GAZA UNDER ATTACK-CIVILIANS UPROOTED- HOMES DEMOLISHED: NOT BY ISRAEL SO THE WORLD IS SILENT
Once more, Gaza is under attack.Now the World Fiddles as Gaza Cries By Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn
Gazans are being evicted from their homes, a curfew has been imposed, and a crossing that enables Gazans to leave has been closed. Yet the world is silent. Strange, is it not?
Hundreds of residents along one of Gaza’s borders have suddenly been ordered to evacuate, on just two days’ notice. Their homes are to be demolished. There is no talk of compensation. Why isn’t the United Nations Security Council denouncing this outrage?
Because it is the Egyptian government, and not Israel’s, that is doing the evicting. See The New York Times, Oct. 28 edition.
The Egyptians have decided they need a buffer zone along their border with Gaza. They don’t trust the Hamas regime, which they say has been assisting terrorists who have been attacking Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. Apparently Cairo does not accept the Obama Administration scripted fiction that the new Hamas-PA government is run by “technocrats.” Egypt understands that a Hamas-appointed “technocrat” is, first and foremost, a functionary of Hamas.
Of course, the Egyptians could establish their buffer zone along their own side of the border, without evicting anyone. But why should they yield their own territory when it is Hamas creating the menace? So they are kicking out Gazans who reside along the border, and setting up a buffer zone that will be nine miles long, and with water-filled trenches that will be more than 500 yards wide — that’s half a kilometer, or five football fields.
Yet nary a word of protest from the White House, nor any suggestion of delaying any U.S. arms deliveries to Egypt.
That’s not all. In response to the recent attacks in Sinai, the Egyptians have imposed a dawn-to-dusk curfew all along the Egypt-Gaza border. In other words, no resident of that part of Gaza can leave his or her home after dark, for any reason.
Yet Thomas Friedman has not written any columns in The New York Times with heart-rending stories about Gaza women being forced to give birth in unsanitary conditions because they can’t travel to the local hospital after sundown.
Egypt has also shut down the only crossing along the Egyptian side of the Gaza border. With the passageway closed, no Gazan can get out.
So where are the snarky political cartoonists depicting Gaza as a Holocaust-era ghetto? Nor is Secretary of State John Kerry warning of Egypt becoming ostracized and isolated in the world. Western academics are not threatening to boycott their Egyptian counterparts. J Street is not lobbying for U.S. intervention against this new assault on Gaza.
It’s the ultimate example of the double standard. Israel does it, the world screams. Egypt does it, the world is silent. Could the hypocrisy of the international community be any more blatant?
Evidently, if they genuinely cared about the well-being of the residents of Gaza, the White House would be holding up arms to Egypt — exactly as it held up Hellfire missiles to Israel. If he were sincerely concerned about Gaza, Thomas Friedman would be blasting the Egyptians on the op-ed page of The New York Times. If they truly wanted to help the Gazans, J Street’s lobbyists would be working overtime to get the Obama Administration to intervene against Cairo.
But the truth is that they don’t really care about Gazans’ welfare at all. The Palestinian cause interests them only if it presents an opportunity to bash Israel. When Palestinians are squeezed by their fellow-Arabs, the State Department and the pundits and the “peace camp” fall silent.
So let’s all learn an important lesson from this experience. Israel and its supporters should stop worrying about the latest Thomas Friedman diatribe or the latest J Street conference or the latest unfriendly remarks by the Obama White House and the State Department. They will go on blaming Israel — and excusing Egypt and other Arab countries — no matter what. Nothing Israel does will ever satisfy them — so there’s no point in trying.
Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn are members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America.
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