The Gaza Flotilla’s Real Message

By forcing world leaders to grapple with the Gaza embargo, the flotilla organizers managed to focus attention on the fundamental problem: Hamas rule itself.

Told ya.

Last week in this space, I offered some predictions of winners and losers from the Gaza flotilla. Among the winners, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas; among the losers: Hamas.

On Wednesday, Abbas met in the Oval Office with Barack Obama. Abbas returns from that meeting with a pledge of an additional $400-million in U.S. aid. The pledge came with a price: public acceptance of a continuing Israeli embargo against Hamas.

In the words of President Obama: “We agree that Israelis have the right to prevent arms from entering into Gaza that can be used to launch attacks into Israeli territory.”

This is important news. The goal of the Israeli embargo is not to starve Gazans, who are not starving. The goal of the embargo is to weaken Hamas’ political control over Gazans’ livelihoods.

The German magazine Spiegel reported last week how Hamas’ political control works. Spiegel contrasted two families, the Khadars (who support Fatah) and the Batsch family (who support Hamas):
“Donations coming to the Gaza Strip from both large and small aid organizations never arrive at the Khadars. ‘People who are not in with Hamas don’t see any of the relief goods or the gifts of money,’ Khadar says. On the sand dune where his house once perched, there is now an emergency shelter. The shelter is made of concrete blocks that Khadar dug from the rubble, and the roof is the canvas of a tent that provided the family with shelter for the first summer after the war. ‘Hamas supporters get prefabricated housing, furnishings and paid work. We get nothing,’ Khadar complains.”

Khadar’s neighbour Batsch lives in a brand-new fully furnished house.

“The 35-year-old homeowner does not dispute his relationship to Hamas, but he does dispute any accusations of preference. ‘The construction ministry held a lottery to win a new home. And I just happened to be the winner,’ Batsch explains. Does he think it’s a strange coincidence that he, the neighbourhood’s only Hamas supporter, should have won the contest? No. ‘Sometimes in life you get lucky,’ he says.”

At the press briefing after the Oval Office meeting, President Obama spoke of a “new conceptual framework” to deal with Gaza. It’s not clear what he meant. But here’s one guess: the president is looking for some way to deliver aid to the likes of the Khadars by bypassing Hamas institutions.

The $400-million in extra aid for the Palestinian Authority includes some new money for Gaza school, sewer and infrastructure projects. The White House briefing paper insists, “These initiatives result directly from the advocacy and guidance of President Mahmoud Abbas and [his] Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.” But when it comes time to hire workers and hook houses to the sewer line — who believes that Hamas will not use the power of the gun to seize the credit for the funds? By what mechanism will Hamas hate propaganda be excluded from the schoolrooms built with new American or European assistance?

Perhaps here is the way that the flotilla has most ultimately backfired upon Hamas. The organizers of the flotilla wanted to focus world attention on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. They had a story of hardship inside Gaza and irrationality inside Israel. (Why ban cilantro but not cinnamon?)

But the more you look at the aid, the more you see a problem bigger than the embargo. Spiegel again: “The autocratic rulers of the Gaza Strip have placed conditions on aid delivery. The goods are not to be brought into the territory piece by piece, but all at once. All or nothing. By making these demands, Hamas wants to ensure the building materials are all handed over [to Hamas itself].”

How is aid to help Gaza so long as that aid is manipulated by a terrorist group for its own purposes? How is peace to come so long as half the Palestinian population is governed by that terrorist group?

By forcing world leaders to grapple with the embargo problem — which means, the problem of denying instruments of violence to Hamas — the flotilla organizers also forced attention on to the fundamental problem: Hamas rule itself.

Originally published in the National Post.