Palestine:
The Political
Ecology Of Disaster
By James Petras
04 April, 2007
James
Petras Site
On
Monday, March 26, 2007 in Northern Gaza a river of raw sewage and debris
overflowed from a collapsed earth embankment into a refugee camp driving
3,000 Palestinians from their homes. Five residents drowned, 25 were
injured and scores of houses were destroyed.
The New York Times, Washington Post and the television media blamed
shoddy infrastructure. The Daily Alert (the house organ of the Presidents
of the Major American Jewish Organizations) blamed the Palestinians
who they claimed were removing sand to sell to construction contractors
thus undermining the earth embankment. The disaster at Umm Naser (the
village in question) is emblematic of everything that is wrong with
US-Israeli politics in the Middle East. The disaster in this isolated
village has its roots first and foremost in Washington where AIPAC and
its political allies have successfully secured US backing for Israel’s
financial and economic boycott of the Palestinian government subsequent
to the democratic electoral victory of Hamas. AIPAC’s victory
in Washington reverberated throughout Europe and beyond – as the
European Union also applied sanctions shutting off financing of all
new infrastructure projects and the maintenance of existing facilities.
At the AIPAC conventions of 2005 through 2007, the leaders of both major
American parties, congressional leaders and the White House pledged
to re-enforce AIPAC’s boycott and sanctions strategy. AIPAC celebrated
its victory for Israeli policy and claimed authorship of the legislation.
In addition to malnutrition, the policy undermined all public maintenance
projects.
Equally central to the disaster,
Israel’s massive sustained bombing attack on Gaza in the summer
of 2006, demolished roads, bridges, sewage treatment facilities, water
purification and electrical power plants. Northern Gaza was one of its
many targets, putting severe strain on already precarious infrastructure
and government budgets – including the maintenance of sewage treatment
plants and cesspools.
The Israeli economic blockade
of Gaza increased unemployment, poverty and hunger to unprecedented
levels. Out of work Gazans reached over 60% of the population –
large families with young children were reduced to one meal a day. Family
heads desperately looked for any way to earn funds to buy a pound of
chickpeas, oil, rice and flour for bread. It is possible that forced
by the AIPAC-induced US-EU boycott and Israeli bombing and blockade,
that some desperate workers removed some sand around the cesspool. The
pretext cited by the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations
(PMAJO) for blaming the Palestinian victims for their own suffering,
and exonerating the Israelis, AIPAC and their congressional clients.
The PMAJO has justified thirty-nine
years of Israeli occupation and criminal neglect of Gaza’s basic
sewage treatment facilities. Israel spends less than 2% on a per capita
basis for basic services in the Occupied Territories that it is obligated
under international law to provide responsibly than it spends in Israel.
The United Nations and Israeli human rights groups have documented Israel’s
callous lack of responsibility toward the Palestinian civilians under
its brutal occupation. It is not surprising that the Presidents of the
Major American Jewish Organizations can think of nothing better than
to blame the destitute Palestinians for the collapse of a primitive
earth embankment and the horrific deaths.
To the extent that any Palestinian
leader can be held responsible, the finger points to the US and Israeli-backed
PLO and its titular head Abbas who receives whatever ‘humanitarian’
aid flows into Palestine. The tens of millions of dollars of Palestinian
import taxes held by Israeli banks were handed over to Mahmoud Abbas
and his CIA-Mossad liaison, Mohammed Dahlen, to arm their anti-Hamas
vigilantes. Over the past two decades the US-backed ‘moderate’
PLO leaders and crony ‘capitalists’ have diverted tens of
millions of dollars and euros to their private overseas bank accounts,
with the acquiescence of their European, US and Israeli patrons. What
is a bit of Palestinian corruption if it means propping up an incompetent
group of pliant ‘leaders’?
The plight of the Umm Naser
villagers deluged by their own sewage was neither an act of fate nor
a result of local negligence or theft: It was a direct consequence of
all that is wrong in US-Middle East politics, the taking sides with
a brutal colonial power and its powerful voices and organizations in
Washington. Umm Naser is written large throughout Palestine, Iraq and
Lebanon: Millions of Arab villagers suffer the consequences of pre-emptive
wars to secure Greater Israel as both President Bush and Vice President
have publicly stated in justifying their aggression. Their commitments
follow the Lobby’s script, which ‘coincidentally’
is exactly what pleases the Israeli Foreign Office
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