The differences between Hamas and Israel are so profound, it’s almost as though the two aren’t living in the same century.
The Hamas war against Israel pits cheap rockets — basically the 21st-century version of an exploding cannonball — against a high-tech military so sophisticated, it can send harmless “door-knocking” bombs to land on the roofs of buildings to warn its targets inside that the next live bomb will level the place.
One side is monstrous but hapless: Hamas is looking to create mass terror through the deliberate targeting of enemy civilians, has fired 500 rockets, and has killed exactly one Israeli.
The other side is effective, at times to its own disadvantage: Israel wants to eliminate weapons caches and does whatever it can to minimize civilian casualties but has killed 200 in Gaza — almost entirely because Hamas wants to use its own people both as human shields and as public-relations weapons.
But take the war away, and what do you see about the differences between Hamas and Israel?
It was nine years ago that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It was seven years ago that Hamas took control of Gaza following an election in which the terrorist group routed the Palestinian Authority (which controls the West Bank).
The area has been entirely under Palestinian dominion.
Since 2005, Israel’s overall economy has grown almost 60 percent larger, with an annual GDP growth rate of 4.5 percent.
Israel, once the globe’s poorest democracy, ranks 37th among nations in overall GDP and its per-capita income of $31,000 per year makes it the 25th-richest country on Earth.
And Gaza? Its economy is largely frozen. Its per-capita income hovers around $2,000. Because its people elected a terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of Israel, almost all economic ties between the growing economic giant and the basket case have been severed.
No rational outside investor wants to have anything to do with Gaza, given its management and the simple fact that its government seems to be obsessed with getting itself into a destructive war with its neighbor every couple of years.
And not only that, but Gazans exist in a bizarre condition known nowhere else on Earth. Nearly 1.2 million of the area’s 1.5 million residents are classified as “refugees,” notwithstanding the fact that almost all of them were born there. They live in eight “refugee camps” — towns that are now 65 years old.
As Michael Bernstam of the Hoover Institution has written, “These camps were established in 1949 and have been financed ever since by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Yet far from seeking to help residents build a new and better life either in Gaza or elsewhere, UNRWA is paying millions of refugees to perpetuate their refugee status, generation after generation, as they await their forcible return to the land inside the State of Israel.”
Meanwhile, Israel has economic and political problems of its own — but its problems have been generated in large measure by the rapidity of its economic growth.
Housing has become insanely expensive, in part because (as in New York City) foreign investors looking to diversify their personal holdings think Israeli real estate is a good value for them.
They’ve driven up the prices in the higher ends of the market in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which has in turn made it very difficult for younger Israelis to buy their own homes.
This affordability crisis led to large-scale protests in 2011 that led to national elections in which, for the first time in the nation’s history, domestic issues took precedence over foreign and military issues.
The country’s politics and politicians can’t keep up with the exploding private sector, which has drained Israel’s public life of its smartest and most capable younger people and left the management of the country to a class of hackish stumblebums who trip over their own shoes.
There’s basically one person who seems to know how to play the political game in Israel right now, and that’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — which is why he bids fair to become his country’s longest-serving head of state since its George Washington, David Ben-Gurion.
Bibi could use some serious rivals, but he doesn’t have any, because everyone who could be has decided they can do better.
Israel is a First World country with First World problems. Gaza is a 65-year-old refugee camp run by vicious terrorists who can’t shoot straight — and even when they do, they see their rockets destroyed by the most advanced system of air defense the world has ever seen.
It’s not a fair fight, and thank God for that.