If you recall, when chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was in Israel to celebrate his son’s Bar Mitzvah, he invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington to meet the President. Then the IDF encountered a group of militants on the Mavi Marmara and killed 9 in self defense. Netanyahu then cancelled his U.S. trip. Now President Abbas’s trip is coming today:
Abbas was supposed to follow Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the White House. But the Israeli leader canceled his visit last week to return to Israel after the raid, which killed nine civilians.
Now this is clearly misleading. “[N]ine civilians?”
David Bernstein went through the competing claims of what happened and concluded:
The first several to land were beaten to pulp and taken hostage, and, at least according to Israeli reports, the oncoming commandos were fired on, and also beaten. At this point, the commandos who were not captive began to use lethal force to defend themselves, rescue their comrades, and gain control of the ship.
So these weren’t exactly innocents. Whether or not the commandos should have been sent in is a separate matter. However to call those killed civilians is misleading.
So Abbas will go first. He and Obama will discuss how Palestinians should proceed with peace talks. But they will also talk about ways to improve the situation in the Gaza Strip, which has been under Israeli blockade in one form or another for five years.
This could be interesting because Aussie Dave noticed that Fatah doesn’t believe that there’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza:
Azzam al-Ahmed, a top Fatah official in the West Bank, was quoted over the weekend as saying that he was opposed to the lifting of the blockade on the Gaza Strip until Hamas agreed to end the dispute with his faction.
Ahmed stressed that there was no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip because the PA government was sending aid through Israeli border crossings.
Responding to a quote from Der Spiegel:
“Sure, there’s enough to eat in Gaza, but poverty is more than that. Poverty is when the 15,000 people who graduate from the university each year have to beg for jobs as waiters, when an extended family lives in a single room and when the hospital lacks critical drugs. That’s poverty.”
Lee Smith, author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, observed:
There is not an Arab state where this is not true of college graduates – especially now after the financial crisis has affected the Gulf states and made it harder for Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, Moroccans etc to find work in the Gulf.
and more generally, Smith continues:
However, this ignorance of what the Arab world looks like is a consistent problem you see in the Western press where reporters on Israeli-Palestinian issues generally have very little experience of the region outside of Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. So instead of comparing Gaza to a Cairo slum like Imbaba, or Ramallah to an Arab capital like Damascus, they are compared to Tel Aviv, West Jerusalem and Western cities.
I would add that Israel also has plenty of homegrown critics who provide reporters with plenty of fodder to bolster these misimpressions.
So perhaps what needs to be discussed then, is not why a chef can’t get the ingredients for beef stroganoff or the overcrowding – i.e. the humanitarian crisis – but why Hamas persists in its rejection of Israel.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
