Juan Cole 'splains Gaza, Hamas, Israel, and Palestine for you

strip away all the b.s. and this is pretty much what you get...

juan cole...

Shorter AFP: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will try to tell Binyamin Netanyahu, the far rightwing prospective prime minister of Israel, that he should allow the rebuilding of Gaza and start up a peace process that leads to a Palestinian State. Netanyahu [will] ask her to let him bomb Iran and go on colonizing the West Bank and making sure there is a never a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu probably won't get his way on Iran, but he likely will keep the Palestinians stateless, i.e., in subhuman conditions.

Clinton arrives in Israel from a donors conference in Cairo that raised $5 bn. Unfortunately, Israel won't let most of it in, since it is trying to half-starve the Palestinians into submission. And the only realistic conduit for that amount of money is the Palestinian Authority bureaucracy in Gaza, which was taken over by Hamas when it won the January, 2006 elections. But the US and Israel refuse to deal with Hamas and won't let the money go through bureaucracies it controls (all the relevant ones). Washington and Tel Aviv will probably try to use the money to bolster Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction within the Palestinian authority. What they can't understand is that Palestinians have excellent bs meters, and don't support people they view as corrupt collaborators. The frantic search for the 'good Palestinian' only creates unpopular failures over time, in the nature of the case.

Anyway, rebuilding is pretty hard when Israel won't let in concrete for . . . rebuilding.

Aljazeera English reports on the challenges of rebuilding Gaza and the Israeli blockade that is keeping basic materials out. 90% of Gaza's water is unsafe to drink, and the damage the Israelis did the sewage treatment plant has sent raw sewage into the drinking water.

now, THERE'S a strategy for ya - starve people into submission... ya gotta love that israel...! what a country...!

al jazeera...

Israel's 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip has left a trail of destruction. Rebuilding is an enormous project, now being done with little money, a few tools and no organization. But as billions of dollars are being pledged to fund the reconstruction efforts, [the] Israeli blockade is still in effect.

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