The beggar entity in Gaza

Washington Post:

The batteries are the size of a button on a man's shirt, small silvery dots that power hearing aids for several hundred Palestinian students taught by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza City.

Now the batteries, marketed by Radio Shack, are all but used up. The few that are left are losing power, turning voices into unintelligible echoes in the ears of Hala Abu Saif's 20 first-grade students.

The Israeli government is increasingly restricting the import into the Gaza Strip of batteries, anesthesia drugs, antibiotics, tobacco, coffee, gasoline, diesel fuel and other basic items, including chocolate and compressed air to make soft drinks.

This punishing seal has reduced Gaza, a territory of almost 1.5 million people, to beggar status, unable to maintain an effective public health system, administer public schools or preserve the traditional pleasures of everyday life by the sea.

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The Israeli cordon tightened in June, when Hamas, a radical Islamic movement at war with Israel, seized control of Gaza. Israeli officials have insisted to the Bush administration that no humanitarian crisis would result from the sanctions imposed on the territory.

But for Gazans, caught between Israel's concrete gun towers and the Mediterranean, the sense of crisis is pervasive as they struggle to keep their homes intact, buy essential food from a shrinking and increasingly expensive stock, and educate their children.

"I hold every man, woman and child in Israel responsible for this," said Geraldine Shawa, 64, the Chicago-born director of the Atfaluna Society. A tall, imposing woman who has lived in Gaza for 36 years, Shawa has watched the fortunes of her pupils squeezed in recent months by what she calls Israel's practice of collective punishment.

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Shawa is an example of the idiocy that has brought the Gaza Palestinians to their current situation. The Palestinians are the ones that elected the death cult government responsible for attacking Israel. The Palestinians are the one that are not doing anything about the war crimes of the terrorist attacking Israeli civilians with indiscriminate rocket fire. The Palestinians are the ones who have decided to be at war with Israel instead of at peace with Israel. At the very least their situation exposes the perils of beggars making war against their benefactors. It is a very bad idea. The Palestinians will begin to be better when they take responsibility for their own circumstances and quit blaming Israel. They must get past their religious and ethnic bigotry before they can do that.