Gazans Resist by Surviving

“I will send fire upon the walls of Gaza…”
—Amos 1:7In a small cafe in Gaza City, Amjad Shawa, the
coordinator for the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), sips black coffee and
ruminates on the Israeli blockade of Gaza. “This siege isn’t about
‘security’ or even about Hamas,” he says. “Israel’s ultimate aim is to
separate Gaza from the West Bank and kill the Palestinian national
project.”

The Gaza Strip, a 25-mile-long narrow coastal plain wedged between Israel
and Egypt, is home to 1.5 million Palestinians. Despite its small size,
Gaza in many ways encapsulates the essence of two of the world’s major
conflicts: the rise of political Islam and the use by the West of
collective punishment and economic coercion as a brutal counterweight.

Since Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006, Israel has
subjected Gaza to an increasingly severe blockade. In June 2007, after
Hamas defeated militants aligned with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
and forcibly asserted control of Gaza, Israel tightened the blockade to
include everything except occasional deliveries of humanitarian goods. The
local economy has shattered as a result, leading to steep increases in
unemployment, poverty and childhood malnutrition rates.

While Abbas and the Fatah party still govern the West Bank with Israel’s
full support, Hamas faces an uncertain future. Although Gazans have
rallied around the government, there is also increasing public frustration
with the moribund economy.

Rawya Shawa, an independent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council
from Gaza, describes Palestine as being in political limbo. “When you’re
in power it’s never the same as when you’re on the outside,” Shawa says.
“Seventy percent of Gaza are refugees. Fatah led the Palestinians for 45,
50 years. Fatah failed. They didn’t deliver anything. Hamas, now, they are
trying. They didn’t succeed
yet, so people are still just waiting.”

THE RISE OF HAMAS

Confronting the decline of pan-Arab nationalism which had peaked during
the 1960s and ’70s and the collapse of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Hamas found
fertile ground in Palestine by combining social welfare projects,
religious traditionalism, anti-elitism (Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh
still lives in the house where he grew up in Beach Camp, one of Gaza’s
poorest neighborhoods) and a hard-line stance toward Israel. Although
Hamas is currently observing a unilateral ceasefire, in the past its
military wing has sent small rockets and suicide bombers into Israel,
leading to its designation as a terrorist group by Israel and the United
States.

Few Gazans agree with that description. According to B’Tselem, an Israeli
human rights group, 955 Palestinian minors have been killed by Israeli
security forces, while 123 Israeli minors have been killed in Palestinian
attacks since the start of the second intifada in September 2000. With the
blockade, 3,500 out of 3,900 factories in Gaza have closed, leading to
over 100,000 private sector layoffs. Per capita income in Gaza is less
than two dollars a day, and 80 percent of families are completely
dependent on international food aid.

The siege has led to massive shortages that have rippled through the
economy and society. Shortages in fuel caused gasoline prices to spiral to
$50 a gallon in early summer, leading to sustained power cuts. Hospitals,
dependent on diesel-powered generators, regularly lost power for up to 12
hours a day. Unable to operate irrigation pumps, farmers experienced
significant loss of crops. Most family homes have running water for less
than six hours a day, and almost a third of homes have no running water.

Without electricity, sewage treatment facilities are unable to work, and
raw sewage is being dumped into the Mediterranean — turning the sea into a
toilet. Over 15 billion liters of raw sewage has been released into the
Mediterranean in 2008 alone, killing much of the marine life in the
immediate vicinity.

Compared to December 2005, less than 20 percent of the supplies needed for
normal trade are allowed into Gaza by Israel, and foreign investment has
fallen off by over 95 percent, leading both the World Bank and some
Israeli human rights organizations to call for an end to the siege.

“This is not a natural disaster,” says John Ging, director of the U.N.
Relief and Works Agency in Gaza. “It is a man-made disaster created by
policies that are not humane.”

DIRECT ACTION

The people of Gaza aren’t waiting for the siege to end to deal with the
crisis. In January, hundreds of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt when
Hamas demolished a border wall that Israel had erected in 2003. In
February, the Popular Committee Against the Siege organized thousands of
Gazans into a “human chain” that stretched along the entire length of the
Gaza Strip.

“My phone was ringing off the hook all day because they [the Israelis]
thought we were going to storm the border,” says Sameh Habeeb, one of the
event organizers. “Israel couldn’t believe that thousands of Arabs could
peacefully protest. When there’s armed resistance Israel can send their
rockets and F-16s, but they don’t know how to respond to civil resistance.
Nonviolence makes the Israelis crazy.”

The greatest act of nonviolent resistance in Gaza has been simply
surviving. Some families have taken to catching and raising wild rabbits
and birds to supplement their diet. A network of perilous tunnels that
cross into Egypt has claimed several lives, but has also helped to relieve
shortages with smuggled goods. In recent weeks, an underground pipeline
for gasoline has substantially eased the fuel crisis. Automobile
conversion kits, allowing cars to run off cooking gas, sell for about
$300. Shortages in propane have led families to revert to wood-burning
stoves for cooking and, with the scarcity of concrete, Gazans have
returned to using earthen bricks for construction.

The collapse of Gaza’s economy is an example of imperialism at its most
extreme: prevent raw materials from entering the economy, weaken and tear
down native industries through military violence and blockade, allow
access only to finished products imported from the outside (in this case,
Israeli products) and force the local population and its uncooperative
government to expend and exhaust whatever resources and reserves they had
managed to set aside. When the Gaza blockade is finally lifted, people
here will be hard pressed to recover, even with increased humanitarian
assistance.

PNGO Director Amjad Shawa points out that the blockade is part and parcel
of the ongoing Israeli occupation. “Gaza is still occupied, legally and
physically,” says Shawa, “and the siege is simply one part of this
aggression. We don’t need more aid. What we need is an end to the
occupation.”

Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American writer and activist, and one of the
organizers of the Free Gaza Movement. To find out more, visit
www.FreeGaza.org.