The
Real Goal Of Israel’s Blockade
By Jonathan Cook
17 November,
2008
Countercurrents.org
The latest tightening of Israel’s
chokehold on Gaza – ending all supplies into the Strip for more
than a week – has produced immediate and shocking consequences
for Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.
The refusal to allow in fuel has forced the shutting down of Gaza’s
only power station, creating a blackout that pushed Palestinians bearing
candles on to the streets in protest last week. A water and sanitation
crisis are expected to follow.
And on Thursday, the United Nations announced it had run out of the
food essentials it supplies to 750,000 desperately needy Gazans. “This
has become a blockade against the United Nations itself,” a
spokesman said.
In a further blow, Israel’s large Bank Hapoalim said it would
refuse all transactions with Gaza by the end of the month, effectively
imposing a financial blockade on an economy dependent on the Israeli
shekel. Other banks are planning to follow suit, forced into a corner
by Israel’s declaration in Sept 2007 of Gaza as an “enemy
entity”.
There are likely to be few witnesses to Gaza’s descent into
a dark and hungry winter. In the past week, all journalists were refused
access to Gaza, as were a group of senior European diplomats. Days
earlier, dozens of academics and doctors due to attend a conference
to assess the damage done to Gazans’ mental health were also
turned back.
Israel has blamed the latest restrictions of aid and fuel to Gaza
on Hamas’s violation of a five-month ceasefire by launching
rockets out of the Strip. But Israel had a hand in shattering the
agreement: as the world was distracted by the US presidential elections,
the army invaded Gaza, killing six Palestinians and provoking the
rocket fire.
The humanitarian catastrophe gripping Gaza is largely unrelated to
the latest tit-for-tat strikes between Hamas and Israel. Nearly a
year ago, Karen Koning AbuZayd, commissioner-general of the UN’s
refugee agency, warned: “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming
the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject
destitution”.
She blamed Gaza’s strangulation directly on Israel, but also
cited the international community as accomplice. Together they began
blocking aid in early 2006, following the election of Hamas to head
the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The US and Europe agreed to the measure on the principle that it would
force the people of Gaza to rethink their support for Hamas. The logic
was supposedly similar to the one that drove the sanctions applied
to Iraq under Saddam Hussein through the 1990s: if Gaza’s civilians
suffered enough, they would rise up against Hamas and install new
leaders acceptable to Israel and the West.
As Ms AbuZayd said, that moment marked the beginning of the international
community’s complicity in a policy of collective punishment
of Gaza, despite the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention classifies
such treatment of civilians as a war crime.
The blockade has been pursued relentlessly since, even if the desired
outcome has been no more achieved in Gaza than it was in Iraq. Instead,
Hamas entrenched its control and cemented the Strip’s physical
separation from the Fatah-dominated West Bank.
Far from reconsidering its policy, Israel’s leadership has responded
by turning the screw ever tighter – to the point where Gazan
society is now on the verge of collapse.
In truth, however, the growing catastrophe being unleashed on Gaza
is only indirectly related to Hamas’s rise to power and the
rocket attacks.
Of more concern to Israel is what each of these developments represents:
a refusal on the part of Gazans to abandon their resistance to Israel’s
continuing occupation. Both provide Israel with a pretext for casting
aside the protections offered to Gaza’s civilians under international
law to make them submit.
With embarrassing timing, the Israeli media revealed at the weekend
that one of the first acts of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister
elected in 2006, was to send a message to the Bush White House offering
a long-term truce in return for an end to Israeli occupation. His
offer was not even acknowledged.
Instead, according to the daily Jerusalem Post, Israeli policymakers
have sought to reinforce the impression that “it would be pointless
for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas”.
On this thinking, collective punishment is warranted because there
are no true civilians in Gaza. Israel is at war with every single
man, woman and child.
In an indication of how widely this view is shared, the cabinet discussed
last week a new strategy to obliterate Gazan villages in an attempt
to stop the rocket launches, in an echo of discredited Israeli tactics
used in south Lebanon in its war of 2006. The inhabitants would be
given warning before indiscriminate shelling began.
In fact, Israel’s desire to seal off Gaza and terrorise its
civilian population predates even Hamas’s election victory.
It can be dated to Ariel Sharon’s disengagement of summer 2005,
when Fatah’s rule of the PA was unchallenged.
An indication of the kind of isolation Mr Sharon preferred for Gaza
was revealed shortly after the pull-out, in Dec 2005, when his officials
first proposed cutting off electricity to the Strip.
The policy was not implemented, the local media pointed out at the
time, both because officials suspected the violation of international
law would be rejected by other nations and because it was feared that
such a move would damage Fatah’s chances of winning the elections
the following month.
With the vote over, however, Israel had the excuse it needed to begin
severing its responsibility for the civilian population. It recast
its relationship with Gaza from one of occupation to one of hostile
parties at war. A policy of collective punishment that was considered
transparently illegal in late 2005 has today become Israel’s
standard operating procedure.
Increasingly strident talk from officials, culminating in February
in the deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai’s infamous remark
about creating a “shoah”, or Holocaust, in Gaza, has been
matched by Israeli measures. The military bombed Gaza’s electricity
plant in June 2006, and has been incrementally cutting fuel supplies
ever since. In January, Mr Vilnai argued that Israel should cut off
“all responsibility” for Gaza and two months later Israel
signed a deal with Egypt for it to build a power station for Gaza
in Sinai.
All of these moves are designed with the same purpose in mind: persuading
the world that Israel’s occupation of Gaza is over and that
Israel can therefore ignore the laws of occupation and use unremitting
force against Gaza.
Cabinet ministers have been queuing up to express such sentiments.
Ehud Olmert, for example, has declared that Gazans should not be allowed
to “live normal lives”; Avi Dichter believes punishment
should be inflicted “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians”;
Meir Sheetrit has urged that Israel should “decide on a neighbourhood
in Gaza and level it” – the policy discussed by ministers
last week.
In concert, Israel has turned a relative blind eye to the growing
smuggling trade through Gaza’s tunnels to Egypt. Gazans’
material welfare is falling more heavily on Egyptian shoulders by
the day.
The question remains: what does Israel expect the response of Gazans
to be to their immiseration and ever greater insecurity in the face
of Israeli military reprisals?
Eyal Sarraj, the head of Gaza’s Community Mental Health Programme,
said this year that Israel’s long-term goal was to force Egypt
to end the controls along its short border with the Strip. Once the
border was open, he warned, “Wait for the exodus.”
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His new book is “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's
Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
This article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.