In Shattered Gaza, "Change" Is A Hard Sell
Changing that may well hold the key to the resolution of, or at least significant progress on, a foreign policy issue that has bedeviled and frustrated successive administrations in Washington for decades.
Israel's three-week-plus pounding of the heaving 139-square-mile slum that is home to 1.5 million Palestinians — 70 percent of them refugees expelled from what is now Israel — will cost billions to repair.
But money isn't the problem so much as convincing people that the U.S., which is widely seen as the only outside player that counts, cares.
Certainly the victims are having a hard time believing it. In the Gaza City suburb of Abed Rabbo, Raed Anthamna, who used to make his living driving foreign journalists around the enclave, could barely hold back tears yesterday as he surveyed the rubble that was once the home of his 60-member extended family.
The car that was his livelihood was barely recognizable under piles of concrete blasted by tanks, missiles and gunboats. His aged father sat alone on the top of what had been his house weeping quietly, waiting, he said, for God to help, because no one else would.
Asked if he thought the new Obama administration would make a difference, Raed shook his head. "Not any president for American or any country. They just give security for Israel. Not for us. Nobody care about us. Nobody care about us."
More than a million Palestinians relied on United Nations food aid before the latest fighting. Israel wants to control what comes in and out, and Washington will be under pressure to force them to ease up. But that will only happen if Hamas respects the tentative cease-fire now in place.
The movement is as recalcitrant as the Israelis. At a news conference Monday, a spokesman for Hamas' military wing vowed to rearm as soon as possible. "Manufacturing the holy weapons is our mission and we know how to acquire weapons," Reuters reported Abu Ubaida as saying.
Stopping that means getting Egypt to stop smuggling across — and under — its border, and that will take international help, which President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally in the region, has refused to accept.
"Change you can believe in" will be a much harder sell here than anywhere else, and it will be even harder to make happen.