By Evelyn Gordon
Commentary Magazine
May 1, 2013
-- Having complained frequently about the media’s failure to report
anything that might detract from their preferred narrative of
Israel-as-villain, I’m delighted to discover that one British paper is
bucking this trend. The Telegraph ran two articles this week describing
the miserable situation in Hamas-run Gaza. And as reporter Phoebe
Greenwood makes clear, the culprit isn’t Israel, but the elected Hamas
government.
The first describes
how Hamas has introduced military training into the curriculum of Gaza
high schools–after having previously excised sports from said curriculum
on the grounds that there wasn’t time for it. The mandatory weekly
classes include learning how to shoot a Kalashnikov rifle; students who
so choose can learn more advanced skills, like throwing grenades, at
optional two-week camps. The article also includes video footage of
Hamas militants demonstrating their skills for the students on a school
playground: They carry out a mock raid on an Israel Defense Forces
outpost, killing one soldier and capturing another, then demolish the
outpost with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Needless to say, educating schoolchildren to view Israelis solely through the sights of a rifle doesn’t contribute to peaceful coexistence.
And as Samar Zakout of the Gaza-based human rights groups Al Mezan
noted, it also willfully endangers the students: If Hamas is using
schools as military training bases, they could become targets for
Israeli airstrikes in a future conflict.
But Hamas also engages in more direct forms of abuse, as Greenwood’s second article
makes clear. It describes the victims of Hamas’s modesty patrols. In
April alone, police arrested “at least 41 men” for crimes such as
wearing low-slung pants or putting gel in their hair. Most were brutally
beaten; they also had their heads forcibly shaved. One victim described
being dragged into a police station and seeing “a mountain of hair, it
looked like it had been shaved from 300 heads.” Another described being
beaten on the soles of his feet with a plastic rod “for at least five
minutes. I was crying and screaming with agony. It was the worst pain
I’ve ever felt.”
Yet Greenwood’s articles, unsparing though they are, still leave out one crucial point: The situation isn’t much better in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. There, too, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary arrest for such crimes as insulting PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook. There, too, Palestinian schoolchildren are taught
to view all of Israel, even in the pre-1967 lines, as “stolen”
Palestinian land that must be reclaimed someday. There, too, murderers
of Israelis, like the one who killed a father of five this week, are glorified as “heroes”; the PA even gave the honor of launching
its UN statehood campaign to the proud mother of four sons who are
serving a combined 18 life sentences for murdering Israelis. It’s no
wonder that, according to a new Pew poll, Palestinians are the biggest supporters of suicide bombings in the Islamic world.
This
is the reality journalists and diplomats consistently ignore, because
it disrupts their comfortable theory that Israeli-Palestinian peace
could be made tomorrow if Israel would just cede a little more
territory. But the truth is that Israeli-Palestinian peace will never be
made until Palestinian leaders do two things: stop teaching their
children that killing Israelis is life’s greatest glory, and start
providing their people with a decent life instead.
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