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"Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first
territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject
destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and--some
would say--encouragement of the international community,"
the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.
The Strangulation of Gaza
by
SAREE MAKDISI
[posted online on February 1, 2008]
The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom
last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron
wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from
Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the
virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the
past few years--the terminal stage of four decades of
Israeli occupation--and to shop for desperately needed
supplies in Egyptian border towns.
Gaza's doors are slowly closing again, however. Under
mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt
has dispatched additional border guards armed with water
cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control.
It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the
Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez
is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of
Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the
desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal,
on the other side of which they would find the regular
Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of
the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.
Now that Gaza's fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to
fade, the grim reality facing the territory's 1.5 million
people is once again looming large. "After feeling
imprisoned for so long, it has been a psychological relief
for Gazans to know that there is a way out," said John Ging,
the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA). "But it does not resolve their crisis by any
stretch of the imagination."
Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns
brought into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and
other relief agencies have been blocked by Israel from
delivering to the people who depend on them for their very
survival. As long as the border with Egypt is even partially
open, Israel refuses to open its own borders with Gaza to
anything other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel to
keep the territory's one power plant operating at a
subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a
day.
UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid
it had previously built up in Gaza. Only thirty-two
truckloads of goods have been allowed to enter Gaza since
Israel imposed its total closure on January 18; 250 trucks
were entering every day before last June, and even that was
insufficient to meet the population's needs.
On
January 30 UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the
daily ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000
destitute refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component:
the canned meat that is the only source of protein in the
food parcels--which even under the best of circumstances
contributes less than two-thirds of minimum daily
nourishment--is being held up by Israel, and the stock of
those cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food
Program, which feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has
brought in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks; in
the seven months before that, it had been bringing in
fifteen trucks a day.
Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical
Israeli restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the
population now depends on food aid for day-to-day
subsistence. With the aid, they were receiving "enough to
survive, not to live," as the International Red Cross put
it. Without it, they will die.
All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian
militant groups' firing of crude homemade rockets into
Israel, which rarely cause any actual damage. There can be
no excuse for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel
was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those primitive
projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal rocket
attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying
Gaza for four decades.
The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991. It was tightened
with the institutionalization of the Israeli occupation
enabled by the Oslo Accords of 1993. It was tightened
further with the intensification of the occupation in
response to the second intifada in 2000. It was tightened
further still when Israel redeployed its settlers and troops
from inside Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory into
what John Dugard, the UN's special rapporteur on human
rights in the occupied territories, referred to as a prison,
the key to which, Dugard said, Israel had "thrown away." It
was tightened to the point of strangulation following the
Hamas electoral victory in 2006, when Israel began
restricting supplies of food and other resources into Gaza.
It was tightened beyond the point of strangulation following
the deposition of the Hamas-led government in June 2007. And
now this.
When Israel limited commercial shipments of food--but not
humanitarian relief--into Gaza in 2006, a senior government
adviser, Dov Weisglass, explained that "the idea is to put
the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of
hunger."
Israel's "diet" was taking its toll even before last week.
The World Food Program warned last November that less than
half of Gaza's food-import needs were being met. Basics
including wheat grain, vegetable oil, dairy products and
baby milk were in short supply. Few families can afford
meat. Anemia rates rocketed to almost 80 percent. UNRWA
noted at about the same time that "we are seeing evidence of
the stunting of children, their growth is slowing, because
our ration is only 61 percent of what people should have and
that has to be supplemented."
By
further restricting the supply of food to an already
malnourished population, Israel has clearly decided to take
its "diet" a step further. If the people of Gaza remain cut
off from the food aid on which their survival now depends,
they will face starvation.
They are now essentially out of food; the water system is
faltering (almost half the population now lacks access to
safe water supplies); the sewage system has broken down and
is discharging raw waste into streets and the sea; the power
supply is intermittent at best; hospitals lack heat and
spare parts for diagnostic machines, ventilators,
incubators; dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer
available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.
Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer patients cut off
from chemotherapy regimens, kidney patients cut off from
dialysis treatments, premature babies cut off from
blood-clotting medications. In the past few weeks, many more
Palestinian parents have watched the lives of their sick
children ebb slowly, quietly and (as far as the global media
are concerned) invisibly away in Gaza's besieged hospitals
than Israelis have been hurt--let alone actually killed--by
the erratic firing of primitive homemade rockets from Gaza,
about which we have heard so much. (According to the Israeli
human rights organization B'Tselem, these rockets have
killed thirteen Israelis in the past four years, while
Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in
the occupied territories in the past two years alone, almost
half of them civilians, including some 200 children.)
Israel's squeeze is expressly intended to punish the entire
population for the firing of those rockets by militants,
which ordinary civilians are powerless to stop. "We will not
allow them to lead a pleasant life," said Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert when Israel cut off fuel supplies on
January 18, thereby plunging Gaza into darkness. "As far as
I am concerned, all of Gaza's residents can walk and have no
fuel for their cars."
Olmert's views and, more important, his policies were
reaffirmed and given the legal sanction of Israel's High
Court. In what human rights organizations referred to as a
"devastating" decision, on January 30 the court ruled in
favor of the government's plan to further restrict supplies
of fuel and electricity to Gaza. "The decision means that
Israel may deliberately deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel
and electricity supplies," pointed out Sari Bashi, of the
Gisha human rights organization in Israel. "During wartime,
the civilian population is the first and central victim of
the fighting, even when efforts are made to minimize the
damage," the court said. In other words, harm to the
civilian population is an inevitable effect of war and
therefore legally permissible.
That may be the view of Israel's highest legal authority,
but it is not how the matter is viewed by international law,
which strictly regulates the way civilian populations are to
be treated in time of war. "The parties to a conflict must
at all times distinguish between the civilian population and
combatants in order to spare the civilian population and
civilian property," the International Red Cross points out,
invoking the Geneva Conventions and other founding documents
of international humanitarian law. "Neither the civilian
population as a whole nor individual civilians may be
attacked."
Moreover, no matter what Israel's High Court says, what is
happening in Gaza is not a war in the conventional sense:
Gaza is not a state at war with the state of Israel. It is a
territory militarily occupied by Israel. Even after its 2005
redeployment, Israel did not release its hold on Gaza; it
continues to control all access to the territory, as well as
its airspace, territorial waters and even its population
registry. Over and above all the routine prohibitions on
attacks on the civilian population and other forms of
collective punishment that hold true in case of war, in
other words, international law also holds Israel responsible
for the welfare of the Gaza population. Article 55 of the
Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) specifically demands, for
example, that, "to the fullest extent of the means available
to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food
and medical supplies of the population; it should, in
particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical
stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied
territory are inadequate."
Israel's methodical actions make it clear that it is
systematically grinding down and now actually starving
people for whose welfare it is legally accountable simply
because it regards Gaza's 1.5 million men, women and
children as a surplus population it would, quite simply,
like to get rid of one way or the other: a sentiment made
quite clear when Israel's chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed,
shortly after the current crisis began, that the entire
Palestinian population of Gaza should just be removed and
transferred to the Egyptian desert. "They will have a nice
country, and we shall have our country and we shall live in
peace," he said, without eliciting even a murmur of protest
in Israel.
The overwhelming majority of Gazans are refugees or the
descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes
when Palestine was destroyed and Israel was created in 1948.
Like all Palestinian refugees, those of Gaza have a moral
and legal right to return to the homeland from which they
were expelled. Israel blocks their return for the same
reason it expelled them in the first place, because their
presence would undermine its already tenuous claim to
Jewishness (this is the nature of the so-called "demographic
problem" about which Israeli politicians openly complain).
As long as the refugees live, what Israel regards as the
mortal threat of their right of return lives on. But if they
would somehow just go away...
"Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to
be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution,
with the knowledge, acquiescence and--some would
say--encouragement of the international community," the
commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.
The question now is whether the world will simply sit and
watch, now that this unprecedented threshold is actually
being crossed.
Having taken matters into their hands and destroyed the wall
cutting them off from the outside world, it is most unlikely
that the people of Gaza will simply submit to that fate. A
hermetic closure ultimately depends not merely on Israel's
whims but on Egypt's willingness--or ability--to cut off the
Palestinians of Gaza and watch them starve. For all the US
and Israeli pressure on Egypt, and for all the steps Egypt
is now taking, it seems most unlikely that it would let
things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow Arabs
from the Israeli occupation is one thing; actually
participating in their repression is quite another. The
Egyptian government would have to answer not only to the
people of Palestine but to its own people, and indeed to all
Arabs.
Working together, Hamas and the people of Gaza have forced
Egypt's hand and made much more visible than ever before the
role it had been playing all along in the Israeli occupation
and strangulation of Gaza; now that its role in assisting
Israel has been revealed, it will be difficult for Egypt to
go back to the status quo. Gazans have thrown Israel's plans
into disarray, because Israel's leaders could do little more
than watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza burst out
of their prison. And they have placed Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas and the government of Ramallah in a
corner: they will have to choose between defending their
people's rights and needs or confirming once and for all--as
indeed they are doing--that the PA is there to serve
Israel's interests, not those of the Palestinians. In which
case they too will one day be called to account.
- Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative
literature at UCLA, is the author of Palestine Inside Out:
An Everyday Occupation (Norton).
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