Starving
Gaza
By Chris Hedges
21 August, 2007
Truthdig
Gaza
has become the Sarajevo of the Middle East. Israel, in an action similar
to that of the Serbs in Bosnia, has surrounded and cut off nearly a
million and a half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the Islamic
militant group Hamas took control in June. Electric fences and watch
towers manned by Israeli soldiers keep the Palestinians trapped inside
the strip. The land and sea blockade, the halting of all but minimal
humanitarian aid and the refusal to allow Gaza to receive financial
support are crushing Gaza’s industry, farming and infrastructure.
The tactic is clear: Israel
and the United States will strangle Gaza by cutting off all money and
goods, including fuel and most food, to reduce one of the most densely
populated places on the planet to an impoverished ghetto. Hunger and
anarchy, they hope, will motivate Gazans to turn on Hamas, and the anarchy
will perhaps be used to justify a reoccupation by the Israeli military
and see the return of the quisling President Mahmoud Abbas, who was
ousted after he led an abortive coup to overthrow the democratically
elected Hamas government. He is now in the West Bank.
The Bush administration has,
in an effort to bolster the credibility of Abbas, promised to provide
his government with $190 million in aid and $80 million in security
assistance. And the Israeli prime minister has traveled to Jericho to
tout Abbas as a partner for peace.
The effects of the siege
are disastrous. Palestinians in Gaza are not allowed to travel abroad.
They cannot enter Israel for work. They do not fish off the coast because
Israeli gunboats open fire at any vessels that are more than a mile
offshore. Gaza has seen 75 percent of its factories closed since June,
with the loss of 68,000 jobs, according to the World Bank. There is
a 70 percent unemployment rate, and 1.1 million of the 1.5 million Palestinians
in Gaza depend on U.N. assistance to survive. The boycott has forced
the United Nations to suspend $93 million worth of construction projects
for homes, schools and sewage treatment in Gaza because cement and other
building supplies have run out. These U.N. projects once employed 121,000
people. About 80 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza survive on $2 a
day. Basic foodstuffs such as milk powder, baby formula, vegetable oil
and medical supplies are running out. Families, unable to get food or
find work, are living on little more than tea and bread.
The instability is compounded
by the internecine violence among Palestinian factions, gangs, clans,
militias and criminals, as well as the Israeli warplanes that bomb refugee
camps in an effort to strike at militants and Israeli patrols that make
incursions into the strip to round up suspects. It is impossible for
nearly all Palestinians to enter or leave Gaza. The only connection
the trapped population has with the outside comes through deep tunnels
that Palestinians dig across the border into Egypt. These tunnels are
used to smuggle goods, weapons and people, as a tunnel under the airport
in Sarajevo was during the war in Bosnia.
The looming humanitarian
crisis, manufactured and orchestrated by the Israeli government, in
violation of international law, is a brutal form of collective punishment.
It has, however, the support of the compliant Abbas government. Abbas
has ordered all government officials in Gaza, including the police,
to refuse to go to work and government offices to shut their doors.
Those who do go to work, he says, will no longer receive their salaries.
He suspended the Gaza Strip attorney general’s office and, in
order to keep money out of the hands of the Hamas government, led by
Ismael Haniyah, he told government-run hospitals not to collect fees.
Abbas has even threatened not to recognize high school exam results
in Gaza because the education system is being administered by what he
called an illegitimate government.
On the public relations front,
Abbas, knowing what buttons to push in Washington, has linked the Hamas
government with al-Qaida and branded its military wing “a terrorist
organization.”
“Yes, through Hamas,
al-Qaida has entered Gaza and through Hamas, al-Qaida is protected,”
he told Italian RAI TV in Rome on July 10.
The decision by Israel and
the United States to widen the schism and increase tensions between
Hamas and Abbas is a blunder of catastrophic proportions. The hatred
for Israel and the United States, which already runs deep among Palestinians,
will only grow the longer the siege continues. Abbas, by dancing to
the tune of those seen by the Palestinians as the enemy, is becoming
a reviled, weak and discredited figure. The schism makes a peace agreement
and future cooperation only more elusive. Hamas is an unsavory organization,
but as long as it has broad support among the Palestinians, and it does,
it is going to have to be included in any eventual settlement if civility
and peace are to be restored in Gaza and the West Bank. The ham-fisted
attempt to make Hamas go away by meting out draconian punishments on
the Palestinians in Gaza will radicalize more Palestinians and see the
civil war spill into the West Bank. Despite all the aid Abbas gets,
he may soon be battling Hamas militants in Ramallah.
Violence begets violence.
Iraq should have taught us that. The road chosen by the Bush administration
and the Israeli government is one that failed in Iraq, failed in Lebanon
and will fail in the Palestinian territories. It will only increase
the chaos, suffering and death. Hamas is not going to vanish because
of Israeli repression. Radical organizations, on the contrary, count
on this repression to build a militant base and silence the voices of
reason within their own societies. These two apocalyptic extremes-represented
by Hamas and the Israeli right wing-need each other to further their
frightening visions. The Israeli right wing dreams of a broken and compliant
Palestinian population living on impoverished reservations surrounded
by the Israeli military. Hamas dreams of destroying the Jewish state.
Neither dream is based on reality. Neither dream will work. But a lot
of people will suffer and die to find this out.
Chris Hedges,
who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades
a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“
© 2007 Truthdig.com
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.