Who’s Responsible for Stopping Terrorism in Gaza?

Stand for Israel | May 8, 2019

Three soldiers in uniform holding fire arms.

While much of the world blames Israel for the sorry state of Hamas-run Gaza, our friend Jonathan Tobin, writing at JNS, places the blame where it belongs:

Yet the point most commentators, both Israeli and non-Israeli, miss about this issue is that it isn’t really Israel’s responsibility to save Gaza from Islamist tyranny. It should be up to the Palestinians themselves to do so, and that’s exactly what those who purport to care about them and the cause of peace ought to be encouraging.

As long as Hamas is a powerful force in Palestinian life and can use Gaza as a base, any hope for peace is impossible. That’s not just because it means control of the Palestinian population is divided between the Islamists and the Fatah-run P.A. It’s because Hamas acts as a permanent check on any possible tendency among the Palestinian leadership to discard their century-old ideology of hatred for Jews and Zionism.