Booman has just an excellent piece up on the conflict in Gaza. Here's the last part of it…
1. In January 2006, President Bush ignored the concerns of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority (under Fatah) and insisted on elections in the occupied territories.
2. In tandem with this policy, the Bush administration spent approximately $2 million dollars (administered through USAID) to bolster the Fatah Party in the elections.
3. When Hamas won the elections, Israel simply arrested members of the new government, while the US sponsored a guerrilla war against it.
4. When Hamas won the guerrilla war, Israel responded with a blockade of Gaza designed to provide the 'minimum amount of goods required to avert a hunger or health crisis.' The idea was to convince Gazans that Hamas was incapable of governance.Now, these are all facts that help contextualize what is going on in Gaza today. The US and Israel have spent the last three years trying to figure out a way to recover from the elections of 2006, where the Palestinian people (in a relatively clean election) elected Hamas to represent them. Every step they've taken so far has been somewhere between ineffective and counterproductive. With time running out on the Bush administration, Israel has taken this little window during the transition to wage open war on the people of Gaza and to destroy all vestiges of government (including mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations) in the Strip.
The United States imposed an unwanted election on the Palestinian government, attempted to dictate the outcome of that election (and failed), then supported a civil war against the new government (and lost), while the Israelis simply arrested members of that government, imposed a blockade on their people, and then sought to outright murder members of the ruling party. Finally, they invaded their territory and so far have killed nearly 800 civilians in an act of undisciplined and inexcusable violence.
At the same time, throughout all of this, the Israelis have continued to allow new settlements to be built in the West Bank. The response from Hamas has been to refuse to turn over a kidnapped soldier and to lob rockets at communities in Southern Israel.
If you think the world believes our propaganda about this conflict, you're dead wrong. And if you think our actions have not incited a new generation of people with a desire to get revenge, you're dead wrong, too. Link
Read the entire post. If Booman's blog post seems odd or foreign, it's because we've been propagandized. Just a, you know, pre-emptive warning.
