If “Pro-Palestine” groups are willing to pass on this sort of message in a coordinated way to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, I think we’ll be a lot closer to getting rid of Hamas, lifting of barriers and restrictions for ordinary Palestinians and swiftly moving towards Palestinian statehood and peace for those on both sides of the border.

Brutal honesty will beget action, and ultimately, a real solution.

You’ve illuminate where a lot of ‘pro-Palestine’ groups have gone wrong with their work including myself, and I’m grateful for your insights.

Terry, perhaps I did phrase it a bit badly, but we’re in total agreement. The border controls around Gaza are clearly intended not merely to put pressure on the ruling thugs from their own people, but to physically separate Hamas militants from Israeli civilians.

And of course, it’s not just the Israelis keeping these barriers up; the Egyptians, already suffering greatly from rising militant fanaticism on their territory, are fearful of Palestinian-inspired violence — of which there is plenty of precedent, in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere.

In any case, the aid that gets in from Israel into Gaza demonstrates as well as anything the limitations that Israelis are under when it comes to dealing with the terrorist-run statelet on their southern flank. Critics of Israel liken the border controls to a siege, part of a general strategy of genocide.

But if so, it is the first siege in history in which the belligerent trucked in humanitarian goods for their enemies, and the first genocide in history where the target population grows by double-digit figures, in stark contrast to the stagnant and below-replacement birth rates in much of the rest of the world.

Looking at a few notable examples of sieges in the past, the Ottoman Turks did not provide food and medicine to the panicked residents of Constantinople. The Wermacht did not ferry in sour kraut and wiener schnitzel for the citizens of Leningrad at the same time that the poor Russians were literally dying in the streets.

But I digress. Sealing off your country from people who want to kill you is always a good idea. ‘Nuff said.

I might be wrong, but I will nevertheless quibble with this:

“As regards the hardships experienced in the “day to day living conditions of people living in Gaza”, well, that’s what the blockade was meant to do, as a means of pressuring the Palestinian people to reject their thuggish, torturing fascist overlords.”

It might be a matter of phrasing, but “the blockade” clearly doesn’t directly apply pressure on the innocent Palestinian people for that purpose alone, and indeed more than $4 billion in aid to Gaza (much of it from those cunning American imperialists, no less) has been pledged, which exposes the Viva Palestina and Code Pink shenanigans as the Hamas propaganda that is their real purpose. Humanitarian aid does get through, slowly and incompetently, from the Israeli side.

The primary purpose of the sanctions, for better or worse, is to isolate and contain the Hamas pathogen within Gaza, and to protect Israel’s security. Out of this, however, the reading that Palestinians in Gaza should be encouraged to make of this, as you rightly point out, is that if they want their future to be a massively-subsidized and bustling, reconstructed little metropolis on the Mediterranean, it’s theirs. But it can only happen if Hamas is a thing of the past.

And as you say, the comical Parliamentary committee would prefer that Palestinians suffer and wallow in their grievances rather than prosper and flourish by fully rejecting Hamas, which is the most committed enemy of Palestinian freedom and independence, and by turning to a future at peace with Israel.