HOSTAGE NATION

Two seemingly unrelated events happened last week, one in Gaza and one in Jordan. However, upon close inspection, they are closely linked. In Jordan, George Habash, the fiery leader of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) died peacefully at 81. George pioneered and perfected the concept of hijacking airplanes and taking hostages. He burst upon the scene with a dramatic hijacking n 1970 and capped it with the Entebbe Uganda hijacking in 1976. He also successfully hired Japanese Red Army soldiers to spray bullets in the Lod Israel Airport, killing 23 and wounding dozens of others. All together scores of civilians were murdered in cold blood. Not withstanding this, he was such an inspiration, that our ally Abbas declared three days of official mourning, lowering flags in what is left of “Palestine.” What a message to send to Palestinian youth.

In Gaza, the Rafah “breakout,” as many are calling it, was certainly dramatic. Sort of a cross between Stalag 17 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. An imprisoned people, brought low by a surrounding enemy, in a final act of will, smash the barriers of their entrapment and flood the surrounding territory with a sea of needy humanity. A frenzied sweep of the Egyptian souks ensues, and terror bombers are sent to their destinations before the Egyptians can bottle it up again.

So how are these two events related? How does Habash’s death, a 70’s Christian Palestinian secular nationalist, possibly relate to the Hamas Gaza breakout, Hamas being a deeply religious Islamic movement rooted in the Koran of 13 centuries ago? It’s the utilization of the concept of hostages.

Essentially what the border breakout shows is that Hamas leadership has taken the entire population of 1.3 million people as hostage. They have done this deliberately and with a cunning that bespeaks their fanatical mission to war with Israel. For starters, using suicide bombers and mortars, they attacked the other crossing -- their lifeline into Israel, the Eretz Crossing -- so many times that the Israelis just closed it. This effectively sealed in the Gazans from exports and imports, reducing everyone to unemployment and dependency on relief agencies. Hamas then blamed the Jews for this and played the victim card to the world.

The Eretz closing denied the Gazans a normal life at even a subsistence level. Also, Hamas continued to flout all norms and fire militarily pointless rockets of resistance into Israel, which elicited their desired goal of return fire. Overwhelming in its response and killing scores of key Jihadi and Hamas operatives, this return fire put Gaza on a war footing and the consensus building funerals and endless cries for revenge continued without pause.

Recently, the economy came to a full stop when the lights went out and gasoline ran dry. Gaza joined the list of basket states, like Haiti and Zimbabwe, where supplying the rudiments of food, medicine, and fuel were beyond the grasp of the political leadership. Unlike Haiti and Zimbabwe, however, this grind down of the population was intentional and deliberate, not the result of corruption, incompetence and perhaps (in the case of Mugabe) insanity, but a cold calculated decision to use the suffering of a people as a tool, one to break into Egypt (with the world’s sympathies) and spread the fundamentalist war into a semi-secular state.
Like spooked cattle, the Gazans were herded through breaches in the wall created by Hamas, their desperate plight visible for the entire world to see. “Oh, how the Israelis have mistreated us! Brotherhood can you spare some flour?” What better way for the Iranian and Saudi sponsors of Hamas to humiliate Egypt and strengthen its own fundamentalist fifth column the Muslim Brotherhood? The headlines of the Saudi papers were all about their Imam’s call to help the Gazans with donations of money and goods. This clearly gives the Saudi clerics something to rail about other then their own princes who have silenced clerical criticism of the monarchy.

Hamas operatives and their Al Quada ‘co-operatives’ have already been apprehended on their way to blow up Sinai resort hotels. They just killed one woman and wounded many others in a Dimona mall. It’s often been joked that the Arabs will fight to the last Palestinian. Now it’s clear they are willing to starve them too.

At this writing, the Egyptians and Hamas have repaired the border wall. A deal has clearly been reached and something of value exchanged. No doubt, before long we will see what it is. George Habash would have been proud.