On a recent trip to Greece in search of Syrian refugees, an Israeli journalist discovered a sizable population of Palestinian refugees from Gaza, thought to be over 6,000 in number. Interviewing them, he heard tales of economic collapse and of Hamas’s brutally oppressive rule. Evelyn Gordon comments:
If you ask Palestinians in either Gaza or the West Bank who’s responsible for their suffering, most would probably say Israel. But what would they say if they were safely overseas and no longer needed to fear their own governments? . . . Not a single one of [the interviewees] even mentioned Israel in his or her responses. . . .
There are numerous UN agencies ostensibly devoted exclusively to helping the Palestinians, while human-rights groups allocate disproportionate attention to this issue. In both cases, their only real interest in Palestinian suffering is finding some way to blame Israel for it. They couldn’t care less about protecting Palestinians from the abuses of their own government. That’s why they keep issuing reports accusing Israel of being the “key cause” of Palestinian suffering, as one UN agency put it this week, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Yet their blatant bias often obscures a larger problem that affects even well-meaning journalists, NGOs, diplomats, and almost everyone else involved in telling the world about what’s happening in the West Bank and Gaza—a failure to understand the way fear affects what people say in nondemocratic societies. For Palestinians, blaming anyone other than Israel for their problems risks serious repercussions from either their own governments or vigilante groups affiliated with both governments. And that’s true not just in Hamas-run Gaza, . . . but also in the Fatah-run West Bank.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/gazans-in-greece-we-fled-hamas-not-israel/