Worse Than a Crime

By Uri Avnery

IT LOOKED like the fall of the Berlin wall. And not
only did it look like it. For a moment, the
Rafah crossing was the Brandenburg Gate.

It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses
of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that
is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody
they meet - to feel so even when it is your own government
that erected the wall in the first place.

The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking
of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an
inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand
up against a mass of people that has crossed the
border of despair.

That is the lesson of Gaza, January, 2008.

ONE MIGHT repeat the famous saying of the French
statesman Boulay de la Meurthe, slightly amended:
It is worse than a war crime, it is a blunder!

Months ago, the two Ehuds - Barak and Olmert -
imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, and boasted about it.
Lately they have tightened the deadly noose even more,
so that hardly anything at all could be brought into the Strip.
Last week they made the blockade absolute - no food, no
medicines. Things reached a climax when they stopped the
fuel, too. Large areas of Gaza remained without electricity
- incubators for premature babies, dialysis machines, pumps
for water and sewage. Hundreds of thousands remained
without heating in the severe cold, unable to cook, running out of food.

Again and again, Aljazeera broadcast the pictures into
millions of homes in the Arab world. TV stations all over
the world showed them, too. From Casablanca to Amman
angry mass protest broke out and frightened the authoritarian
Arab regimes. Hosny Mubarak called Ehud Barak in panic.
That evening Barak was compelled to cancel, at least temporarily,
the fuel-blockade he had imposed in the morning.
Apart from that, the blockade remained total.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid act.

THE REASON given for the starving and freezing of one
and a half million human beings, crowded into a territory of
365 square kilometers, is the continued shooting at the town
of Sderot and the adjoining villages.

That is a well-chosen reason. It unites the primitive and poor
parts of the Israeli public. It blunts the criticism of the UN and
the governments throughout the world, who might otherwise
have spoken out against a collective punishment that is,
undoubtedly, a war crime under international law.

A clear picture is presented to the world: the Hamas terror
regime in Gaza launches missiles at innocent Israeli civilians.
No government in the world can tolerate the bombardment of its
citizens from across the border. The Israeli military has not found
a military answer to the Qassam missiles. Therefore there is no
other way than to exert such strong pressure on the Gaza population
as to make them rise up against Hamas and compel
them to stop the missiles.

The day the Gaza electricity works stopped operating, our
military correspondents were overjoyed: only two Qassams were
launched from the Strip. So it works! Ehud Barak is a genius!

But the day after, 17 Qassams landed, and the joy evaporated.
Politicians and generals were (literally) out of their minds:
one politician proposed to "act crazier than them", another
proposed to "shell Gaza's urban area indiscriminately for
every Qassam launched", a famous professor
(who is a little bit deranged) proposed the exercise
of "ultimate evil".

The government scenario was a repeat of Lebanon War II
(the report about which is due to be published in a few days).
Then: Hizbullah captured two soldiers on the Israeli side of the
border, now: Hamas fired on towns and villages on the Israeli
side of the border. Then: the government decide in haste to
start a war, now: the government decided in haste to impose a
total blockade. Then: the government ordered the massive
bombing of the civilian population in order to get them to
pressure Hizbullah, now: the government decided to cause
massive suffering of the civilian population in order to get
them to pressure Hamas.

The results were the same in both cases: the Lebanese
population did not rise up against Hizbullah, but on the contrary,
people of all religious communities united behind the Shiite
organization. Hassan Nasrallah became the hero of the entire
Arab world. And now: the population unites behind Hamas and
accuses Mahmoud Abbas of cooperation with the enemy.
A mother who has no food for her children does not curse
Ismail Haniyeh, she curses Olmert, Abbas and Mubarak.

SO WHAT to do? After all, it is impossible to tolerate the
suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot, who are under constant fire.

What is being hidden from the embittered public is that
the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.

Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire.
It repeated the offer this week.

A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians
will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will
stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations
and the blockade.

Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?

Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with
Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the
government refuses to do.

Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext - much like the
two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else
altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to
overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a
Hamas takeover in the West Bank.

In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate
of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle.
It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas -
because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance -
than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot.
All the media cooperate with this pretence.

IT HAS been said before that it is dangerous to write satire
in our country - too often the satire becomes reality.
Some readers may recall a satirical article I wrote months ago.
In it I described the situation in Gaza as a scientific experiment
designed to find out how far one can go, in starving a civilian
population and turning their lives into hell,
before they raise their hands in surrender.

This week, the satire has become official policy.
Respected commentators declared explicitly that Ehud
Barak and the army chiefs are working on the principle of
"trial and error" and change their methods daily according
to results. They stop the fuel to Gaza, observe how this works
and backtrack when the international reaction is too negative.
They stop the delivery of medicines, see how it works, etc.
The scientific aim justifies the means.

The man in charge of the experiment is Defense Minister Ehud
Barak, a man of many ideas and few scruples, a man whose whole
turn of mind is basically inhuman. He is now, perhaps, the most
dangerous person in Israel, more dangerous than Ehud Olmert and
Binyamin Netanyahu, dangerous to the very existence
of Israel in the long run.

The man in charge of execution is the Chief of Staff.
This week we had the chance of hearing speeches by two
of his predecessors, generals Moshe Ya'alon and Shaul Mofaz,
in a forum with inflated intellectual pretensions. Both were
discovered to have views that place them somewhere between the
extreme Right and the ultra-Right. Both have a frighteningly
primitive mind. There is no need to waste a word about the
moral and intellectual qualities of their immediate successor,
Dan Halutz. If these are the voices of the three last Chiefs of
Staff, what about the incumbent, who cannot speak out as openly
as they? Has this apple fallen further from the tree?

Until three days ago, the generals could entertain the opinion that
the experiment was succeeding. The misery in the Gaza Strip had
reached its climax. Hundreds of thousands were threatened by
actual hunger. The chief of UNRWA warned of an impending
human catastrophe. Only the rich could still drive a car, heat their
homes and eat their fill. The world stood by and wagged its
collective tongue. The leaders of the Arab states voiced empty
phrases of sympathy without raising a finger.

Barak, who has mathematical abilities, could calculate when
the population would finally collapse.

AND THEN something happened that none of them foresaw,
in spite of the fact that it was the most foreseeable event on earth.

When one puts a million and a half people in a pressure cooker
and keeps turning up the heat, it will explode. That is what
happened at the Gaza-Egypt border.

At first there was a small explosion. A crowd stormed the
gate, Egyptian policemen opened live fire, dozens were wounded.
That was a warning.

The next day came the big attack. Palestinian fighters blew
up the wall in many places. Hundreds of thousands broke out
into Egyptian territory and took a deep breath.
The blockade was broken.

Even before that, Mubarak was in an impossible situation.
Hundreds of millions of Arabs, a billion Muslims, saw how the
Israeli army had closed the Gaza strip off on three sides: the North,
the East and the sea. The fourth side of the blockade
was provided by the Egyptian army.

The Egyptian president, who claims the leadership of the entire
Arab world, was seen as a collaborator with an inhuman
operation conducted by a cruel enemy in order to gain the
favor (and the money) of the Americans. His internal enemies,
the Muslim Brothers, exploited the situation to debase
him in the eyes of his own people.

It is doubtful if Mubarak could have persisted in this position.
But the Palestinian masses relieved him of the need to make a
decision. They decided for him. They broke out like a tsunami
wave. Now he has to decide whether to succumb to the Israeli
demand to re-impose the blockade on his Arab brothers.

And what about Barak's experiment?
What's the next step? The options are few:

(a) To re-occupy Gaza. The army does not like the idea.
It understands that this would expose thousands of soldiers
to a cruel guerilla war, which would be unlike any intifada before.

(b) To tighten the blockade again and exert extreme
pressure on Mubarak, including the use of Israeli influence
on the US Congess to deprive him of the billions he gets every
year for his services.

(c) To turn the curse into a blessing, by handing the Strip
over to Mubarak, pretending that this was Barak's hidden
aim all along. Egypt would have to safeguard Israel's security,
prevent the launching of Qassams and expose its own soldiers
to a Palestinian guerilla war - when it thought it was rid of the
burden of this poor and barren area, and after the infrastructure
there has been destroyed by the Israeli occupation. Probably
Mubarak will say: Very kind of you, but no thanks.

The brutal blockade was a war crime. And worse:
it was a stupid blunder.