The Real Problem with the Gaza Blockade

If anything, collective punishment tends to make the locals rally around their leaders, not seek their overthrow. There's nothing to suggest Hamas is losing popular support in Gaza because of the blockade.
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Much more important than the back-and-forth about Israel's (lethally bungled) raid on a boatload of (deliberately provocative) protesters trying to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is the bigger question it raises: what to do about the blockade? Without a doubt, its critics are right to say it inflicts terrible human suffering on civilian Palestinians. But it's also a fact that without it, Hamas would smuggle in even more rockets to lob at Israeli civilians, not to mention whatever other weapons they could get their hands on to help further their goal of wiping Israel off the map.

But here's another fact about the Gaza blockade: as a tactic, it just doesn't work. This kind of attempt to pressure another nation into doing your will by squeezing them materially almost never does. It pretty much only ends up hurting innocent civilians. The economic sanctions imposed on Serbian-controlled Yugoslavia during the Bosnian war didn't make Belgrade stop supporting Bosnia's genocidal Serbs. They just made life incredibly difficult for ordinary people, without changing the behavior of their leaders at all. Ditto the sanctions on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Ditto, for that matter, the bombing of civilian centers in World War Two. (There might be a case to make about sanctions having helped end apartheid in South Africa, but to me that looks more like they at best hastened something that was inevitable anyway. Very different from these other situations.)

If anything, this kind of collective punishment tends to make the locals rally around their leaders, not seek their overthrow. There's nothing to suggest Hamas is losing popular support in Gaza because of the blockade - probably the opposite. I don't know what the solution is, but it's pretty obvious the status quo just isn't working, and never will.

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