Gaza's ship of fools

Editorial

A few dozen intrepid activists arrived on the shores of Gaza last weekend, symbolically breaking the Israeli blockade against the Hamas terrorist regime in the Gaza Strip.

“Symbolically” is the key word, evidently. The ship, which sailed from Cyprus with 44 activists from 17 countries, arrived to a hero's welcome by Palestinians on the beaches, but the enthusiasm reportedly waned when the boat – billed as a humanitarian supply ship – turned out to be just a publicity stunt.

The activists expected to be halted by Israeli officials, but the Israelis instead opted to let the ship pass. Halting a ship carrying supplies to an impoverished land would have made the kind of headlines the anti-Israel activists adore – the hard-hearted Israelis preventing medicine and such from making it to Gazans. Instead, the activists were allowed to land, and those who were most disappointed, apparently, were the Gazans themselves, whose optimism was dashed when the tourists proved to have little in the way of meaningful supplies. Reports say the Gazans were saddened that the ship was carrying little except the activists, 200 hearing aids and 5,000 balloons.

If Palestinians themselves had the opportunity to hear and see Western "pro-Palestinian" activists as much as we have, they wouldn't have gotten their hopes up. Those who call themselves pro-Palestinian have done almost nothing to tangibly help Palestinians. In reality, the vast bulk of "pro-Palestinian" activists are just "anti-Israel" activists. For Western leftists, Palestinians play the same sad role they do across the Arab world - a people exploited for PR purposes by ideologues who need an excuse to attack Israel. They don't raise money to any significant extent, they don't provide major educational exchanges or civil society assistance or any of the conventional support mechanisms one would associate with a movement ostensibly in support of an oppressed people.

Nonetheless, the visitors received medals of honor from the head of Hamas and, presumably, passed out some balloons.

The truth is that activists of this sort have ensured that Gazans (and West Bank residents) do not live in freedom and peace. When the Palestinians abandoned peaceful negotiation for the familiar war-whoop of terrorism in 2000, the global left did not demand that they return to the negotiating table. Instead, they joined the war cry.

If activists like the ones who alighted on Gaza's beach last weekend had demanded that their Palestinian friends put down their weapons and continue to negotiate through the tough issues, there would be peace – and probably a free Palestine – today. They didn't. They encouraged the Palestinians to seek their maximalist ends, reassuring them that total victory over the Zionist enemy was near at hand and that their strategy of violence had strong support among their "friends" in the West. More than anyone besides the Palestinian leadership themselves, it is activists like these who deserve the most blame for eight years of violence and counting.

This was a ship of fools.

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