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Hamas, Not Israel, Is to Blame for the Latest Bloodshed

(Spectator-UK) Bassem Eid - I was born in the Jordanian-occupied Old City in Jerusalem and lived in a UN refugee camp from 1966 until 1999. In 1996 I founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring group. With my background, you might assume that I am against Israel's current military actions, but this could not be further from the truth. The blame for the bloodshed lies solely at the feet of Hamas. Those who wish to divert attention from Hamas war crimes would like to blame the latest conflict on a complicated legal dispute in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. But this was a private matter between Jews who have a property deed from the 1800s and the residents of four homes who have refused to pay rent. This is little more than a landlord-tenant squabble and cannot be framed as "ethnic cleansing." Hamas is not fighting for a human rights cause; they are committing war crimes to boost their political standing. Hamas sees a lopsided body count as a positive development, as it allows them to claim that Israel is the aggressive party in the conflict they started. Western media reporting out of Gaza is not honest. Hamas tightly controls all press access and foreign media have the choice of reporting the news the way Hamas tells them to, or not being allowed into Gaza at all. Almost all of them choose the former. 73 years have passed since Israel was established. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan, and the UAE all understand that Israel is a permanent feature of the Middle East. Unfortunately, many Arabs, including most Palestinians, still deny this obvious truth. Obsessing over the Israeli-Palestinian issue has been a disaster for the Arab world: it has held back our development for generations and cost the Palestinian people dearly. Instead of focusing our wealth and talent on creating a better life for us, our leaders have spent decades fighting Israel.
2021-05-20 00:00:00
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