The USA and Israel combined to elect Hamas to govern Gaza and the West Bank.  Half a century of American financed bombing, brutal occupations, and every known form of repression of Arab people in Palestine, has finally brought about this result.  This author walked in and painfully photographed a funeral procession for four victims in March, 2002, and the green flags of Hamas were everywhere.  Nor did they appear to be cheap talk politicians, like Arafat, whose Gaza mansion fronts of the Gaza City Mediterranean shore.  Hamas leaders regularly took the rocket hits on their cars, houses and bedrooms.  Few live to be as old as Arafat was.  And it was Hamas that finally won the unity of the Philistines. The election shocked everyone but Israel, whose newspapers saw it coming.

 

Our president now says he is going to review all the funds given to Palestine because Hamas has always said the Israeli state must go. But Arial Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have always said they would eventually drive out the Arabs, and few are looking in their larder to see how much money came from the USA. It good to investigate, so let’s review and compare the amounts given to both neighbors, not just one. The ratio will be on the order of $1 to $10. Were it not so, we would already have peace.

 

Aid, except for scanty UN rations for those 2 millions still in refugee camps, has never reached the Philistines anyway, and what dollars get to them does not arrive at the people’s level, it has been poured in the top of the funnel to control parties like the PLO and Fatah. The latter was richly subsidized in the recent election, and the people in the West Bank and Gaza were not fooled. They elected Hamas because they know the USA and Israel supported Fatah, which stood for more of the same, in their eyes. The Philistines have finally spoken. George W. Bush even noticed, and called the election “Democracy at work,