The Palestinian “March of Return”
The Palestinians’ so-called non-violent “March of Return” at Israel’s border has been erroneously referred to by the international media as a “peaceful and popular” drive by Palestinians in Gaza demanding “freedom and better living conditions”. Apparently, they failed to notice Palestinian Arabs brandishing knives, throwing tear gas canisters, rocks and firebombs at Israeli troops, attempting to cut through the border security fence, sending tires engulfed in flames towards the Israelis and placing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) near the security fence in the hope of damaging or, better yet, breaching it with the intention of rushing IDF posts and abducting Israeli soldiers and civilians under cover of the border “protests”.
When these attempts failed and after seventeen people were killed (including ten known terrorists – mostly Hamas operatives) on the first day, the international media immediately blamed Israel. They failed to note however that the soldiers were not indiscriminately firing bullets into the unarmed masses. They were targeting specific individuals who were in the process of perpetrating terrorist attacks as any nation under direct attack by an enemy would do. Nevertheless, so far as the international media is concerned, the Israelis were committing crimes against innocent and defenseless Palestinian victims.
Hamas deceitfully added that Israel had killed a video journalist who was wearing a “Press” tag. As it turns out, after investigating the case, Israeli security agents were able to identify Yasser Murtaja, the Palestinian posing as a member of the press corps in the Friday, April 6th Gaza disturbance, as a serving captain in the Hamas internal security apparatus. His mission was to use the Palestinian riot to approach the border and spy on IDF forces by sending a small drone carrying a video camera spinning overhead to collect intelligence. The drone aroused the suspicions of the Israeli soldiers defending the border and he was shot dead.
The short of it is this. The Gaza-Israel border security fence separates a sovereign democratic state (Israel) from a genocidal terrorist organization (Hamas) dedicated to Israel’s destruction and Israel has every right to defend its citizens and its borders as any nation is entitled to do under such circumstances. Hamas is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of unarmed Gaza civilians by using them (including children) as human shields in the midst of conflict and the “March of Return” is no exception. Having attempted to terrorize Israel into capitulation with its onslaught of suicide bombers during the Second Intifada, it has cynically and relentlessly exploited Gazans by storing its missiles inside mosques, schools, and civilian homes, firing thousands of missiles from residential areas in Gaza into Israeli cities, and digging terror tunnels into Israel from beneath civilian homes and institutions. It has also unleashed three wars against Israel in ten years and transformed Gaza not into the Singapore of the Middle East (as Israel had hoped it would become when it vacated Gaza in 2005) but into an Afghanistan on the Mediterranean.
It should come as no surprise then that Hamas’ singular goal was, is and remains the total annihilation of Israel. It wants all of the land of Israel – not peace or co-existence. Both Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar acknowledged as much immediately prior to the “March”. Neither hid the real motive behind it – to destroy Israel. They told the crowd that the “March” marked the beginning of the “liberation of all of Palestine from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River…… Our people won’t give up one inch of the land of Palestine.” In other words, the Palestinians were told that breaching the border security fence and invading Israel en masse was a critical first step toward destroying it.
Thus, the “March of Return” is not about improving the living conditions of Gaza’s Palestinians or finding ways to solve the “humanitarian” and “economic” crises there as the international media would have us believe. Hamas and its allies did not send the protesters to the border with Israel to demand jobs, food or medicine. If that were so, why didn’t Hamas ask Palestinians to march toward the Egyptian border since the real blockade on Gaza is being imposed by Egypt and not Israel which continues to provide Gazans with massive amounts of humanitarian and medical aid as well as construction materials that deceitfully have been diverted by Hamas for digging subterranean tunnels into Israel to murder Israelis. Rather, the “March” was and is aimed at forcing Israel to accept millions of Palestinian “refugees” as a first step towards turning Jews into a minority in their own country.
The next step would be to kill or expel the Jews “from the river to the sea” and replace Israel with an Arab Islamic state. As such, the “March” is a call for war without end, since no Israeli government could or would ever concede this claim which would effectively end the Jewish state. The purpose of the “March” in short is to produce Palestinian “martyrs” for media purposes not to highlight their economic grievances.
If Hamas really wanted to improve the living conditions in Gaza, it would have long-since ceased digging miles of terror tunnels into Israel for attacks on Israeli citizens (using hundreds of millions of dollars in international humanitarian aid dollars for that purpose) and smuggling weapons and missiles into Gaza from the Sinai – courtesy of Iran.
Given all of this does the Western media really expect Israeli soldiers to greet them with flowers when they try to cross the border by the thousands with the intention of annihilating Israel? Every critic of Israel should ask themselves how they would expect the security forces of their own country to react if terrorists armed with rifles, fire bombs and IEDs sought to breach their own country’s border with the intention of annihilating it. It is the height of hypocrisy for the international media to criticize Israel while ignoring the real factors causing pain and suffering to the people of Gaza and to randomly dismiss the true motives behind this “March”.
Until the Palestinians come to terms with Israel’s right to exist – which is not expected anytime soon – we’re likely to see more mindless bloodshed – all of it the fault of Hamas’s leadership and the culture of hate and religious jihad they have cultivated.
