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wandering jew

Terror Watch

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Israel must stay vigilant but can’t ignore Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

T

he Palestinian Authority’s bid to
curtail the amount of electricity
flowing into the Gaza Strip is
more than political infighting between
Hamas, which rules the coastal enclave,
and rival Fatah, which governs much of
the West Bank.
It has thrust Israel,
Gaza’s de facto over-
seer, into the fray. The
prime minister’s office
must step up to the
extent it can to limit
Gaza’s civilian suffer-
ing without diminish-
ing Israel’s protective
Robert Sklar
Contributing Editor
shield.
The Jewish state is
a target of interna-
tional outrage in the wake of a civilian
emergency in Gaza — a tinderbox run by
terror-monger Hamas, but also deprived
of adequate power, water and sewage
treatment thanks to the P.A.
The P.A. effected a summer cutback
in electricity to poverty-ravaged Gaza in
apparent hopes of re-seizing leadership
of the almost 2 million Palestinians who
live there. West Bank-based Fatah is the
P.A.’s lead political faction.
Israel supplies a third of the electricity
needs in Gaza; the P.A. has paid the bill
through taxes collected by its Ramallah-
based government. Gaza’s only power
plant also generates electricity. Egypt is
a smaller source of power, but that could
change to something more; invigorated
ties with Cairo stand to infuse Hamas
with improved weapons access.

The P.A. effected a
summer cutback in
electricity to poverty-
ravaged Gaza in apparent
hopes of re-seizing
leadership of the almost
2 million Palestinians
who live there.

bacteria and disease.
A bloody coup in 2007 enabled Hamas
to wrest control of Gaza from Fatah. It
gave Hamas a launch pad to fire rockets
at the Negev and to wage war against
the ancestral Jewish homeland. Hamas’
charter calls for Israel’s destruction,
spurring Israel to place land, air and sea
blockades on Gaza. Israel continues to
permit passage of humanitarian goods
into Gaza as well as permit transfer of
some patients to Israeli hospitals.
Gaza’s power needs worsened when
the sole power plant ran out of diesel
fuel. When Hamas didn’t come calling
for such fuel in protest to the P.A. lifting
a tax exemption for the luxury resource,
the P.A. said it would slash payments to
Israel for Gaza’s electricity by another 40
percent. That put Israel in the untenable
position of having to start decreasing the
Gaza power supply, according to a JTA
news report.

THE NUMBERS

According to a new United Nations
report, Gaza should receive electricity
8-12 hours a day, but is
only drawing 4-6 hours
a day. A July 2 vote by
Israel’s security cabinet
authorized dropping
that to 2-3 hours a day
— a vote that came
at the behest of P.A.
President Mahmoud
Mahmoud Abbas
Abbas.
Meanwhile, fresh
water flows into Gaza
only every 3-5 days as desalination plants
operate at 15 percent of capacity, limit-
ing potable water. Upwards of 29 million
gallons of untreated sewage in Gaza are
pumped daily into the Mediterranean
Sea.
Medical care has felt the brunt of this
full-bore Gaza crisis. The net effect of
hospital wings closing and lifesaving
equipment becoming stressed during
blackouts: new breeding grounds for

8

July 20 • 2017

jn

REMAINING ALERT

The Palestinian struggle over electri-
cal current cleared the way for Egypt,
at least in the short term, to make up
some of the besieged territory’s power
shortfall. It’s no secret Hamas figures
renewed ties with Egypt could reopen
the Rafah border crossing, in turn
easing the humanitarian emergency
as well as bringing materials that, by
stealth, could re-arm and re-embolden
the Iranian and Syrian proxy that rules
from Gaza City.
The Israeli government cannot trust
Hamas or its indoctrinated subjects.
But accentuating the hurt put on ordi-
nary Gazans because the P.A. is seek-
ing to reverse its drubbing by Hamas
seems extreme. Some Gazans, those
desperately impoverished, for example,
surely see Hamas for what it is.
Electricity can’t just be given away
indefinitely, but Jerusalem knows the
long-term consequences of relentless
Gazan despair street side. It would

behoove Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to work
with the Office of the
United Nations High
Commissioner for
Human Rights and
other U.N. agencies
to find funding to
Benjamin
Netanyahu
restore Gaza’s level of
power, which never
has been better than meager.

BALANCING ACT

Following the announcement of a gov-
ernment-planned pipeline that would
require them to treat sewage flowing
into their border communities from
waterways in northern
Gaza, Israeli municipal
and regional lead-
ers objected. As Alon
Schuster, head of
the Shaar Hanegev
Regional Council, put
it to JTA: “Israel’s inter-
est is to allocate elec-
Alon Schuster
tricity to Gaza for civil-
ian purposes. I believe
our policy should be
to give the Palestinians what they need
and not to torture them in any case.”
We’re not talking about capitulat-
ing to Hamas, a terrorist organization
to its core that has ruined the lives of
generations by indoctrinating and con-
demning them to a love of hatred and
violence. The situation is horrendous.
But Israel cannot avoid the plight of
Gazans who have become expendable
pawns in the fissure between Hamas
and Fatah. The Jewish world can’t pre-
tend those people don’t exist, even as
it intensifies girding against Hamas
attacks not only from rockets, but also,
notably, from tunnels.
Undeniably, Hamas would have more
funds at its disposal to pay for energy if
it hadn’t diverted so much tax money
away from infrastructure development
and toward tunnel construction.
It would benefit Israel to excise itself
from the intensifying clash between
the Palestinian people’s two political
powers, Hamas and Fatah, without
abandoning what little it can do to pre-
vent civilians from falling deeper into
the abyss. Talk about walking a moral
tightrope.
It’s difficult to imagine a two-state
solution to the Israel-Palestinian con-
flict, let alone Palestinian unity within,
arising any time soon given the unset-
tled way of life in the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip. Regional coexistence and
peace sure seem fantastical. •

returned home to his new wife and
the news that Super Sol was super
sold. It’s called Family Dollar now.
The irony.
Just past the Sherwood Forest
neighborhood, if you made a left
on Strathcona, you would find No.
1690, the house built by my mother’s
eldest sister and her husband. We
had finally arrived in the fanciest of
all neighborhoods, Palmer Woods,
home to many of Detroit’s elite.
Having only traveled a few miles,
we were decades from Elmhurst.
Back there, under the imprint of the
erstwhile Mogen David, a black man
sat on the steps of my great-grand-
parents’ treasured Stoliner Shul,
now Williams Memorial Missionary
Baptist. He mumbled to himself,
world-worn and spent. My family’s
trials and triumphs were likely noth-
ing this person could imagine, but I
knew for a fact the opposite was also
jarringly true. The neighborhood
held sacred memories of another
nature. I heard my family’s, and it
was time to hear his.
We can stake our claim in a new
Metropolitan Detroit, or we can
return and lay claim to Detroit holis-
tically for every citizen. Yes, it will
entail becoming true allies by con-
fronting uncomfortable truths.
I urge everyone to turn on their
own JewPS. There are great resourc-
es to help, like the Jewish Historical
Society of Michigan and shtetlhood.
com, Lowell Boileau’s website depict-
ing Detroit’s synagogues.
Seeing my history gave me
renewed respect for my heritage. It
also inspired me to take my family
back to Williams Memorial Church,
shake someone’s hand, listen to
their story and join in a conversa-
tion about a city we both treasure.
Hopefully, this will lead to a shared
future brighter than both our
pasts. •

Joshua Lewis Berg, The Wandering Jew, is
a mythical figure whose legend consists of
wandering the world in search of the perfect
bottle of kosher pop and other revelatory
phenomena.

CORRECTIONS:

• Keter Torah President Rick Behar’s
paternal great-grandfather Nissam
Behar was born in 1864, not in 1858,
as written in “Lectures On Se phardic
Jews At JGSMI Annual Meeting”
(page 13, June 29).
• In “From the DJN Davidson Digital
Archive” (page 50, July 13), Ain
Hashophet was the Palestine colony
mentioned in a 1942 JN story.

