What Price Gaza?

Why should Western money rebuild Gaza? This is an assumption made widely and hundreds of millions will be wasted, wasted through corruption, through falling into the hands of Hamas, through building things that will soon be destroyed due to Hamas’s war policy. Is this really so hard to understand?

And what is the strategic reason for doing so? The argument that the masses of Arabs and Muslims love the Palestinians so much that presumably they will love the West for being so generous and hate the West if it isn’t.

Yet this is quite illogical. After all, if they have such love for the Palestinians—and we know that Saudi Arabia and other countries have a great deal of money—why don’t they pay for it?

Regarding the argument that the purpose here is to alleviate human suffering, one should then ask why Arab and Muslim states don’t feel so motivated to help suffering that is not only human but also Arab and Muslim.

The reason why that won’t work tells us that their devotion to the Palestinians is phony. If it won’t motivate them to give surplus money, it isn’t their motivation to go to war, is it?

The very sad fact is that it is often pressure and suffering that forces change. This is one of the many unpleasant, savage realities of history and politics. Why should Hamas fall, why should the Palestinians of Gaza change their political and ideological course if it is going to be subsidized by their enemies?

As for the strategic argument, has the donation of massive amounts of money to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and to the Palestinians ever produced popularity for the United States or the West among the Arab and Muslim populations or among the radical movements that motivate them to attack and hate?

Of course, it makes perfect sense to give aid if there is a strategic return. Aid to, say, Egypt or Jordan might not bring as full a responsive reward as it should but clearly there is an important strategic gain. Even, with all its faults, the Palestinian Authority at present—though not necessarily under Yasir Arafat—is worth helping, if only to keep it in power and Hamas not in power on the West Bank, as well as to provide an example to Palestinians in Gaza of what they might better be doing.

This does not, however, apply to Gaza. There the money is not going to shore up a lesser evil regime but a worse evil one.

Nor can the argument be used to claim that this money will buy peace, will bribe the populace and leaders to maintain quiet and not attack their neighbor, in this case Israel, because we know that this is not true either.

There is also an argument below the surface here, the claim that because the West is responsible for the sufferings and problems of Gaza, it must pay for them. It is part of the hegemonic argument today that people are not responsible for their own affairs or decisions but merely perpetual victims of others. A perpetual victim by definition is one who cannot do anything to alleviate one’s suffering or problems. Consequently, the condition persists forever. That is what we face in the Middle East; that is what Western policy often encourages in the Middle East.

Of course people have to be fed, to have housing and jobs. Yet where are all the arguments used elsewhere applied to this case: we have to go to the root of the problem to solve it, conditions have to be changed to make any real improvement, unless a proper government is in place nothing will be accomplished.

Not a single government, not a single Western leader, and probably not a single major newspaper or professor will consider—let alone discuss publicly—the points made above as they dole out almost $3 billion to the Gaza Strip. No matter what safeguards are taken that money will in real terms sustain the Hamas regime—a terrorist and repressive government aligned strategically against the West no matter what is done to engage or help it—and ensure more war and bloodshed.

What sense does that make?