Why I Don’t Give a Damn About Gaza
Ethan Epstein sees hypocrisy in the silence that prevails among leftists over a blockade far more total and deadly than anything ever imposed on Hamas:
For example, Gazans are permitted to receive items such as medical equipment and medicine, insecticide, coffee, tea, and, best of all, hummus paste. North Koreans, on the other hand, live under a total blockade, one imposed by their government. They are only permitted to receive what their government allows them ““ and that isn’t much.
The food system in North Korea, for example, is administered entirely by the regime. A network of private markets had sprung up in the country over the past decade, but a “currency revaluation” late last year utterly decimated the marketplaces. The situation is the same for all material goods: all are controlled, and doled out, by the regime and its cadres. There is no free flow of goods. This quite plainly constitutes a punishing and beggaring blockade. Yet, for the most part, the world remains silent in the face of this. Instead, its heaps reprobation after reprobation on the Jewish State for its blockade of Gaza.
The North Korean blockade is a real blockade, one that’s causing infinitely more pain to far more people:
Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.
“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.Â
North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.
Interviews in the past month with eight North Koreans who recently left their country — a prison escapee, illegal traders, people in temporary exile to find work in China, the traveling wife of an official in the ruling Workers’ Party — paint a haunting portrait of desperation inside North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, and of growing resentment toward its erratic leader, Kim Jong-il. [N.Y. Times, Sharon LaFrianiere]
That article is an absolute must-read — every last word. There’s also a slide show accompanying it. It’s an especially welcome story coming from the New York Times, which like most of the news media, has traditionally ignored the greater humanitarian sorrow of North Korea out of a monomaniac interest in endlessly ineffective nuclear diplomacy. Show me that anything on this scale is going on in Gaza, and I’ll concede that it’s a story of comparable humanitarian interest.
So if a consistent humanitarian approach doesn’t explain the motive for all of this global anti-anti-Hamas ululation — least defensibly by South Koreans — then I can only wonder what motivates the undue interest of reporters in this story (Helen Thomas being the obvious exception we no longer wonder about)? Suddenly, it’s as if every reporter, editor, and think tank fellow in the Western Hemisphere believes that I should care as deeply about Gaza as they obviously do.
Sorry, I don’t. Or can’t. I know too much. In the context of all of the innocent life that’s lost every day in the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, or North Korea, I’m not nearly as bothered as most Reuters correspondents who cover that region obviously are about the deaths of nine people who seem to have gotten exactly the martyrdom they were looking for. Unlike many of those correspondents, I can’t overlook (much less get on board with) the Hamas agenda of rocketing villages, sending teenagers to suicide-bomb buses, advocating the total extermination of Israel, and most importantly, of keeping Palestinians poor, ignorant, and under the heel of Hamas. I care much more about the stupidity of otherwise intelligent people like, say, Daniel Drezner, who now compares President’s Obama’s response to Israel’s behavior (criticism of the Israeli “blockade,” refusal to judge the flotilla incident without getting “all of the facts,” and more aid to the Fatah government in the West Bank) to China’s response to the Cheonan Incident and the murder of 46 South Korean sailors (deliberate indifference to the facts and unqualified support for Kim Jong Il). That’s a comparison that’s only possible in an environment of near-complete ignorance and apathy about North Korea, a topic on which Drezner has never demonstrated much depth of understanding in any event.
I’m sure some of this ambivalence devolves from my experience years ago, when I stayed in a Hamas-controlled village in East Jerusalem, which might as well have been in the West Bank, and got my fill of Hamas ideology, first hand and without any selective journalistic interpretation. Sure, the methods Hamas advocated, such as driving buses off of cliffs, were anarchic. Yes, their world views were based on a conspiracy-based alternative reality. But fill this rational void with dispassionate Teutonic efficiency, and the ideology would have been familiar enough to Einsatzgrupp commander, or for that matter, to the Grand Mufti: kill the Jews and drive them out. This, of course, is largely overlooked in the coverage of Hamas that portrays it as something like the militant wing of the Salvation Army, but which zooms in on every brutish excess, alleged brutish excess, and perceived brutish excess of the Israelis. The Israelis, for their own part, ought to know by now that they’re being watched as though they were driving through rural Alabama with Massachusetts license plates (unless, for similar reasons, they’ve concluded that trying to mollify “world opinion” is pointless). And for what it’s worth, some of the Israeli behavior I witnessed between the village of Surbahir and Lod Airport struck me as needlessly heavy-handed. This doesn’t absolve those who support Hamas’s agenda of explaining where, precisely, this will all end.
When I visited Surbahir during the early years of Hamas’s rise, the Palestinian response to the heavy-handedness I witnessed was mostly limited to protests, rock-throwing, and tire-burning, so I maybe the darkness of its rhetoric didn’t make as deep an impression on me as it should have. In fact, I came away from that experience, in some ways, much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than I am now. That was before they threw away many chances for an enduring peace, workable self-government, and peace with their neighbors and with each other. Since then, I’ve seen just how hard the Palestinians have worked to maintain their treasured state of squalor, hate, and war; and how thoroughly they’ve demonstrated their incapacity for effective self-government, or for compromise with Israel or each other. A much greater influence on me was Hamas’s adoption of bus bombings as a method of “protest,” although I don’t think anything really depleted my reserve of sympathy for the Palestinians quite as much as this:
Now, I can understand that for plenty of Europeans, Canadians, and American “progressives,” all of those things would have the opposite effect. Then again, maybe a better word than “understand” would be “diagnose.” Just don’t tell me that the largely self-inflicted misery and squalor of people with hearts as evil as this is supposed to be at the top of my personal hierarchy of compassion.
Maybe what bothers me more than anything about this is the unforced error of the Israelis themselves. We often hear that Israel has the world’s most competent and best-equipped military, so I presume they have a sufficient inventory of stun grenades, tear gas, tasers, and other non-lethal weapons. Yet we’ve just watched them blunder into the hands of a group of paraterrorists they saw coming weeks in advance. They ought to have known better than to give such generous gifts to the Helen Thomases of the world.
And in the end, they’ve even managed to get me to write a long post about something I don’t even give a damn about.
Palestinians as a people are often on the wrong side of history. During Israel’s formation, they willingly left their home of their own volition thinking that their Arab “brothers” would drive the Jews to the sea then actually give them back their homes instead of partitioning the lands (the Arabs maintained control of) among themselves.
Wherever they congregate in large numbers, the host country eventually turns on often in a genocidal matter that makes Israeli responses seem mild. In Kuwait, they backed the Saddam strong horse, and they paid for it when Kuwait was liberated and the Palestinians were forcefully expelled by vengeful Kuwaitis. In Jordan, their disregard for Jordanian soveriegnty eventually brought the wrath of the Jordanian army expelling the PLO from Jordan and killed thousands of Palestinian in the process. In Lebanon, their cross border terrorist attacks dragged Israel into Lebanon that resulted in thousands of Palestinian deaths the most famous being the incident where hundreds being executed by Lebanese Christian militia members.
Whatever opinions you have on the Palestinians. We can all agree from an unimpassioned analysis that they are probably the most incompetent National Liberation group ever.
I like how think fox news is credible at all… seriously, are you insane?
So you can only care about one group of people, not both? I don’t understand. Plus, S. Korea isn’t managing the blockade, it’s one country, their own country (North Korea), running the blockade, not an ally of the US like Israel, which is why people think they can do something about it. Send some flotillas to North Korea? Prepare to get blown out of the water no questions asked.
Was it your intention to reinforce my point?
The New York Times article is excellent. I read it in Thursday’s International Herald Tribune and immediately wrote a blog post, which I posted this Friday morning, encouraging people to read it.
I figured that you were likely on the story as well . . .
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
One of my neighbors here in this international dorm, a Palestinian student whose home is in the West Bank, once explained to me his despair that the Arab world is just using the plight of Palestinians for their own political gain and they don’t care about a solution. He directly blames groups like Hamas for most of the troubles inflicted on the people of Gaza, but at the same time, he is keenly aware of the monstrous cruelty inflicted by Israelis on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Much of this was explained to me in January 2009 during a very long discussion — a monologue mostly — when this very nice fellow grad student was obviously in great despair over the Gaza War that had been going on.
He blames everybody.
The post-9/11 video notwithstanding (Hamas supporters probably, but how much do they represent the typical person of East Jerusalem?), I think the everyday Palestinians in Gaza do deserve our sympathy and our efforts to make their situation better. But not for the reasons stated by the flotillistas.
In many ways Hamas’s treatment of the people in the Gaza Strip is as fodder, which starts putting them in the same category as the Pyongyang regime. But the Israeli government is, as you allude to, its own worst enemy at times: Even if its passengers were hell-bent on breaking the blockade, they still attacked it in international waters and then essentially blamed the passengers for fighting back against the attackers.
The people of Gaza deserve a solution to their plight, just as the people of North Korea do. I think you are absolutely right to point out the hypocrisy of the global media that tends to focus so much light on Palestinians while mostly ignoring the plight of North Koreans, but that doesn’t mean that Palestinian people are undeserving of the sympathy they do get.
At any rate, the solution that will solve the problem is not likely to be found anytime soon, however, because the two sides (and their supporters) are too convinced of their own rightness and the other side’s evilness that the problems cannot truly be addressed. Sadly, that’s so often the problem when some issue has entrenched interests as its players or advocates.
Sorry for the rambling.
I don’t think the flotillas would get blown out of the water. “Crazy” North Koreans are way too smart to send needed aid to the bottom of the Sea of Japan. More likely the North Koreans would allow the ships to dock and unload their gifts into trucks waiting to speed to Pyongyang and major military installations, where recipients will weep with gratitude to Dear Leader.
It’s understandable why Arabs and Muslims are so singularly focused on Gaza. What’s not so understandable is why the rest of the world is.
I think part of Joshua’s point is that the same people who choose to narrowly focus on the plight of the Palestinians have no perspective on human suffering considering what is happening in North Korea is several times over in magnitude in the human suffering department.
Also you have to consider the fact that the Palestinian have not endured themselves to any host country where they have congregated in large numbers. The Kuwaitis force ably expelled the Palestinians in mass after the first gulf war from Kuwait b/c the Palestinians backed the Saddam strong horse. The Lebanese despise the Palestinians b/c they bought the Israelis into Lebanon in the 80’s. The Jordanians killed thousands of Palestinians b/c they threatened the existence of the Kingdom with their cross border attacks on Israel.
Beside cheap rhetoric and Pan Arab, greater Islamic politics, history has taught us to be very cynical of any Palestinian “advocacy.”
I don’t think the choice is either:
Give a damn about North Koreans AND NOT Gazans
OR
Give a damn about Gazans AND NOT North Koreans
But you are right in saying that the second one is the default position of the “witless Left” (a subsection of the broader left, some of whom do give a damn about both) and one of the
excuses…prevarications…reasons has already been given above. It is typically the Chomsky position that while they would prefer not to identify themselves with their governments they suddenly decide that North Korea is not “one of us”, not an allied nation such as Israel, and that the policies of the US, the UK and Israel can be criticized and that criticism may lead to policy changes (although simply venting anger and self-righteous indignation is sufficient).They usually ignore the fact that perhaps they can also pressure their government into doing something about the situation in non-allied countries. But frankly, they don’t care about what those countries do to their people because it doesn’t carry the pleasurable, masochistic sting of self-flagellation.
I’m going to steal that.
Feel free but I now fear that “pleasurable, masochistic” contains a redundancy.
I should also add I am not happy to have used the expression “their people” as the implication is that twenty million people belong to Kim Jong-il’s regime or that Cuba’s population belongs to the Castros – a common belief among “witless Leftists” and the isolationist right whose common refrain is “Who are we to say what they do to their people? It’s their culture after all.”
Well I think one of the reasons the Arab-Israeli conflict has such resonance is BECAUSE it is so low-intensity. You can see pictures and names of the guys who were killed last week, it is harder to picture the people in NK. It is also harder to cover the story given that you’ll either get turfed out by China or need Clinton to come bail you out if you try.
Remember what Comrade Stalin said:
“One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic”
BTW, a commenter was alluding to the rumour that the Palestinian celebrations of 9/11 were faked. I know some people have argued that it was some stock footage of them celebrating a peace plan, or something, but these weren’t the only celebrations.
According to this there were celebrations in Nablus and Ramallah on the West Bank as well as in the Shatila refugee camp and a parade in Gaza under the auspices of Hamas. A Palestinian who recorded video of such celebrations was threatened with death if some images were broadcast.
Well, that’s if The Times, AP, AFP and Reuters are to be believed. I suppose the evidence could be dismissed with one swift invocation of the Zionist Octopus:
http://tinyurl.com/l7ljyq
Precisely. The world loves Palestine, but has more ambivalent feelings towards Palestinian Arabs. Is your fellow student a Christian?
I wouldn’t have gone as far as Joshua’s title, but he didn’t refer to Gazans… just Gaza, which can be read as the concept; same as Muslim-majority countries using it to hide their own internal problems (such as Turkey which is killing Kurds at a faster rate).
I wrote about how seething colostomy bags of liberal guilt tend towards paleo-antisemitism. Yet, clearly racist arguments like that aside, part of it I suspect is the impression that Israel, like us, is a Western liberal democracy so required to follow higher standards (still racist, but directed against t’other side).
On the subject of that antisemitic bigot, Helen Thomas, here’s an article on what happened to those Jews who took the old hag’s advice.
Why you would even bother to read one of Drezner’s random stream of consciousness BS blogs with the generous quotes from people who put actual work into their writing is beyond me. That very article caused me to write a flurry of mocking twitter messages on his unique “style.”
Helen Thomas is not an anti-semite. People who claim she is are simpy judeophiles whose tendency towards Pavlovian sycophancy has the gotten the better of their reasoning. What Thomas said was that Jews should go home, to Germany, Poland, or America. Actual anti-semite wants the Jews OUT of their countries because of their perceived nefarious influences on their host societies.
Of course Thomas is also incorrect in simply citing Germany, Poland, and America. A great percentage of Israeli Jews also came from places like Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. None of whom are particularly willing to allow Jews to return to their homes. Then again, the majority of them voluntarily left for Israel in the first place so its a wash.
Whatever you say, Jing. But then, I can’t help wondering how you might react to a dialogue like this:
Now imagine there was no Beijing for the Chinese to go back to because the Chinese there had all been exterminated. Imagine that instead of espousing peaceful methods to petition for limited autonomy, the Dalai Lama fired rockets at Chinese villages, sent bus bombers to Chinese cities, and advocated the expulsion of every last Chinese from Tibet. Would you consider that anti-Chinese? This is why it’s always extra-special fun for me when Chi-bots have opinions about Gaza!
Mr. Stanton my reaction would be a great big yawn. She would simply be a 90 year old probably senile woman reciting the standard Free Tibet litany that everyone and their aunt Sally regurgitates when queried on the topic.
It’s a nice straw man argument you’ve drawn there, not as entertaining as Superman vs Batman what-if’s, but amusing nonetheless. Contrary to your beliefs, its not as far fetched as you imagine it is. The Tibetans are not nearly as pacific as their Western enablers would have everyone believe. The Dalai Lama already advocates for full independence disguised as limited autonomy. He also presently advocates the expulsion of not just every last Chinese from Tibet, but an even greater irredentist Tibetan urheimat. That most people are ignorant of this is because they simply don’t care or are simply too stupid to think critically.
A predictable evasion. You can’t make a principled distinction between the two situations that allows you to bait
the Jews, sorry, the Israelis, and defend China’s colonization of Tibet and Xinjiang.Maybe the Palestinians are onto something. If the Tibetans stopped listening to the Dalai Lama and starting taking out Type 59’s with RPG’s or suicide-bombing buses in Shanghai, they’d also have a chance to throw away multiple chances for a viable two-state solution. But if we take the case of the Muslim Uygurs, you’re right, that’s not so far-fetched.
Chinese will still be filling chatrooms with carefully-monitored, officially approved rants about air strikes on Hamas leaders in Gaza while they’re busing the Uygur population of Urumchi off to resettlement camps.
Pointing out the obvious, that actual anti-semites don’t want Jews relocating to their countries, is now Jew baiting? I wouldn’t want you to strain your neck too hard searching for Hitler in every shadow.
Funny, I don’t actually remember expressing an opinion one way or another about present Israeli policy vis-a-vis Gaza nor drawing analogies between the Palestinians and Tibetans, let alone the Uyghurs. I think you might need more straw.
The point you keep missing is that Jews don’t have “their” country. Also, I question what qualifies you to set the criteria of what an anti-Semite is, particularly if you don’t think Helen Thomas’s advocacy for the expulsion of Jews from the Israel qualifies.
Jing, well it would also help if you actually got the basic facts right. Thomas claimed that Jews should go back to Germany, Poland and America. The only problem with that claim is that a tiny percentage of Jews in Israel come from there. The majority come from Africa and the Middle East. Which is the problem with the latter half of your claim, that they came voluntarily. The vast majority were fleeing countries that were actively persecuting them but then again someone from a country that actively support the most evil countries in the world and thinks that people fleeing one of them aren’t really refugees would have difficulty with these concepts.
Jing, also most anti-semites don’t want Jews out, they prefer to kill them which is another reason why there are not terribly many polish or german jews in Israel…..
The truth is ethnically the Jews/Hebrews/Semites are the twins of the Palastinians/Muslims/Hamites. Both are descendants of a Dad from the Mesopotanian city of Ur.,… One got born by a young northeast African Egyptian woman by name of Hagar, the other a Homogeneously born Hebrew Jewish elderly woman (against all odds) named Sarah.
And to this day, the truth is that the Jews and Palastinians are like North and South Korea in terms of conflict at least. The truth is that Semites and Hamites are genetically identical. Hopefully one day both Jews and Muslims who come from Ur or any other Mesopotanian city in history realize that they are all one people. A beautifull people.
Takes one to know one?