I personally visited Gaza City when I took the Rev. Al Sharpton on a solidarity trip to Israel right after 9/11 and witnessed the unspeakable poverty that prevailed under Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, even though, as The New York Times reported, by 2004 the Palestinians had become “the world’s largest per capita recipients of international aid.”
Sadly, very little of that money trickled down to Palestinian children due to widespread corruption and theft on the part of the Palestinian leadership.
When Hamas came to power in 2006, rather than investing in infrastructure they used their money for weapons to launch a war against Israeli civilians and turning Gaza not into a Palestinian state but into a launching pad to annihilate the Jews.
Hamas, which rules Gaza with an iron fist, is dedicated to Israel’s destruction and to attacking Jews wherever they may be found, not just in Israel. Its covenant is deeply racist, with genocidal aspirations: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts … until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realized.” As a Jew, Peter, for all his attacks against Israel, is also on Hamas’ hit list.
I need not add how gays and women fare under Hamas rule, whose barbarity includes widespread honor killings of young women and whose usual excuse for persecuting gays is to label them collaborators.
Simple question to Peter: would he be OK with Hamas ruling in the West Bank as well as Gaza if that is the price to be paid for a Palestinian state?
The Hamas Charter reads like a modern-day Mein Kampf: “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims… there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
The solution for the conflict is for my Palestinian brothers, who currently live in Gaza under the tyranny of Hamas and in the West Bank under the corruption and mismanagement of the Palestinian Authority, to enjoy a benevolent, democratic government like the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel, who practice a glorious Islamic faith without encumbrance, publish newspapers without interference, and adhere to the Islamic faith without fear.