meanwhile, the real Jewish refugees who were ethnically cleansed from all Arab countries were, decades ago, incorporated into Israeli society and enabled to move on with their lives. It is time to rectify this injustice.  The real “refugees” from Israel, insofar as they ever existed, are almost one hundred percent now dead. There is no “right of return” for the current millions of Arabs held in the most barbaric of conditions decade after decade.  These people need to be incorporated in the countries where their families have now lived for generations, not in concentration camps but as equal citizens, the way Israel did with its Jewish refugees. 

 

Well, probably a waste of time for me to have written this.  However, after only a couple of days thought, this is what I would like to see.