YES, GAZA IS LIKE IRELAND. In Treating Hamas Like the IRA, I wrote how the two should be alike. In Hatred Begins At Home, Peggy Noonan writes about how Gaza and Ireland actually are:

Whenever I think of war, I think of this: It was 1982 or '83, I was in Northern Ireland, and a local reporter was showing me around Derry, then a center of the Protestant-Catholic conflict. The neighborhood we were in was beat up, poor, with Irish Republican Army graffiti on tired walls. There were some scraggly kids on the street.

Suddenly an armored British army vehicle slowly rounded the corner, and the street came alive with kids pouring out of houses, grabbing the heavy metal lids of garbage bins, and smashing them against the pavement. They made quite a racket.

A woman came out. She was 35 or 40, her short hair standing up, uncombed. It was late afternoon, but she was in an old robe, and you could tell it was the robe she lived in. She stood there and smirked as the soldiers went by. She'd come out to register her dislike for the Brits, and to show the children she approved of their protest.

As I watched this nothing sort of scene, I thought: That's where it comes from. That's what keeps it alive.

I knew what kind of person she was. She was lost, neglectful; she was what would come to be called dysfunctional, and whichever of the kids were hers you could tell she wasn't giving them order or safety, not often.

But here at this moment she was being responsive to something--the presence of the enemy. And she was showing an emotion: hatred.

And I thought: Those kids banging the lids on the pavement, they are going to wind up like her, and for some utterly human reasons. To get her notice and approval. To ally themselves with her grievances--if they can't have access to any other part of her, at least they can have her resentment. To be part of her world, of any world.

They would grow up and assign their misery to outside forces. The boy humiliated because he's never sent to school with a clean shirt will turn that into "Britain Get Out of Ireland."

Hamas, of course, is far more sophisticated--taking the hatred and nuturing it: at 'summer camps' in textbooks, and on childrens' shows. They have put guns into the hands of children in place of the garbage can lids. In the end, though, Hamas has done nothing for the lives of the people over whom it rules. It shows, and even the Palestinians themselves are beginning to realize it.

Technorati Tag: Ireland and Hamas and Peggy Noonan and IRA.