Israel National News reports that Turkey
refused aid from Israel (and others).
Turkey rejected on Sunday offers of aid from dozens of countries after earthquakes hit the eastern Van province. Israel was among the countries ready to aid the Turks.
Nor was this the first time:
Israel offered aid to Turkey in March of 2010 after an earthquake struck the eastern part of the country. At least 57 people were killed in the quake, which measured 6 on the Richter scale, and there was widespread damage. Turkey refused the Israeli aid offer.
Iran has similarly refused Israeli aid after and earthquake. But in 1999, the New York Times reported:
Amid the scenes of horror and death that have afflicted this city since the earthquake last week, the brightest sign of life is a field hospital operated by doctors and nurses from the Israeli Army. Eight babies have been born here since the quake. One boy was named Israel, and one girl is called Ziona. Their names are symbols of how firmly the earthquake has sealed the alliance between Israel and Turkey. ''God bless the Israelis,'' said one new mother, Serap Balcioglu, whose child was born blue and seemingly lifeless but was revived by an emergency team at the hospital. ''They're taking beautiful care of me. What would we do without them?''
Erdogan would rather have his people die.
3) How popular is Hamas?
Following on a report two weeks ago in the
Christian Science Monitor, Time Magazine (via
memeorandum) reports that
Hamas isn't all that popular in Gaza.
When the islamist movement known as Hamas first took control of Gaza in 2006, the family of Ahmed Ayyash, a third-year engineering student at the Hamas-controlled Islamic University, gave the party their full backing. Like a solid plurality of Palestinian voters, they thought the Islamists would provide clean government, in contrast to the corruption-riddled Fatah that had ruled for years. Then Ayyash's mother applied for a teaching job. She was offered it immediately: to the Hamas official who interviewed her, all that mattered was that her husband knew people in the new government. A principled woman, Ayyash's mother turned down the job because, he says, "it was through wasta." That's Arabic for connections, and in Gaza it symbolized everything that was wrong with the old administration, everything Hamas claimed to oppose. "This was their slogan at election time, to end the wasta," Ayyash recalls. Ayyash lost faith in the Islamists early, and in the six years since, he's been joined by many other Gazans who complain that Hamas' patronage politics favors the few while the majority suffer.
This is key. Hamas despite some discrete examples of good governance, was (and is) as corrupt as Fatah. There's a lot wrong with the Time article (given that it's written by Karl Vick that's no surprise), such as:
How did Hamas lose Gazan hearts and minds? Not the way you might think. Few Gazans blame Hamas for the most damaging events that have happened on its watch: the siege, the trade embargo, the three-week Israeli military assault in late 2008 and early 2009 that killed 1,400 residents and left tens of thousands homeless. Israel's efforts to drive a wedge between Hamas and its supporters have consistently failed: Gazans reliably side with Hamas over Israel. But they are less forgiving of Hamas for Gaza's international isolation, the pariah status the Islamists defiantly embraced when the West withdrew aid because of Hamas' terrorist activities. In an enclave so difficult to leave, the isolation "makes you feel that you're a less-deserving human," one young blogger says.
I don't believe that anything Israel did was designed to "drive a wedge between Hamas and its supporters," but to protect itself from terrorism. The "isolation" in the second paragraph, is secondary to the corruption. How will average residents of Gaza feel when they see that Hamas spared no expense in
releasing Shalit and
welcoming terrorists? I also don't buy that Netanyahu was motivated to make the deal in order to undermine Abbas. No doubt that was a benefit; but not a lasting one. I think that Aaron David Miller had it mostly right (h/t
HR's Mideast Cheat Sheet):
But now that it is done (or almost so), what exactly does it all mean? First, let's not have any illusions here: The deal for Shalit was self-contained; it offers no first phase of a broader political deal between Israel and Hamas, no Act I in some kind of modus-vivendi play with a happy ending to break open the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There was an opportunity and Netanyahu took it along with the risks involved.
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