The countries of the European Union are divided over whether to continue aid to Gaza. However, the question of whether it is possible to help the civilian population without strengthening Hamas is not part of the current debate.

Most international aid to Gaza is channeled through UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated exclusively to Palestinian refugees....Unfortunately, UNRWA's very existence and modus operandi directly reinforce Hamas. For this international organization, while there are only a handful of surviving refugees from 1948, supposed "refugee status" is passed down from father to son, so there are now around five times as many "refugees" in Gaza as there were originally.

[UNRWA] appears intended as political thorn to be administered for the purpose of maligning Israel for a war that was started by five Arab armies... which they then lost. Perhaps they should have thought of that before.

Meanwhile, roughly the same number of Jewish refugees, about 650,000, were fleeing for their lives from Arab countries to Israel. The newly born Jewish state, about the size of New Jersey or two-thirds of Belgium, and with no funds, managed comfortably to absorb everyone.

Given Palestinian demographics, return to the places deserted in 1948 would mean the end of the Hebrew state, and is just as utopian as the idea of the returning German refugees from 1945 to pre-war Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic.

[A]id, even humanitarian aid, to dictatorial countries inevitably strengthens that power, even more so with an Islamist totalitarian power such as Hamas, which does not care about the wellbeing of its citizen as European countries do.

The US and the EU, if they want to continue officially supporting an increasingly unrealistic "two-state solution", should first stop funding UNRWA, whose tasks could eventually be taken over by other organizations unrelated to refugee status.

UNWRA, which is inordinately active in education, has been criticized for helping to indoctrinate children with radical Hamas rhetoric through school textbooks and extremist teachers.... UNRWA does not have the reputation of being accountable. A recent report discloses that "UN Teachers Call To Murder Jews."

The problem is therefore not, as we hear today in European circles, to avoid supporting organizations linked to Hamas: all aid benefits the organization, which can then concentrate on war and terrorism, since it is largely exempt from the tasks normally devolved to those who control a territory.

No one will dispute that it is useful to teach Gaza's children to read and write, but it is legitimate to question whether literacy training is actually being used to indoctrinate students and ignite a terrorist drift....

Sometimes, refraining from assisting people is the least bad solution when there is no good one... [O]ne wonders why the United States and the European Union want to help in Gaza and thus help Hamas... It is also usually not clear how much aid actually gets to its intended recipients and how much ends up in Hamas's coffers.

Massacres on this scale, rewarded by the cessation of hostilities when it suits the aggressor, then having others come and clean up after them, would only consecrate their efforts. Churchill did not call for a ceasefire after the Nazi Blitz on London, nor did Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor.

The Israelis have dropped thousands of leaflets over northern Gaza telling the people immediately to go to southern Gaza. Hamas instantly announced that the leaflets were merely propaganda, ordered its citizens not to move, and reportedly are now blocking their passage there. [Source: Dan Senor, Fox News, One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, October 14, 2023]

Today, "standing by Israel" means supporting this democracy's difficult war against a savage terrorist totalitarian movement, and not urging Israel to stop before its critical mission is accomplished.

The US and Israel continue to base their policies on the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is willing to coexist with the Jewish state.

"We made [the Israelis] think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack." — Ali Baraka, senior Hamas terrorist, RT.

"We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law." — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Reuters, October 12, 2023.

Abbas's statement is notable for many reasons. It doesn't name Hamas. It draws a moral equivalence between Israel's counterattack in Gaza and Hamas's orgiastic rape, torture, murder, immolation and kidnapping of babies, children, women and men. And it came after five days in which Abbas and the rest of Palestinian society did nothing but celebrate and defend Hamas's atrocities.

The subtext was clear. Hamas is the bad guy. The Palestinian Authority is the good guy. And if that weren't apparent as Biden spoke, Blinken's decision to meet with Abbas made the point explicit.

Fatah also called for all Palestinians to join Hamas's jihad against Israel.

The fakery of Abbas's milquetoast condemnation of Hamas's atrocities is self-evident when seen in the context of his actions and statements and those of the PA, PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian public. But it was clearly sufficient to convince Blinken that it is reasonable to meet with him and continue to base US policy on the fiction that the PA represents a moderate force within Palestinian society that is willing to peacefully coexist with the Jewish state.

Israel and the US have refused to acknowledge that they have been played by the PA the same way they were played by Hamas for the past two years, and Hamas was able to deceive Israel and the US for two years because they wanted to be deceived. Israel's generals wanted to believe that the Palestinians writ large aren't implacable foes. They can be appeased. We don't have to defeat them.

And the Biden administration, like most of its predecessors, wanted to believe the deception — and to still believe it in the PA's case — because they want to believe that Israel is to blame for the violence waged against it. The lie of Israeli culpability is the foundation of 50 years of US Middle East peacemaking efforts. The lie of Palestinian moderation is the rationale for 50 years of near-continuous US pressure on Israel to concede territory to the Palestinians. It has been the justification and rationale for the US opposition to any effort by Israel to defeat the PLO on the battlefield.

The constant assertion "There is no military solution to the Palestinian conflict with Israel" is predicated on the notion that there is a political solution.

But the slaughter of October 7 made clear — and not for the first or the hundredth time — that this isn't a political conflict. It is an existential one.

They [the Israelis] ignored one of the advice of the Florentine clerk that "Don't wound a deadly enemy and let him live to recover. Either turn him into a friend or kill him!"

Israeli leaders tried to apply to Hamas the strategy they had used against hostile Arab neighbors since 1948: "Taking them to the dentist every 10 years to defang them."

The error the Israelis made was not to see the difference between classical state structures that have to run a country and respond to the minimum needs of their society and a non-state actor that has little concern about the people under its rule.

Hamas has been in a position to totally ignore the needs of people living in the enclave. Essential needs as food, education and health care are covered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), over 100 NGOs from some 30 countries and frequent donations from countries wishing to show solidarity with Palestinians. In some cases foreign, donors even pay the salaries of the personnel in the local administration.

Thanks to "gifts" from "certain friendly powers", Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, even don't have to buy their arms.

Hamas, as its charter clearly states, is not in the business of nation-building: what it seeks is the elimination of Israel, something that Israelis are unlikely to offer.

The threat of executing hostages, that include citizens of several countries other than Israel, could sap much of the sympathy that there is for the Palestinian "cause" especially in the West.

The current showdown also shows the inability or unwillingness of the Biden administration to discard then President Barack Obama's disastrous Middle East policy of cold-shouldering friends in the hope of getting warmth from foes.