US aid and Israel's hard line

Nicholas Kristof:

....We’re now seeing the worst fighting in seven years between Israelis and Palestinians, and again a basic pattern asserts itself: When missiles are flying, hard-liners on each side are ascendant. Civilians die, but extremists on one side empower those on the other.

The late Eyad el-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist in Gaza, described this dynamic when I visited him during a past cycle of violence: “Extremists need each other, support each other.” He lamented that Israel’s siege of Gaza had turned Palestinian fanatics into popular heroes.

The recent fighting was prompted in part by Israel’s latest land grab in East Jerusalem, part of a pattern of unequal treatment of Palestinians. Two prominent human rights organizations this year issued reports likening Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid. 

One group, B’Tselem, described a “regime of Jewish supremacy” and concluded, “This is apartheid.” Human Rights Watch published a 224-page report declaring that Israeli conduct in some areas amounts to “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

....It’s also true that Hamas not only attacks Israeli civilians but also oppresses its own people. But as American taxpayers, we don’t have much influence over Hamas, while we do have influence over Israel and we provide several billion dollars a year in military assistance to a rich country and thus subsidize bombings of Palestinians....

Hard-liners in Israel sometimes accuse Americans of being naïve about what works in a tough neighborhood. But those hard-liners have repeatedly shown their own naïveté in pursuing policies that backfired. 

Consider that it was Israel itself that helped nurture Hamas back in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Israel was then concerned with Yasir Arafat’s Fatah movement, so it cracked down on Fatah and allowed Hamas to rise as a counterforce.

....Since then the Middle East has been caught in a “Boomerang Syndrome,” in which extremists on each side mount violent assaults, which ultimately lead to attacks against their own side as well. Hamas’s past shelling undermined political moderates in Israel.