History is irrelevant

Nobody said Western policy towards Hamas was clever. The Daily Star’s Rami G. Khouri explains:

The core problem is that the prevailing Middle Eastern and global power elite wants to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through compulsory Palestinian concessions and imposed Israeli gains, enforced by the gun and by sanctions if need be. This approach has not worked since the first modern Zionist colonies were built in Palestine over a century ago, and it will not work today. It did not work for the British in India or the French in Algeria, and it will not work for the Israelis and Americans in Palestine today. Ask any student of history, political science and chaos theory.… 

The price for such behaviour is international isolation. The British-led academic boycott is gathering steam. The Palestinian campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel applauds the latest move by British academics to support civil resistance against the Israeli occupation:

The persistence of academic boycott efforts proves that many academics in the UK and beyond do not buy the disingenuous claim that boycott of Israeli academic institutions conflicts with “academic freedom” or inadvertently promotes anti-Semitism in any way. The first claim is at best hypocritical as it is based on the premise that only Israeli academic freedom counts. The fact that Israeli academic institutions themselves collude in various ways in their government’s grave violations of Palestinian human and political rights, which include the right to education, is lost on those making this claim. As to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism charge, it is now clearer than ever that it is mendaciously being used merely to stifle opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation and horrific human rights record and to abort attempts at effectively resisting this decades-old injustice. The Palestinian Call for Boycott is categorically not directed at Jews or even Israelis as Jews; rather, it targets Israel’s oppression and racism with no consideration to ethnicity or religion.

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