OPINION:
Last weekend, yet another unhinged, evil person fired a gun at innocents, taking a life and making the news. Hunter Nadeau, 23, reportedly shouted, “Free Palestine!” as he shot into a wedding crowd at a New Hampshire country club, killing 59-year-old guest Robert Steven DeCesare.
Sound familiar? Unfortunately, it should. In May, upon his arrest after the killings of two people outside the Capital Jewish Museum, Elias Rodriguez, is said to have yelled the same empty, ridiculous slogan.
If statehood is the ‘freedom’ for which these deranged, morally bankrupt gunmen have been clamoring, they got a semblance of their wish this week. On Monday, Canada, Britain, France and other similarly misguided nations formally recognized a “Palestinian state,” in contravention of every world map everywhere.
The prevailing wisdom among leftists seems to be that formally granting independence to a people and organization that have effectively had it for two decades (and squandered it) will stop terrorism.
This is folly.
To see as much, one need only compare the Gaza Strip in the years preceding Israel’s September 2005 unilateral disengagement to its current state, or even to its state directly before Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched the largest single-day genocide of Jews since World War II.
Before Israel’s departure, “up to 120,000 Palestinians from Gaza had been employed in Israel or in joint projects,” according to Tel Aviv University. “After the Israeli withdrawal, the gross domestic product of the Gaza Strip declined, Israeli enterprises shut down, work relationships were severed, and job opportunities in Israel for Gaza residents dried up.”
Just before the pullout, American donors raised $14 million to purchase 3,000 greenhouses from the Jewish communities in Gaza and give them to the Palestinian Authority, which “governed” Gaza at the time. With the transfer, “Palestinians had a shot at inheriting relatively intact the greenhouses whose vegetables and flowers have been a major source of Israeli export income, and, not incidentally, about 3,500 desperately needed Palestinian jobs,” said an August 2005 article in The New York Times.
So what happened? Did the Palestinian Authority take the opportunity to employ thousands of its people in a lucrative business that would have given Gaza’s economy a running start after Israel’s withdrawal? Nope. It let Palestinians openly and completely loot every one of the greenhouses, destroying them and effectively flushing millions of donor dollars down the toilet.
Less than two years into Hamas’ tenure, the organization was unable to pay civil servant salaries. In 2015, 10 years after Israeli disengagement, Gaza had the world’s worst-performing economy, according to the World Bank, with 43% unemployment and a real per capita income nearly a third below what it was in 1994.
The Israel haters, of course, blamed this decline on Israeli restrictions on Gaza residents’ movement, but the Jewish state imposed those restrictions only after deadly rocket attacks launched from Gaza. (What would you do?)
Things got worse from there. In 2018, “Gazans [were] struggling with high rates of unemployment, poverty, and food insecurity; with collapsed basic services and public infrastructure; with a crippled private sector; and with a widespread state of utter despair that engulf[ed its] 2 million inhabitants,” said Palestinian economist Mohammed Samhouri, who was in Gaza as the last Israeli soldiers departed.
Here are the facts: Hamas has had more than its chance to govern legitimately, renounce terrorism and lift the economy of the Gaza Strip out of the doldrums. Instead, it has spent huge sums of foreign aid intended for the people who elected it enriching its top brass, building miles of “terror tunnels” under Gaza, killing, raping and torturing Jews and refusing every offer of peace put on the table by Israel and international brokers.
Is this the “free Palestine” the murderous goons in New Hampshire and Washington (and the left writ large) have been demanding? If it is, we know from the past 20 years what’s in store — and it’s not freedom.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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