Please Mr. Nader

Ralph Nader (May 1) seems almost disappointed so many of the rockets 
which Gaza terrorists send into Israel miss their targets. "The rockets 
failed to reach any population centers 99 percent of the time", he says. 
However, instead of urging Gaza to stop the violence, he jumps in and 
unjustifiably maligns Israel for everything that has befallen the 
troubled people of Gaza.

Little more than a week ago, I visited one of the primary targets of 
those rockets. Sderot, a small city with the misfortune of being 
situated just a few kilometers from Gaza, has a collection of those 
Kassam rockets. I even got to hold some and spoke with the mayor, who 
was clearly frustrated that the Israeli government has not succeeded in 
stopping the constant bombardment. I also suspect he'd be insulted to 
find Ralph Nader doesn't consider his beleaguered city to be a 
population center.
 
Gaza just didn't happen. There is a history that has led to the current 
simmering conflict, a history easily accessible to anyone interested. 
The violent anarchy and repression that roils Gaza is self-inflicted.
 
There is an obvious solution for the problems about which Nader rails, 
albeit one that Mr. Nader doesn't want to hear: Hamas merely needs to 
stop its daily attacks against Israel. If they did that, all hostilities 
would cease. If Israel, on the other hand, dismantled its defenses and 
opened its borders, only slaughter and killing would ensue at the hands 
of Hamas and its subcontractors, including the Islamic Jihad terror group.
 
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. She has both ancient and modern 
claims to that land, but chose to withdraw those claims in the hopes of 
promoting peace. In the process, Israel evicted and displaced over 9,000 
of its own citizens, even though many if not most of them lived on 
property that had been owned by Jews even back in 1948, when Egypt stole 
their property and ethnically cleansed Gaza of any Jewish presence.
 
Instead of seizing the golden opportunity offered by Israel and building 
a modern society, Hamas and other terrorist gangs intensified their 
rocketing directed at all the Israeli population centers that they could 
reach. The number of rockets and missiles fired into Israel since the 
withdrawal is over 8,000. Imagine what America's reaction would be if 
one of its neighbors was a terrorist entity and fired even a single 
rocket at one of our cities!
 
Amazingly, Israel continues to supply massive amounts of fuel, food and 
medical supplies to the very people launching Kassam rockets at Israeli 
civilians. Maybe Nader missed the fact that tons of supplies flow across 
the border from Israel into Gaza every day. Gaza's GDP grew close to 25 
percent in the first 3 quarters of 2011. Gazan residents often cross 
over to Israel for medical care. In fact, the local Red Cross Office 
said that "numerous international organizations have said clearly that 
there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza." Sadly, in return for what it 
provides to Gaza, all that Israel receives is the abduction of its 
soldiers, cross border violence and more daily rockets and missiles 
which are growing in effectiveness and numbers.
 
Contrary to Nader's assertion, there is journalist access to Gaza. Not 
many, though, choose to go there because of the danger. Those who do 
enter Gaza are careful not to report anything that Hamas does not want 
to reveal to the world, since to do otherwise would compromise the 
journalists’ safety and the safety of their colleagues, some of whom 
have paid for their honesty with their lives. Much of what happens in 
Gaza, therefore, remains shrouded in secrecy.
 
The Arab claim to Gaza and to all of Israel, not just the so-called 
“occupied territories,” rests on layer upon layer of fabricated 
“atrocities,” dispossession, and wildly exaggerated reports of civilian 
casualties on those rare occasions when Israel actually defends itself. 
Although there is little basis in reality, that doesn’t stop the Arab 
world and their allies from employing the “big lie.”
 
Ralph Nader repeats the same “big lies” en masse and wholesale in his 
column and substantiates them only with third-party quotes and 
assertions. The actual facts are that the violence and brutality which 
Gaza residents endure comes mostly from the Hamas gangs and criminal 
elements that enforce their form of discipline and “justice” on their 
own population. Their government, as in almost all Arab countries, is 
administered at the point of a gun.
 
Ralph Nader's invective against Israel in his column is not new. He's 
done it many times before. Instead of just accusing and name calling, 
Nader would serve us all better if he dealt with the facts on the ground 
and ascribed blame for the violence to the groups that foment it and not 
to a country which is one of the few actually doing anything to improve 
in the lives of those that live in Gaza.
 
Rather than expressing disappointment that most of the terror rockets 
fired from Gaza miss their intended victims in Israel, Nader ought to 
encourage the Palestinian Arabs to finally choose peace over their 
genocidal war against the world's only Jewish state.
 
-- 
 
Alan Stein, Ph.D.
President, PRIMER-Connecticut
Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting
www.primerct.org