Is The Honeymoon Over Between Arab Militancy And The Palestinian Cause?

This is the question Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal, asks in his post on Pajamas Media: Hamas' Neverland in Gaza:

Images of destroyed Palestinian homes, masked men shooting guns in the air, and processions of mothers pledging more children to martyrdom draw yawns, or anger.

When Hamas bulldozed Egypt's borders, unleashing a flood of half a million chaotically poring out into border towns and scooping up everything from kerosene to aspirin and eggs, the man-in-the-street reaction toward their Palestinian brethren was dismay at this primal attack. Hamas, in the chaos, shot nearly 50 Egyptian soldiers. Within days Egypt put taller and beefier walls back up, with foreign minister Ahmad Abulgheit vowing in a remarkable comment to "break the leg" of anyone illegally crossing. In 1970 King Hussein of Jordan unleashed his entire army onto Palestinian refugee camps in a yearlong civil war known as Black September. Last year in Lebanon the army fought Palestinians for four months in Tripoli, leveling their refugee camp of Nahr al Bared, where terrorists were domiciled.

For all of Hamas's chest-pounding, the realities on the ground do not go away:

The Hamas-run republic of Gaza is a basket case. Jam-packed like a box of sardines with 1.5 million procreating at dizzying rates, it boasts the world's highest population density. Half its people live below $2 a day. All are dependent upon the kindness of strangers, mostly the U.S. and the UN, which pour in millions of dollars daily along with tons of food and drugs. Israel supplies power and fuel.

...Counting upon the world, including the Arabs, to be shaken by the injustice of it all is part of that Palestinian illusive Neverland.

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tag: Gaza.