Furthermore, Israel was entitled to withdraw to “secure and recognized boundaries.” And who would decide what constituted “secure” boundaries? That could only be Israel itself. During the Johnson administration, a group of high-ranking American officers, asked to study the military significance of the territories Israel had won in the war, concluded that for the security of the state, given its tiny size, and its 8-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, certain changes were indispensable, including Israel’s military control of the Judean hills, and permanent retention of the West Bank.

I am convinced that Ocasio-Cortez has not studied either the Mandate for Palestine or Resolution 242, as elucidated by its author Lord Caradon. Nor has she studied the topography of the West Bank. She admitted at the end of her interview with Martha Hoover that she was “not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.”

That was clear. For after mentioning the “occupation of Palestine,” she delivered herself of judgments about “an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition.” [sic] What crisis is that? Was she referring to the “crisis” in “Palestinian” civil society because all of the leaders, whether of Hamas or of the Palestinian Authority, have helped themselves to billions of dollars in diverted aid? Mahmoud Abbas and his two sons have accumulated a family fortune of at least $400 million. Recently Abbas used $50 million in aid money — while “Palestinian” propaganda proclaims the dire condition of the “Palestinian people” — to buy himself a private jet. Abu Marzook, one of the main leaders of Hamas, has accumulated a private fortune of $2.5 billion. Khaled Meshaal, the recently “retired” leader of Hamas’s political wing, has outdone even that, with a fortune, according to Arab sources, of from $2.5 to $5 billion. He doesn’t bother to live in Gaza; his longest visit there lasted four days. This “Palestinian” leader prefers his cosseted existence in a mansion in Qatar. Mohammed Rashid, the financial advisor to the late Yasser Arafat, has a fortune of $500 million. Arafat himself had at one time a fortune of $3 billion; at his death, billions seem to have disappeared. Does Ocasio-Cortez know about any of that? Someone should let her know.

Does Ocasio-Cortez know that Israeli hospitals treat “Palestinian” and other Arab patients with the best possible medical care, often for free? She might want to see the Arabs filling the charity wards at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Does she know about the hundreds of Muslim Arabs from Syria who have been treated for free in Israeli hospitals? Or the humanitarian aid sent by Israel to civilians in Syria? Is she aware of the truckloads of medical supplies that Israel attempted to send to Gaza last May, but Hamas prevented those trucks from entering the Kerem Shalom crossing, preferring that ordinary Gazans suffer rather than be helped by aid from Israel? Hamas benefits by the suffering of the very people it claims to lead; such suffering provides good copy for anti-Israel propaganda. Few in the international media report on Israel’s attempt to supply, and Hamas’s preventing, such aid from reaching Gazans.

In her PBS interview, Ocasio-Cortez said that “what people are starting to see, at least in the occupation of Palestine, is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition. That, to me, is just where I tend to come from on this issue.” I don’t quite know what she means here. Does she mean that she can’t be bothered to read up on this matter, on what the Mandate for Palestine was intended to achieve, or what Resolution 242 was all about? All she knows is that she’s been told that people — “Palestinians” — are suffering from a “humanitarian” crisis. She doesn’t know how that “crisis” began, but a little googling would tell her that Hamas whips up civilians to protest, to riot, and to throw Molotov cocktails and other explosives into Israel, and to let loose incendiary kites that have already burned up thousands of acres in Israel, all part of an attempt to breach Israel’s security fence. She does not know, and has not tried to find out, that Israel tries to supply humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, but Hamas, wanting that “humanitarian crisis,” blocks that aid.