26-Dec-13: Violence on Israel's Hamas border is escalating again Why?

Haniyeh, Al-Zahar and other Hamas insiders [Image Source]

Avi Issacharoff, writing in Times of Israel two days ago, makes some cogent comments about the strategy being followed by the terrorist Hamas regime in the past few days. 

It's sometimes said they are against rocket firings into Israel, like the one this morning. He doesn't agree. 

"It would be a stretch to say that the government in Gaza isn’t the party most responsible for the recent escalation. Last Friday, someone on the Gazan side allowed a group of Palestinians to approach the fence and even attempt to lay explosives. Someone also looked the other way when a rocket was fired last week at Ashkelon. And on Tuesday, someone apparently allowed men from the PRC (which has been known to cooperate with Hamas) to fire into Israel. It isn’t that Hamas is trying to trigger a major escalation. But it would appear that the organization wouldn’t mind a bit of a scrap with Israel, a “controlled explosion” of sorts that could help it recapture some of its rapidly declining popularity in Gaza. The reason for Hamas’s interest in a mild flareup with Israel is apparent in a survey published Tuesday by Dr. Khalil Shikaki’s Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. According to the study, support for Hamas is in decline among Gazans, a trend that the center had already underlined in its September study. Only 33 percent of the latest survey’s respondents in Gaza said they’d vote for Hamas if Palestinian parliamentary elections were to be held today, down from an already poor 39% in September. Combine that figure with the responses of West Bank residents, and Hamas is left with the support of only 29% of the Palestinian population, versus 40% for Fatah... Hamas hopes, public debate in Gaza will focus on the reported death Tuesday of a three-year-old girl at Israel’s hand, not on the government’s impotence in dealing with the dire economy... The problem, as ever, is that it’s a gamble on Hamas’s part: Contained clashes and controlled crises have a way of spiraling out of control and giving way to all-out conflict — sometimes in a matter of hours. [more]

Here's another aspect of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll that we wish would have gotten a little more attention: when respondents were asked to identify "the most serious problem confronting Palestinian society today", the answer that got the highest percentage of support was the spread of poverty and unemployment. 

Ultimately that view is more threatening to the iron-fisted rule of the Hamas and PA tyrants than anything Israel can do to them. When their own people finally come to recognize how far they are from being able to build decent lives for their children, and that they have something worth protecting in their own society, that's when ordinary Palestinian Arabs will be less willing to continue suffering the long, long descent into barbarism which has been their fate under several generations of kleptocratic, inhumane rule imposed by their vicious political elites.