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BARROW NEWS-JOURNAL
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2023
Opinions
“Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ”-
Henry W a i d Beeche r
What will Gaza be after the fighting stops?
The tragedy unfolding in Israel is both shocking and un
surprising — shocking in its scope and brutality, unsurpris
ing for an area of the world that has
long been embroiled in conflict.
In late 2015, I spent a good bit of
time traversing around Israel and the
Palestinian territories, including the
area just outside the Gaza strip where
Hamas terrorists mutilated hundreds
of civilians early on a Saturday morn
ing two weeks ago.
It was on a similar sunny Satur
day morning in December 2015 that
I stood outside the northeast comer
of Gaza’s massive fence and inter
viewed several residents of the near
by town of Sderot.
The town is one of the places where on Oct. 7, Hamas
terrorists murdered dozens of men, women and children.
• ••
We’re 6,400 miles away from Israel and from this dis
tance, it’s difficult to grasp the complexity of what’s hap
pening there. From this distance, the decades of bloodshed
often seem indistinct, just part of a violent continuum root
ed in ancient hostilities which appear to have no solution.
Even so, the Oct. 7 Hamas murdering rampage has shak
en many Americans who had become numbed to the cycle
of violence in Israel. This violence was different in its size,
scope, secrecy and brutality..
A little historical context helps explain some of the com
plexity of Gaza and its fractious relationship with Israel:
When Israel was established in 1948, it was a violent un
dertaking. During two years of fighting, many Arab resi
dents of what had been British Palestine fled. Some went
to other nearby countries, others fled to the West Bank and
others to the small Gaza Strip near Egypt. Around 200,000
Palestinians ended up in Gaza by 1949. (Palestinians are
not a unique ethnic group; they are the Arab people who
have inhabited what is today Israel and the surrounding
area for centuries. They are Arabs who inhabited British
Palestine, hence the term “Palestinian” became the main
reference for most of the world.)
When the dust settled in 1949, the Gaza Strip was un
der Egyptian control. But while Egypt controlled Gaza, it
didn’t allow its thousands of Palestinian refugees to enter
Egypt. Since Gaza holds no particular religious signifi
cance for Israel, Israeli leaders were content to have Gaza
as a buffer zone with Egypt.
That all changed in 1967 when Egypt, Syria and Jor
dan invaded Israel in what became known as the “Six Day
War.” Israel crushed the invaders and in the process, took
the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt.
Israel didn’t annex either area as part of greater-Israel —
doing that would have absorbed hundreds of thousands of
Muslim Palestinians as Israeli citizens, something Jewish
leaders certainly didn’t want then nor do they want that to
day. Gaza is not part of any country, it is a controlled terri
tory mired in poverty and isolation.
Israel wants to control Gaza to buffer any potential ag
gression from Egypt, but that also created a big problem:
What should Israel do with the 2 million Palestinian resi
dents of Gaza?
For nearly lour decades after 1967, Israel had a military
occupation of Gaza and there were over 20 Jewish-Israeli
settlements in the territory. But there was ongoing trouble
and violence and in 2005, Israel abandoned Gaza both with
its military and its settlers. Hamas, a violent strain of Pales
tinian nationalism, soon took over.
Israel had already begun building fences around Gaza
in 1994, but reinforced those and upgraded its perimeter
around the territory after Hamas took power. Israel also es
tablished a blockade by both land and sea to control the
movement of people and goods in and out of the territory
for security reasons. Egypt did the same on the south end of
Gaza where it controls several border crossing points.
In effect, Gaza became the equivalent of a giant prison
with 2 million people inside and the most violent gang of
prisoners, Hamas, running the prison. Only outside human
itarian aid has sustained the people of Gaza as around 80%
of the population is unemployed — around half of the pop
ulation are children or teens. It is one of the most dense
ly-populated areas on Earth.
Despite the prison-like situation, Hamas found ways to
evade the Israeli blockades and fences. Iran helped sneak
in weapons, including missiles, and Hamas terrorists used
tunnels to conduct raids into Israel.
That left Israeli leaders in a difficult position. They hated
the terrorism from Hamas, but they couldn’t kill 2 million
people to stop Hamas.
Instead of sustained confrontation, Israel adopted a strat
egy of containment, or as some have put it, “mowing the
grass.” The idea was to contain Hamas violence as much as
possible, but not by an occupation which would be costly
in money and lives. It would have also made Israel more
deeply responsible for aid to the civilian population.
• ••
By the time I visited the Gaza region in 2015, a lot of
Hamas-led violence had already happened. In 2014, Hamas
violence led to a seven-week war between Hamas and Isra
el; thousands were killed.
While I was there, we drove down a small dirt road about
!4 mile from the east fence that surrounds Gaza. About ev
ery 100 yards was an Israeli military monitoring position.
There was nothing but farm fields between us and the Gaza
fence.
Floating over Gaza were military balloons with cameras
to monitor what was happening inside the fence.
After we stopped on the dirt road to take some photos,
two Israeli soldiers in a Jeep drove down the road to where
we were. They asked us what we were doing and had us
move to another area nearby.
• ••
After we left the Gaza observation area in 2015, we drove
into the small town of Sderot. While there, I interviewed a
brother and sister who were sitting on a bench at a bus stop
with their two small, pug-like dogs.
Like many Jewish residents of that area, their family had
emigrated to Israel following the collapse of the Soviet
Union in the 1990s.
I asked the young woman if she’d ever met anyone from
Gaza, which was just a couple of miles away.
“Thank God no,” she said.
That was the general feeling around Sderot and other
nearby communities where Hamas had long fired rockets
toward civilians. Many of the early rockets were homemade
devices that would only hurt you if it landed on your head.
The Sderot police station had a large pile of old homemade
rockets it had collected over the years.
But in more recent years, Iran began smuggling in bigger
rockets that were deadly and had a longer range to go fur
ther into Israel. The tools of terrorism became more deadly.
“Kill all the terrorists,” the young woman told me in
Sderot.
• ••
The use of rockets hasn’t been of any strategic military
value for Hamas — it doesn’t capture territory or open the
gates for Palestinians to the outside world — but it has had
a huge psychological impact on the people around southern
Israel. Every community had concrete shelters around town
— when the sirens went off dining a Hamas missile attack,
people on the street could take shelter in those bunkers.
That ongoing fear from Hamas’ rockets created a sense of
insecurity among Israeli citizens, especially children who
sometimes suffered from PTSD. The violent incursion on
Oct. 7 was part and parcel to the strategy of using terrorism
to create fear. It had no real military value; it was meant to
terrify Israeli civilians and to poke the Israeli military in
the eye.
• ••
There are a lot of ramifications that will come out of these
historic events taking shape, including a major shakeup of
Israeli politics and possibly a wider, regional conflict.
But the key question I believe is this: What is the “end
game?” What does “victory” for Israel look like and what
happens to the people of Gaza once the fighting stops?
Israeli leaders say they will invade Gaza and crash
Hamas, but Hamas is as much an idea and radical philos
ophy as it is individual terrorists. Israel may decapitate
Hamas’ current leadership in Gaza, but there are other
Hamas leaders in other countries waiting on the sidelines to
take their place. In addition, there are other anti-Israeli ter
rorist groups poised to fill any vacuum left by a weakened
Hamas. You kill one group of bad guys, another will take
their place.
One has to wonder if Hamas’ brutal violence two weeks
ago was a carefully planned suicide mission designed to
lure Israel into a bloody and protracted conflict within Gaza
itself. Hamas leaders knew how Israel would respond; was
all of this designed to set a trap?
An invasion of Gaza could become a strategic sinkhole
for Israel in the same way Vietnam became a sinkhole for
the U.S. five decades ago. It’s asymmetrical warfare where
civilians are used both as bait and shields. Conventional
military weapons may raze the town, but it does not always
motivate people to stop their violence; it can have the oppo
site effect of creating new terrorists who will in the future
seek revenge for today’s actions.
Israel can win a physical war; it has the military resourc
es to leave Gaza a wasteland of rabble.
But can Israel win the longer-term psychological war that
motivates terrorism in the first place?
And so I return to the same question that has existed in
Israel since 1967: What will Israel do with the 2 million
people who inhabit Gaza?
Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspa
pers. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.
More evidence of the tooth fairy
than fraud in 2020 voting
By Jay Bookman
According to a poll conducted last month by the
University of Georgia, 63% of Georgia Republican
voters still claim to believe “there was widespread
voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.”
At this point, almost three years after the elec
tion, that’s like an adult believing in the Tooth
Fairy, only worse. There’s at least some evidence
of the existence of a Tooth Fairy: A child’s tooth
disappears overnight, and is magically replaced by
money? How do you explain that, other than by
magic? In contrast, after multiple federal and state
investigations, there remains zero evidence that
such vote fraud occurred, not here in Georgia, not
in Arizona or Michigan, not anywhere.
It simply did not happen.
At some level, far more Republicans know that
than admit it. You can tell they know it by their
behavior. Since January of 2022, the GOP has had
majority control of the U.S. House of Representa
tives, with full power to subpoena witnesses and
documents, hire investigators and commandeer at
tention to whatever media circus they care to put
on.
Have they used those substantial resources to
even attempt to find evidence of this widespread
fraud that they are so certain exists? Have aggres
sive, combative committee chairs such as Jim Jor
dan and James Comer up in Washington shown
even the slightest curiosity about how Democrats
managed to pull off such an audacious heist, what
would be the biggest crime in American history?
They have not.
Here at the state level, have legislative com
mittees or Republican district attorneys launched
investigations into how the supposed fraud was
perpetrated, and by whom? If they are so certain it
happened, shouldn’t they be demanding that those
local, do-nothing Republican prosecutors be re
placed with someone willing to do their jobs and
ferret out evil?
They are not. They have not dared to look be
cause they know beforehand that they would come
up as empty as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s brain.
Their only evidence that it happened is their belief
that it happened, and it is that pretense that keeps
them united and angry.
All human beings have the capacity to make
themselves believe many things that aren’t true.
Some people still believe that climate change is
a hoax, that Elvis lives, that the world is flat and
that Tom Cruise played a credible Jack Reacher.
Much of the time such delusions are harmless, but
sometimes, as with climate change, they are not.
Sometimes such delusions have significant conse
quences.
That is certainly true of Republican insistence
that the 2020 elections were stolen from them. It
has warped our politics, fed into anger, raised the
potential for violence and made the GOP look like
an insane asylum to the overwhelming majority
of Americans still willing to recognize truth when
they see it. Within the party, the sense of being
cheated, however delusional, is so powerful that
whatever remains of rational leadership is cowed
into silence. Telling the truth is seen as an act of
betrayal, while selling the insanity is the pathway
to power, riches, Fox News airtime and probably
the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
The credibility of the presidency, the sole branch
of government elected by all Americans, is now
compromised based on lies and self-deception,
not just here at home but internationally as well.
The legislative branch has been rendered inoper
able. The justice system, which ordinarily serves
as our arbiter of fact, has determined in dozens of
cases that claims of vote fraud have no credence
whatsoever, which means that it too must now be
depicted as corrupt.
In public life as well as private, the most de
structive lies are those that we tell ourselves.
• ••
Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national
politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Jour
nal-Constitution, earning numerous national, re
gional and state journalism awards.
Dems providing
leadership while GOP in
Dear Editor:
While MAGA Republicans fight among themselves and cre
ate chaos in Congress, President Biden and Democrats are pro
viding leadership.
A select group of House Republicans has chosen as their
nominee for Speaker of the House and third in line to assume
the Presidency, a person who, in 16 years in the House, has not
managed to get a single bill through the House, let alone into
law. Republicans continue to elevate those who disdain govern
ment and whose goal is to stop it from working. Dysfunction on
their part will continue.
Chaos and failure to govern marches on with Republicans
holding up appointments to key military and national security
posts amid the heinous attacks on Israel. While MAGA Repub
licans carry on their clown show. Democrats are staying fo
cused on working for us and maintaining steady leadership for
the nation and the world.
Example, another clean energy company announced that
thanks to incentives in President Biden and Democrats’ Infla
tion Reduction Act, it’s reopening its solar cell plant in Nor-
cross. A project that is expected to create up to 240 jobs and
generate enough electricity to power 750,000 homes. The com
pany, which went bankrupt during the Trump administration
amid a glut of cheap Asian solar panels, directly credited the
IRA with making its reopening possible.
Every single Georgia Republican voted against the Inflation
Reduction Act that has made Georgia a leader in the industries
of the future. Georgians deserve a government that serves them,
not the egos of MAGA extremists.
Sincerely,
Peggy Perkins
Winder
The Barrow News-Journal
Winder, Barrow County, Ga.
Mike Buffington Co-Publisher
Scott Buffington Co-Publisher
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