Friday, January 13, 2006
Zakaria has this right:
There were many hopes that Gaza could become a model of what the Palestinians would do once liberated from occupation. Last week The Christian Science Monitor reported on the new scene: "As the first year devoid of an Israeli presence since 1967 dawns," it wrote, "armed militias roam the streets freely, foreigners are kidnapped with regularity, and the measure of a man in this coastal territory is not his political title, or even the size of his house, but the number of AK-47-wielding bodyguards he employs."
And this wrong:
It is, in fact, all of the Palestinian's making. The lack of any will to build a civil society outside of a vector poiting always toward war with Israel, and the continuing militarization that demand Israeli security measures are a choice made by Palestinians themselves, as this story of another intercepted terror ship attests: Lebanese nab terrorists headed for Gaza
According to military sources who confirmed the report, the boat was on its way to Gaza from Lebanon and planned to drop off canisters filled with weapons, explosives and rockets off the coast where they were to be collected by Palestinian fishermen.
Government officials speculated that the boat was funded by Iran or Syria and that the weapons were meant to reach either the Hamas or the Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.
In 2002, the Karine A ship was captured in the Red Sea by special IDF forces. The boat's cargo, intended for the Palestinian Authority, included 50 tons of advanced weaponry including Katyusha rockets, rifles, mortar shells, mines and a variety of anti-tank missiles.
"There are attempts to smuggle weapons into Israel all the time," one official said. "They will do anything they can to get weapons here which they can use in attacks against Israel."
According to Lebanese media reports, the boat - together with four passengers - was caught off the southern port of Tripoli. The boat's point of origin was a dock at Naher Al Bard - a nearby Palestinian refugee camp...
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"The big story that no one wants to admit yet is that the Palestinian Authority has collapsed, Gaza has turned into a failed state and there is no single Palestinian political organization that could create order in the territories and negotiate with Israel."
While agreeing with the general thrust of this argument, I have to take issue with the contention that Gaza qualifies as a 'failed state'. Gaza was never in any true sense a state, and so cannot now be considered a failed one.
Which isn't to say that the Palestinian leadership has not failed its people, failed to implement any controls over the forces of nihilism running rampant, failed to show any capability either to bring about the birth of a state or show itself in any meaningful way capable of sustaining it if it were to be delivered.
As you rightly point out it is not the Israelis who are in any way to blame for the current failed, tragi-comic 'state' of Gaza. That's just pandering to politically correct idiocy, which some of us have long come to despise if not entirely ignore.