Jonathan Tobin, a neoconservative propagandist with Commentary online magazine, has written a piece today that attempts to perpetuate the neocon myth that the Gaza Strip is a Palestinian State on account of it being run by Hamas. In his relentless tirade against there ever being a true Palestinian state, Tobin writes:
…the theoretical arguments about a Palestinian state tend to ignore the fact that one currently exists in all but name in Gaza. There, a Hamas government continues its tyrannical Islamist rule over more than a million people with no interference from Israel other than the imposition of a loose blockade on the strip (food, medicine, and other essential items enter it daily from Israel).
“…no interference from Israel other than the imposition of a loose blockade on the strip”?
Using helicopters to place Special Forces on boats trying to reach the Strip and killing many of its passengers is hardly a “loose blockade” and, while food, medicine and other essential items do, indeed, enter daily from Israel, it is firstly, nowhere enough and secondly, ignores the fact that Israel is interfering with the people of the Gaza Strip’s right to trade with whoever they wish to trade with.
Israel also interferes with Hamas and the running of the Gaza Strip in other ways. Israel has tight patrols around the Gaza’s entire fence that continually harass the Palestinian farmers who tend their fields close to the border. These farmers have been shot at and wounded or killed by Israeli soldiers on almost a daily basis. These provocations are rarely mentioned by the mainstream media but the Israelis and their neocon supporters in the West are very quick to condemn the Palestinian fighters when they retaliate in the only way they are able to by firing rockets into Israel in an attempt to deter further Israel aggression against the Gaza people. The Israelis then use the rocket attacks as an excuse to launch massive and deadly air attacks against the Gaza Strip.
Tobin goes on to write:
But as today’s barrage of missile fire aimed at southern Israel from Gaza shows, this Palestinian state presents a clear and present danger to both the Jewish state and regional stability. While no casualties resulted from the 50 rockets fired from Gaza, the incident not only terrorized southern Israel. It also demonstrated the inherent danger that an irredentist Palestinian state where armed terrorists are free to plan mayhem poses to Israel’s security. While peace activists claim all problems will be solved by Israeli territorial withdrawals, the example of Gaza, where every single settlement, soldier, and individual Jew was pulled out in 2005, continues to operate as a powerful argument against repeating the experiment in the West Bank as much of the world insists Israel must do.
Here Tobin pushes the lie about the Gaza Strip being a Palestinian state further.
The Gaza Strip represents only a small proportion of what one day will be a Palestinian State. Just because ‘every single settlement, soldier and individual Jew was pulled out in 2001’ doesn’t make the Gaza Strip a Palestinian state. A Palestinian state includes all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in its entirety as one homogenous entity. It is to this end that the Palestinian people in the Gaza are continuing to fight for. The fight’s not over until all of the Palestinian state is united as one – and that won’t be until ‘every single settlement, soldier and individual Jew’ has pulled out of all of the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip. Until then, Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have the right to at least defend themselves against Israeli harassment and aggression and to continue to fight for the liberation of their nation
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