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Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/11/arab-rulers-america/
Are Arab Rulers With or Against America?
(Washington Times) Clifford D. May - More than 6 million Syrians fled their homeland during the 14-year-long civil war. Other nations took them in. It was the humanitarian thing to do, fulfilling their obligation under international law. Since Hamas initiated a full-blown war against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, hardly any residents of Gaza have managed to flee because no countries - not even Egypt, which borders Gaza - were willing to take them in. It's now become obvious that, for Hamas and its supporters, the Palestinian cause is and always has been the extermination of Israel, the resurrected Jewish homeland, a tiny island amid an ocean of Arab and Muslim states. Palestinians have ruled Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory without preconditions in the hope of securing peace. A kind of two-state solution was in effect. But Hamas built an army and spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a subterranean fortress in which its troops would hide during the war it planned to launch. Early in the conflict, the Biden administration demanded that Israel deliver aid - food and fuel that Hamas would steal. Can you imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill providing aid to Germany before the Nazis surrendered? I strongly suspect that President Trump's proposal was a way of saying to Arab rulers, particularly Egyptian President el-Sissi and Jordanian King Abdullah II: "You don't get to just watch and kibbitz. If you don't like my idea, come up with a better one." The writer is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.