Mass Starvation And
Democracy PreventionBy Ghali Hassan
15 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
“[The economic siege] is like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but they won't starve to death," --Dov Weissglas, Ariel Sharon's political advisor.Nothing has displeased the US and its allies more than free and fair democratic elections. The recent Palestinian elections are just a case in point. While Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections freely and fairly, the next step for the US, Israel and their European vassals is to demonise Hamas, undermine democracy and continue the violence and the destruction of the Palestinian society.
Condoleezza Rice, the bellicose secretary of state just paid a visit to US stooges and tin-pot dictators to warn them against supporting the Palestinian people. President Mubarak of Egypt, who recently orchestrated his own fraudulent and violent elections, was the first to lecture Hamas, and urged Hamas leaders to recognise Israel and renounce “violence." In other words, Hamas must recognize a “Jewish state” on Palestinian land and accept Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinian people. Mubarak didn’t mention if Israel will recognise Palestine and renounce its ongoing greater violence. Blaming the victims for the systematic violence which Israel inflicted on the Palestinian people has been an Israeli-Western policy of dehumanising the Palestinian people.
Israel has also requested that Hamas renounces “violence." And because the violence is Israel’s violence and Hamas is unable to stop it, Hamas is guilty. So, the Israeli government found a good pretext to increase the brutality and terror against the Palestinian people. Israel will continue the violence and the dispossession of the Palestinians while Western governments are supporting Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinian people.
Since the elections, the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) has killed at least 20 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, including a disabled teenager in the West Bank and a Palestinian woman tending her sheep in the Gaza Strip. On 19 February, Israeli snipers killed children and injured another 30 in Nablus and the Balata refugee camp. On 20 February, the IOF killed Ahmad Mohammad Nayef Abu Sharkh, 29, in a cold blood as he was confronting the IOF incursion into the refugees’ camp. Who is the terrorist? The IOF also imposed severe restrictions on the movement of civilians. There has been no Israeli death by Palestinians, including Hamas. Israel, as an occupying power is obliged to abide by international law.
For their part, Hamas leaders have said that they will end the armed struggle if the Israelis were to commit to withdrawing completely from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. “If Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, then we will establish a peace in stages. We will establish a situation of stability and calm, which will bring safety for our people," said Ismail Haniya, the newly elected Palestinian Prime Minister. “We do not have any feelings of animosity towards Jews. We do not wish to throw them into the sea. All we seek is to be given our land back, not to harm anybody," added Haniya.
The Israeli government responded by effectively annexing the Jordan Valley and most of the illegal Jewish colonies (settlements) in the West Bank. Palestinians in the area are either expelled or pushed into the ghettoised zones and encircled by the Apartheid Wall. The US and Israel are not interested in peace; they had plenty of opportunities in the last 50 years or so to establish peace, but instead they resort to violence and destruction.
The Palestinian people are the most brutalised and terrorised community on earth. As Jennifer Loewenstein, a scholar at Oxford University, wrote recently; “While [Palestinians] are being stomped, shot, beaten, demolished, assassinated, intimidated, robbed, despoiled, starved, uprooted, dispossessed, harassed, insulted and killed with bullets, missiles, armoured bulldozers, tanks, helicopter gun-ships, cluster-bombs, fleshettes, fighter-bombers, semi-automatic submachine guns, sonic booms, tear gas, electrified fences, blockades, closures and walls, they must renounce violence so that the hoodlums won't get hurt. If they defend themselves, they lose." Israel’s genocidal policy of systematic control and imprisonment of the Palestinian people can only be compared with Nazi concentration camps.
Recent UN reports reveal that 60 percent of Palestinians are now living in acute poverty, a figure which has tripled in just four years. Over 22 percent of children under the age of 5 are suffering from serious malnutrition and 16 percent from acute anaemia, many of whom will suffer permanent damage to their physical and mental development as a result. The majority of families are now eating only once a day and over 50 percent of Palestinians are now completely dependent on food aid.
The UN report which was presented to the Donors conference last year said that, “37 percent of the estimated 3.7 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip had trouble getting food in 2004. Another 27 percent were at risk of running into such difficulties." About half the “Palestinian population was poor, with poverty rate in the Gaza Strip reaching a staggering 65 percent," added the UN report. “Up to 16 percent of Palestinians -- 550,000 -- were living on $1.50 a day, with the likelihood that the figure will rise to 35 percent if aid is not forthcoming." In addition, “child mortality rose by 15 percent and the average unemployment rate reached 28 percent."
To satisfy its Zionist ideology, Israel is proceeding to impose a Nazi-like economic siege over nearly 4 million defenceless Palestinians, intended to starve them into surrendering their democratic freedoms. On Sunday 19 February, Israel moved to withhold funds of $50 million per month owed to the Palestinians from tax and customs revenue, causing great hardship and financial crisis in occupied Palestine. The money is part of the value-added tax of 17 percent that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. In 2005 Israel collected $711 million on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. The money is simply stolen from the Palestinians by the Israeli government. The Jewish state which is in violations of international laws and UN resolutions is imposing -- with the support of the US and Europe -- sanction measures that will starve the victims of its brutal occupation.
The Palestinians’ reward for democratically electing their representatives is a “collective punishment," which if implemented will lead to a silent Palestinian genocide. It is ironic that the might of the US, Israel and the European powers is now directed against the most defenceless community in the world, the Palestinian community. Similar genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq by US-Britain, and backed by the Europeans, have needlessly killed more that 1.6 million Iraqis, including 600 000 Iraqi children, and destroyed the fabric of the Iraqi society. It was premeditated genocide. “Mass starvation is mass genocide. It is a silent holocaust," said Nayef Rajoub, a prominent Hamas leader.
Israel’s brutality against the Palestinian people is continuing only because of massive flow of US and European financial and military aid into Israel's economy. A collective guilt will continue, unless the Palestinians’ legitimate rights of return and self-determination are honoured. Like Apartheid South Africa, Israel can be forced -- even under moderate economic sanctions -- to change its brutal policies and live in peace.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
