Saree Makdisi shows how Israel, with the collusion of
Egypt, is systematically grinding down and now
actually starving the people of Gaza because it
regards Gaza's 1.5 million men, women and children as
a surplus population it would, quite simply,
like to get rid of one way or the other�.
The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days
of freedom last week, after demolition charges
brought down the iron wall separating the
impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt,
allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of
the virtual prison into which Gaza has been
transformed over the past few years �
the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli
occupation � and to shop for desperately needed
supplies in Egyptian border towns.
Gaza's doors are slowly closing again, however.
Under mounting pressure from the United States
and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border
guards armed with water cannons and electric
cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already
cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal
to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is
the new border: even if Palestinians could get out
of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have
to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert
and cross the canal, on the other side of which
they would find the regular Egyptian army
(barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the
1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.
Now that Gaza's fleeting taste of freedom is
beginning to fade, the grim reality facing the
territory's 1.5 million people is once again
looming large. "After feeling imprisoned for so
long, it has been a psychological relief for Gazans
to know that there is a way out," said John Ging,
the local director of the United Nations Relief
and Works Agency (UNRWA). "But it does not
resolve their crisis by any stretch of the imagination."
Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian
border towns brought into Gaza a mere
fraction of the food that UN and other relief
agencies have been blocked by Israel from
delivering to the people who depend on them
for their very survival. As long as the border
with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses
to open its own borders with Gaza to anything
other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel
to keep the territory's one power plant operating
at a subsistence level, and a few trucks
of other supplies a day.
UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of
emergency food aid it had previously built
up in Gaza. Only 32 truckloads of goods have
been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel
imposed its total closure on 18 January 2008;
250 trucks were entering every day before last
June, and even that was insufficient to meet
the population's needs.
On 30 January UNRWA warned that, unless
something changes, the daily ration that it
will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute
refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component:
the canned meat that is the only source of
protein in the food parcels � which even
under the best of circumstances contributes
less than two-thirds of minimum daily
nourishment � is being held up by Israel, and the
stock of those cans inside Gaza has been
exhausted. The World Food Programme, which
feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has brought
in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks;
in the seven months before that, it had been
bringing in 15 trucks a day.
Gazans have been ground into poverty by years
of methodical Israeli restrictions and closures;
80 per cent of the population now depends on
food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the
aid, they were receiving "enough to survive,
not to live", as the International Red Cross put it.
Without it, they will die.
All this is supposed to be in response to
Palestinian militant groups' firing of crude
homemade rockets into Israel, which rarely
cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse
for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel
was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those
primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The
first fatal rocket attack took place four years ago;
Israel has been occupying Gaza for four decades.
The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991.
It was tightened with the institutionalization
of the Israeli occupation enabled by the Oslo
Accords of 1993. It was tightened further with
the intensification of the occupation in
response to the second intifada in 2000.
It was tightened further still when Israel
redeployed its settlers and troops from inside
Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory
into what John Dugard, the UN's special
rapporteur on human rights in the occupied
territories, referred to as a prison, the key to
which, Dugard said, Israel had "thrown away".
It was tightened to the point of strangulation
following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006,
when Israel began restricting supplies of food
and other resources into Gaza. It was tightened
beyond the point of strangulation following the
deposition of the Hamas-led government in
June 2007. And now this.
When Israel limited commercial shipments
of food � but not humanitarian relief � into
Gaza in 2006, a senior government adviser,
Dov Weisglass, explained that "the idea is to
put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make
them die of hunger".
Israel's "diet" was taking its toll even before
last week. The World Food Programme warned
last November that less than half of Gaza's
food-import needs were being met. Basics,
including wheat grain, vegetable oil, dairy
products and baby milk, were in short supply.
Few families can afford meat. Anaemia rates
rocketed to almost 80 per cent. UNRWA noted
at about the same time that "we are seeing
evidence of the stunting of children, their growth
is slowing, because our ration is only 61 per cent
of what people should have and that has to be
supplemented".
By further restricting the supply of food to an
already malnourished population, Israel has
clearly decided to take its "diet" a step further.
If the people of Gaza remain cut off from the
food aid on which their survival now depends,
they will face starvation.
They are now essentially out of food; the water
system is faltering (almost half the population
now lacks access to safe water supplies); the
sewage system has broken down and is
discharging raw waste into streets and the sea;
the power supply is intermittent at best;
hospitals lack heat and spare parts for
diagnostic machines, ventilators, incubators;
dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer
available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.
Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer
patients cut off from chemotherapy regimens,
kidney patients cut off from dialysis treatments,
premature babies cut off from blood-clotting
medications. In the past few weeks, many more
Palestinian parents have watched the lives of
their sick children ebb slowly, quietly and
(as far as the global media are concerned)
invisibly away in Gaza's besieged hospitals
than Israelis have been hurt � let alone actually
killed � by the erratic firing of primitive homemade
rockets from Gaza, about which we have heard
so much. (According to the Israeli human rights
organization, B'Tselem, these rockets have
killed 13 Israelis in the past four years,
while Israeli forces have killed more than
1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories
in the past two years alone, almost half of them
civilians, including some 200 children.)
Israel's squeeze is expressly intended to
punish the entire population for the firing of
those rockets by militants, which ordinary
civilians are powerless to stop. "We will not
allow them to lead a pleasant life," said
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when
Israel cut off fuel supplies on 18 January,
thereby plunging Gaza into darkness. "As far
as I am concerned, all of Gaza's residents can
walk and have no fuel for their cars."
Olmert's views and, more important, his
policies were reaffirmed and given the legal
sanction of Israel's High Court. In what human
rights organizations referred to as a "devastating"
decision, on 30 January the court ruled in favour
of the government's plan to further restrict
supplies of fuel and electricity to Gaza. "The
decision means that Israel may deliberately
deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel and electricity
supplies," pointed out Sari Bashi, of the Gisha
human rights organization in Israel. "During
wartime, the civilian population is the first and
central victim of the fighting, even when efforts
are made to minimize the damage," the court
said. In other words, harm to the civilian population
is an inevitable effect of war and therefore
legally permissible.
That may be the view of Israel's highest legal
authority, but it is not how the matter is
viewed by international law, which strictly
regulates the way civilian populations are
to be treated in time of war. "The parties to a
conflict must at all times distinguish between
the civilian population and combatants in
order to spare the civilian population and
civilian property," the International Red Cross
points out, invoking the Geneva Conventions
and other founding documents of international
humanitarian law. "Neither the civilian
population as a whole nor individual civilians
may be attacked."
Moreover, no matter what Israel's High Court
says, what is happening in Gaza is not a war in
the conventional sense: Gaza is not a state at
war with the state of Israel. It is a territory
militarily occupied by Israel. Even after its
2005 redeployment, Israel did not release its
hold on Gaza; it continues to control all access
to the territory, as well as its airspace,
territorial waters and even its population
registry. Over and above all the routine
prohibitions on attacks on the civilian
population and other forms of collective
punishment that hold true in case of war, in
other words, international law also holds
Israel responsible for the welfare of the Gaza
population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention (1949) specifically demands, for
example, that,
"to the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate." |
Israel's methodical actions make it clear that
it is systematically grinding down and now
actually starving people for whose welfare it
is legally accountable simply because it regards
Gaza's 1.5 million men, women and children
as a surplus population it would, quite simply,
like to get rid of one way or the other: a
sentiment made quite clear when Israel's
chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed, shortly after
the current crisis began, that the entire
Palestinian population of Gaza should just
be removed and transferred to the Egyptian
desert. "They will have a nice country, and
we shall have our country and we shall live in
peace," he said, without eliciting even a
murmur of protest in Israel.
The overwhelming majority of Gazans are
refugees or the descendants of refugees who
were expelled from their homes when
Palestine was destroyed and Israel was
created in 1948. Like all Palestinian refugees,
those of Gaza have a moral and legal right to
return to the homeland from which they were
expelled. Israel blocks their return for the
same reason it expelled them in the first place,
because their presence would undermine its
already tenuous claim to Jewishness
(this is the nature of the so-called "demographic
problem" about which Israeli politicians openly
complain). As long as the refugees live, what
Israel regards as the mortal threat of their right
of return lives on. But if they would somehow
just go away...
"Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first
territory to be intentionally reduced to a state
of abject destitution, with the knowledge,
acquiescence and � some would say �
encouragement of the international community,"
the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.
The question now is whether the world will
simply sit and watch, now that this unprecedented
threshold is actually being crossed.
Having taken matters into their hands and
destroyed the wall cutting them off from the
outside world, it is most unlikely that the
people of Gaza will simply submit to that fate.
A hermetic closure ultimately depends not
merely on Israel's whims but on Egypt's willingness �
or ability � to cut off the Palestinians of Gaza
and watch them starve. For all the US and Israeli
pressure on Egypt, and for all the steps Egypt is
now taking, it seems most unlikely that it would
let things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow
Arabs from the Israeli occupation is one thing;
actually participating in their repression is quite
another. The Egyptian government would have to
answer not only to the people of Palestine but to
its own people, and indeed to all Arabs.
Working together, Hamas and the people of
Gaza have forced Egypt's hand and made much
more visible than ever before the role it had
been playing all along in the Israeli occupation
and strangulation of Gaza; now that its role in
assisting Israel has been revealed, it will be
difficult for Egypt to go back to the status quo.
Gazans have thrown Israel's plans into disarray,
because Israel's leaders could do little more than
watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza burst
out of their prison. And they have placed
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
and the government of Ramallah in a corner: they
will have to choose between defending their
people's rights and needs or confirming once and
for all � as indeed they are doing � that the PA is
there to serve Israel's interests, not those of the
Palestinians. In which case they too will one day be
called to account.
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