Compassion for Palestinians comes easy in West Hartford

By Chris Powell

Some Jews in Connecticut and around the country are upset with the extent of the destruction Israel is committing in Gaza to uproot the territory’s rulers, the terrorist group Hamas. Participants in a rally in West Hartford last week called for a “ceasefire” and chanted, “Not in my name!”

But Israel isn’t retaliating against Gaza in anyone’s name but its own, and no one in West Hartford has been under rocket fire from Gaza as Israelis have been for years. West Hartford’s compassion for Gazans is easier to come by. 

Yes, the United States provides military assistance to Israel, for which the participants in the West Hartford rally may feel responsible. But then the United States also long has provided “humanitarian” aid to Gaza, which, like the “humanitarian” aid long provided by the United Nations, has enabled the Hamas government to divert Gaza’s resources away from the territory’s people and toward constant war. This aid also has let Gazans think they are not responsible for their government and its longstanding pledge to destroy Israel.

Connecticut columnist Red Jahncke minimizes that pledge. The Hamas platform, he writes, “has never been tested against a reality of Palestinian civilians achieving and enjoying genuine freedom.”

Jahncke is right if he means that no Arab country has ever been free as Americans understand freedom. But he’s wrong if he means that Palestinians living adjacent to Israel have never been free of Israeli occupation. They were free of Israeli occupation prior to 1967, living under Egyptian and Jordanian government until Israel’s Arab neighbors went to war against the Jews again. And Gazans were free of all occupation in 2005 when Israel withdrew from the territory and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization took over.

A year later Gazans had an election in which they rejected the PLO’s Fatah faction and installed Hamas, despite or maybe because of its genocidal pledge. That was the last election held in Gaza. In the West Bank, where the corrupt Fatah faction still holds local authority, the first and last election was held in 2005. It is not Israel that is preventing another election there but Fatah, and if there was another election, Hamas almost certainly would win it despite the destruction it has brought on Gaza.

Indeed, a recent poll of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza found three-quarters of them opposed to accepting Israel. 

That’s why the “two-state solution” has become ridiculous. Through the years Israel repeatedly accepted it just as the Palestinians repeatedly rejected it and still do. President Clinton got Israel to accept a settlement plan that gave Arafat and the PLO nearly everything they demanded, yet they refused — probably because they knew that any Palestinian leaders who settle with Israel will be assassinated by Palestinian irreconcilables just as the peace-favoring Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a Jewish irreconcilable.

Yet prior to last October 7 most Israelis still favored a “two-state solution.” Now few do, and most may not care how heavy-handed their military gets in Gaza nor how badly Israeli settlers abuse Palestinians in the West Bank. Why bother being decent with an adversary pledged to destroy you no matter what?

The peace advocates in West Hartford and elsewhere are evasive and dishonest in calling for a “ceasefire.” Israel has had many “ceasefires” with Gaza over the years and they all ended with more rockets being fired into Israel. No one among the peace advocates in West Hartford called for a ceasefire when Israel was being attacked. A ceasefire has become desirable only now that Israel is defending itself with the overwhelming force and destruction always necessary to win a war.

Why not demand peace itself? That is, why not demand that Gaza raise up a government repudiating Hamas and committing itself to the “two-state solution” most Palestinians still reject? The response to such a call might be illuminating. 

Even now Israel might have trouble rejecting such an offer. But while Gazans are suffering, they are not yet suffering enough to make it. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

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