In today’s NY Times, Gideon Lichfield points out that the world’s disunited response to Hamas too closely resembles the world’s response to Fidel Castro (pictured). To boycott or engage? Lichfield writes:
Sound familiar? The same debate has been raging for decades about another small, impoverished and controversial place: Cuba. The United States doggedly insists that Fidel Castro’s repressive regime must be boycotted to make it collapse. Europeans and Canadians prefer encouraging gradual change through “constructive engagement.”
The result is that an unrepentant Mr. Castro is enjoying his 48th year in power, using the American boycott as a political prop and the rest of the world as an economic prop. Talk to Cubans and two things soon become clear: the main reason any of them support Mr. Castro is for his heroic stand against the Yanqui bully, and the main reason Cubans don’t starve is that tourists and foreign joint-venture businesses pump money into the economy.
Something similar could happen with Hamas.
