Israel is invading northern Gaza with thousands of ground troops.
Gaza is a place filled up with people. Israel, over the border, is all fields of green and brown, with a few small settlements.
The resemblance to a gigantic "location" or "township" (reserved for "the Bantu") in South Africa is undeniable.
The "government" in Gaza is Hamas, the acronym offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood nurturing an armed militia. The idea that the Gazans could elect their own state was undermined by Israel's ability to choke Gaza and Egypt's closing of its border. Therefore the most extreme, rejectionist party was elevated to power as a reaction. It would be as if all Soweto was walled off from Midrand, its people disallowed from entering Johannesburg to find work, and then permitted an unedited slate of parties from which to choose their "government." (And then blockaded and attacked.)
Hamas however unlike liberation movements actually wants to change the society that elected it to power, like the Muslim Brotherhood does generally. It's a terrorist organization according to the European Union and the USA. Therefore, it has been willing to engage in strategies that risked alienating Gaza's people in the process, like firing forty or fifty home-made rockets per day into Israel.
Those actions were not popular, because they were obviously likely to lead to further suffering in Gaza.
But when reprisals do come, the collective suffering of Gaza's populace at the hands of the Israeli military make Hamas's emphasis on the struggle seem wise and true. The world is all about blood and fire after all! Hamas' preoccupation, its reason for being, is conflict.
The Gazan "state," by wielding force against the interests of its people, i.e. rockets spun off into Israeli apartments and fields, asks that its people be more fully identified with itself, preparatory to their further transformation: and the state of Israel complies.
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