Ending the stranglehold on Gaza

From the Boston Globe. It is always an amazing thing when the US media features opinions from the Palestinian peace movement.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/26/ending_the_stranglehold_on_gaza/


AN ISRAELI convoy of goods and peace activists will go today to Erez, Israel's border with Gaza, and many Palestinians will be on the other side waiting. They will not see one another, but Palestinians will know there are Jews who condemn the siege inflicted on the tiny territory by Israel's military establishment and want to see an end to the 40-year-old occupation.
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Israel's minister of justice, Haim Ramon, had pushed for cutting off Gaza's "infrastructural oxygen" - water, electricity, and fuel - as a response to the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. Last Sunday, Ramon's wish came true: Israel's blockade forced Gaza's only power plant to shut down, plunging 800,000 people into darkness. Food and humanitarian aid were also denied entry. Although international pressure forced Israel to let in some supplies two days later, and the situation further eased when Palestinians breached the border wall with Egypt, the worst may be yet to come.

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, agrees with Ramon's strategy, saying that it is "inconceivable that life in Gaza continues to be normal." The rapid and deepening desperation of Gaza's sick and hungry is of no moral concern to her. For Livni, like Ramon, the siege is a tactical measure, a human experiment to stop the rockets and bring down a duly elected government.

The siege on Gaza and the West Bank began after Hamas's 2006 electoral victory with an international diplomatic and financial boycott of the new Hamas-led government. Development assistance was severely reduced with the improbable aim of bringing about a popular uprising against the very government just elected to power. Instead, this collective punishment resulted in a steady deterioration of Palestinian life, in growing lawlessness, and a violent confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, which escalated into a Hamas military takeover of Gaza in June 2007.


.....
Gaza also suffers from the ongoing destruction of its agriculture and physical infrastructure. Between June and November 2006, $74.7 million in damage was inflicted by the Israeli military on top of the nearly $2 billion already incurred by Palestinians between 2002 and 2005. Over half the damage was to agricultural land flattened by bulldozers, with the remainder to homes, public buildings, roads, water and sewage pipes, electricity infrastructure, and phone lines.

(please read the whole thing. this is a very important contribution the discussion. Eyad lives in Gaza, and has been active for human rights for a long time. He has heavily criticized the Hamas leadership as well as the misleadership of Arafat in times past. Sara Roy is a Jewish activist for peace and justice in Israel/Palestine, and an expert in economics.)

They are not part of anybody's peace movement.

regime. It's about human rights, its about international law, its about human decency.

Hamas could end this right here and now.

They choose not to.

Place some of the blame on the terrorists, at least a bit of it. I know you hold the Israeli government in contempt, but Hamas is in utter violation of international law too, and they could end this in two seconds, if they wanted to. But the welfare of their people has never been paramount, obviously, or they wouldn't continue this charade of "resistance" at all costs. At some point, a decent government must think about its citizens first.

"diet" imposers on the children of Gaza.

even if it lasts a life-time.

compassion for children in Gaza is not what i would expect from you.
You do not seem to respect or care about human life there.

that's your problem.

Go yell at them

What I'm saying is, sometimes, it's not Israel's policies that make Palestinian lives miserable.

instead of realizing that they bear at least some responsibility in the mess they are in.

Things don't always just "happen" to people; individuals or groups have a hand in how things turn out.

It's called cause and effect. Or consequences for ones actions.

Maybe the Palestinians will get that one day, and then their lives will begin to improve.

free and fair elections.

And there is much evidence to suggest that the coup in Gaza was Fatah's coup against Hamas' legitimate electoral victory.

Arafat recognized. If you want to be associated w/an organization that turned violence against its own people for absolute power, be my guest.

as Hamas has shown. They rule with an iron fist, so whether they were elected, or wrested power from Fatah in a coup doesn't matter. An election doesn't a democracy make.

regardless of the consequences.

From gush-shalom.org

THE REASON given for the starving and freezing of one and a half million human beings, crowded into a territory of 365 square kilometers, is the continued shooting at the town of Sderot and the adjoining villages.

That is a well-chosen reason. It unites the primitive and poor parts of the Israeli public. It blunts the criticism of the UN and the governments throughout the world, who might otherwise have spoken out against a collective punishment that is, undoubtedly, a war crime under international law.

A clear picture is presented to the world: the Hamas terror regime in Gaza launches missiles at innocent Israeli civilians. No government in the world can tolerate the bombardment of its citizens from across the border. The Israeli military has not found a military answer to the Qassam missiles. Therefore there is no other way than to exert such strong pressure on the Gaza population as to make them rise up against Hamas and compel them to stop the missiles.

The day the Gaza electricity works stopped operating, our military correspondents were overjoyed: only two Qassams were launched from the Strip. So it works! Ehud Barak is a genius!

But the day after, 17 Qassams landed, and the joy evaporated. Politicians and generals were (literally) out of their minds: one politician proposed to "act crazier than them", another proposed to "shell Gaza's urban area indiscriminately for every Qassam launched", a famous professor (who is a little bit deranged) proposed the exercise of "ultimate evil".

The government scenario was a repeat of Lebanon War II (the report about which is due to be published in a few days). Then: Hizbullah captured two soldiers on the Israeli side of the border, now: Hamas fired on towns and villages on the Israeli side of the border. Then: the government decide in haste to start a war, now: the government decided in haste to impose a total blockade. Then: the government ordered the massive bombing of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hizbullah, now: the government decided to cause massive suffering of the civilian population in order to get them to pressure Hamas.

The results were the same in both cases: the Lebanese population did not rise up against Hizbullah, but on the contrary, people of all religious communities united behind the Shiite organization. Hassan Nasrallah became the hero of the entire Arab world. And now: the population unites behind Hamas and accuses Mahmoud Abbas of cooperation with the enemy. A mother who has no food for her children does not curse Ismail Haniyeh, she curses Olmert, Abbas and Mubarak.

SO WHAT to do? After all, it is impossible to tolerate the suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot, who are under constant fire.

What is being hidden from the embittered public is that the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.

Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.

A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations and the blockade.

Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?

Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.

Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext - much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.

In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle. It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas - because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance - than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media cooperate with this pretence.

that a ceasefire from Hamas means absolutely nothing,

lately? Not me ...

Were you not consulted about it? ;)

But if my umma was in civil war, I'd wouldn't.

Sorry, but I don't even live there and I consider them brethren - we started in the same youth movement. Oh, and ours teaches mediation and leadership, as well as survival skills and tactical thinking.

On edit: Uri Avnery ... yup, he's got problems.

on the people of Gaza during 40 years of occupation and wanton destruction of Gaza.
There needs to be serious talks about the need for reparation for Israel's war crimes in the region. It is not a matter of "charity", it is a matter of justice and the possibility of peace.

everything inflicted on them; they aren't responsible for their plight in the slightest.

Tom, do you really believe that the Palestinians are so helpless, that everything has simply "happened" to them, that they have had absolutely no hand in their situation?

I find that mind boggling, no matter how you feel about the Israeli administrations, past and present.

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This was written nearly 6 months ago, i would like to hear his observations today, as Israel has ratcheted up its extremist criminal tactics several fold.

http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html
There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species. Its massiveness, unconcealed genocidal intent, and reliance on the mentality and instruments of modernity give its enactment in the death camps of Europe a special status in our moral imagination. This special status is exhibited in the continuing presentation of its gruesome realities through film, books, and a variety of cultural artifacts more than six decades after the events in question ceased. The permanent memory of the Holocaust is also kept alive by the existence of several notable museums devoted exclusively to the depiction of the horrors that took place during the period of Nazi rule in Germany.

Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust.’
....
Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever the ethos of ‘a responsibility to protect,’ recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering. But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force.

3 November 2005

‘A Dubai on the Mediterranean’
Sara Roy on Gaza’s future

>snip

Since 2000, the economy of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has lost a potential income of approximately $6.4 billion and suffered $3.5 billion worth of physical damage at the hands of the Israeli army. This means, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, that the ‘occupied Palestinian territory has lost at least one fifth of its economic base over the last four years as a consequence of war and occupation.’ Yet the authors of the Plan are confident that ‘the process of disengagement will serve to dispel claims regarding Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.’ They assume, in other words, that Gaza’s suffering is a recent phenomenon borne of the last five years of intifada, and that the return of the land taken up by military installations and settlements – anywhere from 15 to 30 per cent of the territory – and the removal of 9000 Israeli settlers will soon redress the situation. Israel’s primary role in creating Palestine’s misery and decline since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 is expunged from the narrative.

There is no doubt that the destruction wrought by Israel over the last five years – the demolition of homes (some 4600 between 2000 and 2004), schools, roads, factories, workshops, hospitals, mosques and greenhouses, the razing of agricultural fields, the uprooting of trees, the confinement of the population and the denial of access to education and health services as a consequence of Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints – has been ruinous for Palestinians, especially those in the Gaza Strip. But one need only look at the economy of Gaza on the eve of the uprising to realise that the devastation is not recent. By the time the second intifada broke out, Israel’s closure policy had been in force for seven years, leading to unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty (which would soon be surpassed). Yet the closure policy proved so destructive only because the thirty-year process of integrating Gaza’s economy into Israel’s had made the local economy deeply dependent. As a result, when the border was closed in 1993, self-sustainment was no longer possible – the means weren’t there. Decades of expropriation and deinstitutionalisation had long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for development, ensuring that no viable economic (and hence political) structure could emerge.

The damage – the de-development of Palestine – cannot be undone simply by ‘returning’ Gaza’s lands and allowing Palestinians freedom of movement and the right to build factories and industrial estates. Enlarging its sliver of land – or Palestinian access to it – won’t solve Gaza’s myriad problems when its growing population is confined within it. Density is not just a problem of people but of access to resources, especially labour markets. Without porous boundaries allowing workers access to jobs, something the Disengagement Plan not only doesn’t address but in effect denies, the Strip will remain effectively a prison without any possibility of establishing a viable economy. Yet, it is the opposite idea – that with disengagement, development is possible – that Israel is trying to promote, in the hope that this will absolve it of any responsibility for Gaza’s desolation, past or present.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n21/roy_01_.html