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Edited on Sat Dec-23-06 12:39 AM by The Magistrate
You seem to prefer a loaded phrasing; my preference is for technical accuracy.
You do not address at all the basis of my comments, which is that people cannot expect to act without certain consequences following in train. Elect the government you want, fine: but no one else is required to like that government, approve of it, accept it, applaud it, finance it, or show anything but utter hostility and emnity towards it, if that is their desire or they conceive it to be in their interests. That it was freely elected makes no difference at all to this, it only means that those who voted for it have only themselves to thank for any consequences they find visited upon them, and cannot blame an aristocracy or oligarchy or some other dictatorial elite that made the decision for them.
That Hamas gained much of its popularity through the serving the people, and that its militants enjoy the name of honest men where money is involved, no competent observer of the scene will deny: indeed, a good portion of the vote for Hamas was a protest vote against Fatah corruption. But none of this alters in the slightest the fact that the rejectionist stance of Hamas is an embrace of war without end, and that this makes its dominance of the Palestine Authority government a disaster of the highest order for the people of Arab Palestine. Commitment to the idea people should rule themselves does not require belief that people will always do this wisely and well. You will doubtless have encountered in your life persons who resolutely act with great foolishness against their own best interests, and what can be observed in individuals can be counted on to occur in groups of individuals as well.
Your suggestion that monies and assistance in kind be given directly to Arab Palestinians in need is a good one. To some degree the United Nations does this already. But programs like this are difficult to press in conflict situations, where irregular bodies of armed men dominate the scene. The aid must, in such circumstances, be protected from seizure by them, to use for their own purposes, and this can be achieved only by armed force or substantial bribes. Do not imagine for a moment that the militants of Hamas would not regard a program like this as serious competition that threatened their own power base as the providers of people's needs, and do whatever was in their power to wreck it, particularly if it was associated with the United States or Israel. In the early days of the occupation in Gaza, men who took work in Israel to feed their families were routinely shot as collaborators, and people accepting direct aid from the U.S. or Israel could expect a similar fate today. Eventually, as regards work, the course of the militants proved too widely unpopular to sustain, and the same might result were your suggestion tried, in time, but the initial stages of it would likely be bone-chilling. Romanticism about the benevolence of revolutionary militants is sadly mis-placed: they invariably are hard men with a dream, resolved to whack the world into a shape congruent with it, and with no more concern for what must be carved off in that endeavor than a carpenter has for shavings and saw-dust.
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