The
War On Gaza's Children
By Saree Makdisi
23 September, 2007
Los
Angeles Times
An entire generation of Palestinians
in Gaza is growing up stunted: physically and nutritionally stunted
because they are not getting enough to eat; emotionally stunted because
of the pressures of living in a virtual prison and facing the constant
threat of destruction and displacement; intellectually and academically
stunted because they cannot concentrate -- or, even if they can, because
they are trying to study and learn in circumstances that no child should
have to endure.
Even before Israel this week
declared Gaza "hostile territory" -- apparently in preparation
for cutting off the last remaining supplies of fuel and electricity
to 1.5 million men, women and children -- the situation was dire.
As a result of Israel's blockade
on most imports and exports and other policies designed to punish the
populace, about 70% of Gaza's workforce is now unemployed or without
pay, according to the United Nations, and about 80% of its residents
live in grinding poverty. About 1.2 million of them are now dependent
for their day-to-day survival on food handouts from U.N. or international
agencies, without which, as the World Food Program's Kirstie Campbell
put it, "they are liable to starve."
An increasing number of Palestinian
families in Gaza are unable to offer their children more than one meager
meal a day, often little more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit
and vegetables are beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken
are impossibly expensive. Gaza faces the rich waters of the Mediterranean,
but fish is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has
curtailed the movements of Gaza's fishermen.
Los Angeles parents who have
spent the last few weeks running from one back-to-school sale to another
could do worse than to spare a few minutes to think about their counterparts
in the Gaza Strip. As a result of the siege, Gaza is not only short
of raw textiles and other key goods but also paper, ink and vital school
supplies. One-third of Gaza's children started the school year missing
necessary textbooks. John Ging, the Gaza director of the U.N. Relief
and Works Agency, whose schools take care of 200,000 children in Gaza,
has warned that children come to school "hungry and unable to concentrate."
Israel says that its policies
in Gaza are designed to put pressure on the Palestinian population to
in turn put pressure on those who fire crude home-made rockets from
Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot. Those rocket attacks are wrong.
But it is also wrong to punish an entire population for the actions
of a few -- actions that the schoolchildren of Gaza and their beleagueredparents
are in any case powerless to stop.
It is a violation of international
law to collectively punish more than a million people for something
they did not do. According to the Geneva Convention, to which it is
a signatory, Israel actually has the obligation to ensure the well-being
of the people on whom it has chosen to impose a military occupation
for more than four decades.
Instead, it has shrugged
off the law. It has ignored the repeated demands of the U.N. Security
Council. It has dismissed the International Court of Justice in the
Hague. What John Dugard, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights
in the occupied territories, refers to as the "carefully managed"
strangulation of Gaza -- in full view of an uncaring world -- is explicitly
part of its strategy. "The idea," said Dov Weisglass, an Israeli
government advisor, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but
not make them die of hunger."
Saree Makdisi
is a professor of English literature at UCLA and the author of "Palestine
Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," forthcoming from Norton.
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