Call for control of Gaza to be handed to Palestinian Authority

[FBaggins]

Yair Lapid, Israel’s finance minister, has called for authority in the Gaza Strip to be transferred from Hamas to Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, and for the territory to be demilitarised and rebuilt under international supervision after the war with Hamas ends. The “diplomatic initiative” would see the international community pledge aid to rebuild Gaza and boost its ties with the Arab world, conditional on a return to authority in Gaza of the Ramallah government that Hamas expelled from power in 2007.

..snip...

His initiative calls for Egypt to host an international conference that would include the US, the EU, Russia, Jordan, the Palestinians, Israel, and “moderate” Arab states including Saudi Arabia. Its main purpose would be the “demilitarisation and rehabilitation of Gaza” and the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, with support from the international community.

...snip...

The principles outlined in the proposal broadly chime with recommendations by the Palestinian Authority and European officials, who have in recent days proposed installing the PA on Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel.
International players, notably the US and the EU, are trying to assemble some kind of peace deal that would bolster the authority of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, while easing a blockade causing a continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.


http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/423c8278-21f7-11e4-ad60-00144feabdc0.html

[COLGATE4]

1. Excellent idea. Hopefully something will come of it. nt

[Larkspur]

2. The same demilitarization of Israel should also be demanded by the world

Neither Israel nor the world has a right to tell Gazans who can govern them.

The Dubya Admin tried to rig the Gazan election in favor of a PA candidate, but it backfired because the PA candidate was an corrupt SOB.

Hamas was legally elected because FATAH was corrupt at that time. Demanding that Hamas turn power over to Fatah will weaken Fatah and the Palestinian people. Weakening the entire Palestinian position is the goal of Israel.

[FBaggins]

3. Lol... Israel would be gone shortly after that date.

Please don't pretend that their opponents are willing to live in peace if Israel is disarmed. That's laughable. Even if Hamas is given every single thing they ask for, they still won't accept Israel's right to exist - and will only offer a ten-year ceasefire... for they still intend to destroy Israel.

Neither Israel nor the world has a right to tell Gazans who can govern them.

Hamas was once elected to control Gaza in a unity government with Fatah... then they killed off most of the Fatah members and refused to hold any more elections. Please don't pretend that they remain the democratically/legally-elected government of Gaza. Gazan's are not free to select their own leadership... but it isn't because of Israel or the U.S. - It's because Hamas will kill those who don't support them (and did so actively just last week).

[4now]

4. After murdering over 400 innocent children

Israel obviously isn't willing to live in peace with its neighbors.

[FBaggins]

5. How odd that they seem to be avoiding warfare with Syria/Jordan/Egypt/Lebanon/Saudi Arabia...

It's only the people shooting at them who seem to be a problem.

I doubt seriously that it's anything close to 400 children... but those deaths are Hamas' responsibility... not Israel's. Hamas is the one that wanted them dead after all.

[4now]

7. Israel murdered children in Lebanon too.

From Wikipedia
"However, it has been widely reported that the majority of the Lebanese killed were civilians, and UNICEF estimated that 30% of Lebanese killed were children under the age of 13.
The death toll estimates do not include Lebanese killed since the end of fighting by land mines or unexploded Israeli cluster bombs. Between the end of the war and November 2008, approximately 40 people were killed and over 270 injured by cluster bombs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War#Lebanese_civilians

Children in Lebanon continue to die because of unexploded Israeli land mine and cluster bombs.

and blaming the victim is an old and sick tactic.
"Blaming the victim describes the attempt to escape responsibility by placing the blame for the crime at the hands of the victim. Classically this is the rapist claiming his victim was "asking for it" by, for example, wearing a short skirt. Until recently, blaming the victim was largely how most rape victims experienced the investigation and litigation into claims of rape - often leading to women and men becoming unwilling to report it. It was not uncommon for a victim of rape to face a defense attorney who asked the victim about her (or, in the rare cases that a male victim went to court, his) sexual history, sexual preferences, drinking habits and even social status, all to paint her as less of a victim. In 2013, a Montana Judge said a 14 year old rape victim was equally responsible for her own rape because she "seemed older than her chronological age". A perfect example of blaming the victim.

Denying the victim is similar, but has a slight difference in that the perpetrator attempts to assert that he or she is the real victim. Denying the victim is generally less of a one-on-one scenario, and more topical, ie. "The real victims of the supposed 'mistreatment of women' are the children who have to grow up in homes where their mother wants to work instead of care for them." Denying the victims, in this sense, is often an attempt at historical revisionism, to make those charged with the crimes, look more or even totally innocent in the light of modern society.

Denial of the victim can also take the form of minimizing the number of victims or the severity of the offense. For example, the Roman Catholic Church played this game, when trying to claim the systematic child abuse by some priests were simply isolated events both individually and by priests at large. They also pushed the issue that the boys should not be described as "children," but "young men" to minimize the sense of how horrific these rapes were. Both blaming the victim and denying the victim are specific instances of neutralization."
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Blaming_the_victim

[sabbat hunter]

6. Hamas

has already agreed to a unity government with Fatah in charge of it. Now they just have to carry that out.

in 2006 Hamas had 44% of the vote to Fatah's 41%. Hamas then used force to remove Fatah from Gaza and take complete dictatorial control over the enclave. They won a plurality of the vote, acted as if they won an absolute majority, then went beyond even that.
They used force of arms to control Gaza and shape it as they liked, then launched attacks against Israel (initially after Israel withdrew from Gaza there was no blockade in place). The blockade did not take place until 2007. If Hamas in its stupidity had not attacked Israel with missiles and rockets in 2007, there in all likelihood would have never been a blockade.

[Larkspur]

8. Sandy Tolan of Tomdispatch.com and Juan Cole, Middle East expert, disagree with you

Blown Chances in Gaza Israel and the U.S. Miss Many Chances to Avoid War
SNIP

In 2007, Hamas and Fatah again discussed forming a unity government. The U.S. responded with heavy pressure on Mahmoud Abbas. American officials, through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had already been facilitating military training and arms shipments to his Fatah faction in Gaza. They wanted to bolster its capabilities against Hamas, allowing the U.S.’s favored Fatah leader in Gaza, strongman Mahmoud Dahlan, to take control.

This scenario, laid out in “The Gaza Bombshell,” a 2008 Vanity Fair piece by David Rose, and elsewhere, was confirmed to me by an American official stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv at the time. Eventually, said Norman Olsen, a former State Department official and 26-year foreign service officer, the unity talks collapsed, “but not before Dahlan’s undisciplined fighters engaged in months of open protection rackets, extortion, kneecappings, car-jackings, and abductions.” Olsen knows the territory: he spent four years at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv covering the Gaza Strip, making hundreds of daily trips there, and later served as chief of the Embassy’s political section, and as special advisor on the peace process to the U.S. ambassador.

Word of the American plan was leaked to an Arabic-language newspaper. Street battles between Fatah and Hamas erupted in Gaza. The “Battle of Gaza” took more than 100 lives. In the end, Hamas police and militants, according to Olsen, “drove Dahlan’s fighters from the Strip, established order, and restored the ability of Gaza residents to move about safely.”

Taken in by Dahlan’s bravado, American officials were initially encouraged by the fighting. “I like this violence,” a senior American Middle East envoy told his U.N. counterpart, Alvaro de Soto, according to a confidential “End of Mission Report” leaked to the Guardian. Israeli officials also saw opportunities in the de facto Palestinian civil war. Israel’s director of military intelligence, according to a State Department cable later published by WikiLeaks, told the American ambassador in Tel Aviv that a Hamas victory would allow Israel “to treat Gaza” as a separate “hostile country,” and that he would be “pleased” if Abbas “set up a separate regime in the West Bank.”

Indeed, as Hamas routed Dahlan’s Fatah forces, taking full control of Gaza, the two Palestinian sides — and their populations in the West Bank and Gaza — were physically separated and politically weakened. Despite the language of peace negotiations, ostensibly meant to create a “viable, contiguous” Palestinian state, the fractured reality appeared to be part of a deliberate Israeli strategy. Statehood for Palestinians seemed ever more a mirage.

SNIP

So again the real story -- the U.S. and Israel trying to pick their toady to "govern" the Palestinians -- is in the back pages and away from public scrutiny.

[King_David]

9. "Juan Cole, Middle East expert"

[oberliner]

10. They got booted out by Hamas

And there have been no elections since.

Although, if there were to be elections held now, I would be very curious to know how the people of Gaza would vote.

[Larkspur]

11. from Juan Cole's blog-Poll: Palestinians of Gaza just like Americans: Want Peace, hate “ISIS” and

Poll: Palestinians of Gaza just like Americans: Want Peace, hate “ISIS” and refuse to Give up their Guns
BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — An overwhelming majority of Gaza residents support a long-term truce with Israel and oppose the disarmament of the Palestinian resistance, a poll released on Saturday showed.

The poll, which surveyed 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza from Aug. 14-19 and was conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, also found that a vast majority opposed the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria, which Israeli leaders have claimed maintains support in Gaza.

More than 90 percent of Gazans surveyed thought that resistance was either “well prepared” or “somewhat prepared” for the Israeli assault, and more than 93 percent opposed the disarmament of Palestinian militant groups, which Israel has said is a condition of any long-term truce.

At the same time, despite an Israeli assault that has killed more than 2,100 Palestinians — overwhelmingly civilians — in the last six weeks, nearly 88 percent of those surveyed also supported a long-term truce, and another 10 percent supported an unspecified “medium-term” truce.

SNIP