Why I Don’t Give a Damn About Gaza

Ethan Epstein sees hypocrisy in the silence that prevails among leftists over a blockade far more total and deadly than anything ever imposed on Hamas:

For example, Gazans are permitted to receive items such as medical equipment and medicine, insecticide, coffee, tea, and, best of all, hummus paste. North Koreans, on the other hand, live under a total blockade, one imposed by their government. They are only permitted to receive what their government allows them ““ and that isn’t much.

The food system in North Korea, for example, is administered entirely by the regime. A network of private markets had sprung up in the country over the past decade, but a “currency revaluation” late last year utterly decimated the marketplaces. The situation is the same for all material goods: all are controlled, and doled out, by the regime and its cadres. There is no free flow of goods. This quite plainly constitutes a punishing and beggaring blockade. Yet, for the most part, the world remains silent in the face of this. Instead, its heaps reprobation after reprobation on the Jewish State for its blockade of Gaza.

The North Korean blockade is a real blockade, one that’s causing infinitely more pain to far more people:

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.

North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.

Interviews in the past month with eight North Koreans who recently left their country — a prison escapee, illegal traders, people in temporary exile to find work in China, the traveling wife of an official in the ruling Workers’ Party — paint a haunting portrait of desperation inside North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, and of growing resentment toward its erratic leader, Kim Jong-il. [N.Y. Times, Sharon LaFrianiere]

That article is an absolute must-read — every last word. There’s also a slide show accompanying it. It’s an especially welcome story coming from the New York Times, which like most of the news media, has traditionally ignored the greater humanitarian sorrow of North Korea out of a monomaniac interest in endlessly ineffective nuclear diplomacy. Show me that anything on this scale is going on in Gaza, and I’ll concede that it’s a story of comparable humanitarian interest.

So if a consistent humanitarian approach doesn’t explain the motive for all of this global anti-anti-Hamas ululation — least defensibly by South Koreans — then I can only wonder what motivates the undue interest of reporters in this story (Helen Thomas being the obvious exception we no longer wonder about)? Suddenly, it’s as if every reporter, editor, and think tank fellow in the Western Hemisphere believes that I should care as deeply about Gaza as they obviously do.

Sorry, I don’t. Or can’t. I know too much. In the context of all of the innocent life that’s lost every day in the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, or North Korea, I’m not nearly as bothered as most Reuters correspondents who cover that region obviously are about the deaths of nine people who seem to have gotten exactly the martyrdom they were looking for. Unlike many of those correspondents, I can’t overlook (much less get on board with) the Hamas agenda of rocketing villages, sending teenagers to suicide-bomb buses, advocating the total extermination of Israel, and most importantly, of keeping Palestinians poor, ignorant, and under the heel of Hamas. I care much more about the stupidity of otherwise intelligent people like, say, Daniel Drezner, who now compares President’s Obama’s response to Israel’s behavior (criticism of the Israeli “blockade,” refusal to judge the flotilla incident without getting “all of the facts,” and more aid to the Fatah government in the West Bank) to China’s response to the Cheonan Incident and the murder of 46 South Korean sailors (deliberate indifference to the facts and unqualified support for Kim Jong Il). That’s a comparison that’s only possible in an environment of near-complete ignorance and apathy about North Korea, a topic on which Drezner has never demonstrated much depth of understanding in any event.

I’m sure some of this ambivalence devolves from my experience years ago, when I stayed in a Hamas-controlled village in East Jerusalem, which might as well have been in the West Bank, and got my fill of Hamas ideology, first hand and without any selective journalistic interpretation. Sure, the methods Hamas advocated, such as driving buses off of cliffs, were anarchic. Yes, their world views were based on a conspiracy-based alternative reality. But fill this rational void with dispassionate Teutonic efficiency, and the ideology would have been familiar enough to Einsatzgrupp commander, or for that matter, to the Grand Mufti: kill the Jews and drive them out. This, of course, is largely overlooked in the coverage of Hamas that portrays it as something like the militant wing of the Salvation Army, but which zooms in on every brutish excess, alleged brutish excess, and perceived brutish excess of the Israelis. The Israelis, for their own part, ought to know by now that they’re being watched as though they were driving through rural Alabama with Massachusetts license plates (unless, for similar reasons, they’ve concluded that trying to mollify “world opinion” is pointless). And for what it’s worth, some of the Israeli behavior I witnessed between the village of Surbahir and Lod Airport struck me as needlessly heavy-handed. This doesn’t absolve those who support Hamas’s agenda of explaining where, precisely, this will all end.

When I visited Surbahir during the early years of Hamas’s rise, the Palestinian response to the heavy-handedness I witnessed was mostly limited to protests, rock-throwing, and tire-burning, so I maybe the darkness of its rhetoric didn’t make as deep an impression on me as it should have. In fact, I came away from that experience, in some ways, much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than I am now. That was before they threw away many chances for an enduring peace, workable self-government, and peace with their neighbors and with each other. Since then, I’ve seen just how hard the Palestinians have worked to maintain their treasured state of squalor, hate, and war; and how thoroughly they’ve demonstrated their incapacity for effective self-government, or for compromise with Israel or each other. A much greater influence on me was Hamas’s adoption of bus bombings as a method of “protest,” although I don’t think anything really depleted my reserve of sympathy for the Palestinians quite as much as this:

Now, I can understand that for plenty of Europeans, Canadians, and American “progressives,” all of those things would have the opposite effect. Then again, maybe a better word than “understand” would be “diagnose.” Just don’t tell me that the largely self-inflicted misery and squalor of people with hearts as evil as this is supposed to be at the top of my personal hierarchy of compassion.

Maybe what bothers me more than anything about this is the unforced error of the Israelis themselves. We often hear that Israel has the world’s most competent and best-equipped military, so I presume they have a sufficient inventory of stun grenades, tear gas, tasers, and other non-lethal weapons. Yet we’ve just watched them blunder into the hands of a group of paraterrorists they saw coming weeks in advance. They ought to have known better than to give such generous gifts to the Helen Thomases of the world.

And in the end, they’ve even managed to get me to write a long post about something I don’t even give a damn about.