GAZA IN FLAMES: COUNT BODIES, THEN COUNT VOTES Dear friends, As I write today (12/2808) Israel is engaged in another round of savage attacks in Gaza, with nearly 300 victims so far. Predictably, the US government and media largely single out Hamas as the culprit in the breakdown of the truce agreed between the two sides last 19 JUNE. But though Hamas does conduct itself irresponsibly, this analysis ignores the big picture. The truce really ended on November 4, which by coincidence was election day in the US. Israel conducted a major raid against Gaza to destroy what it claimed was a tunnel being built for the abduction of an Israeli soldier. In the resulting battle, five Hamas fighters were killed. Hamas then unleashed a rataliatory barrage of rocket fire against targets in southern Israel. No Israeli casualities were reported. "Israel said Tuesday's raid was not a violation of the ceasefire, but rather a legitimate step to remove an immediate threat" (BBC, "Rockets fired after Gaza clashes", 11/5/08). The new clashes came in the context of Israel's refusal to do anything substantial to lighten the siege against Gaza, which has destroyed economic life there. The territory has been reduced to a condition of abject misery. There is widespread malnutrition, a health care crisis, and frequent power and water shortages. At least half the population depend on food aid from international organizations. The majority of the population are children under 18. Even the conservative ECONOMIST newspaper noted in late August that "though a ceasefire is more or less holding, Gaza is still under siege" ("Ceasefire plus blockade", ECONOMIST 8/28/08) Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed shock at conditions in the Strip during her recent visit there. She told the BBC that it was "almost unbelievable" that the world did not care about a "shocking violation of so many human rights". The truce had brought no change in the lives of the people. (BBC "Gaza Residents Terribly Trapped', 11/4/08) The ensuing clashes in November brought new hardship to the territory, which is outlined in the appended article by Sara Roy. For three days in that month, the UN Relief and Works Agency completely ran out of food because of Israel's interruption of supplies. 20,000 people could not get their rations. And that is just one example of what has become an epidemic of shortages. During its most recent actions in Gaza, the cutting off of supplies in November and now the air-raids against Gaza City and elsewhere, Israel has often barred diplomats and reporters from entering the territory to survey the damage. If its cause is so just, what does it have to hide? (cf. BBC "UN 'has run out of Gaza food aid'", 13 Nov. 2008: "Israel refused permission for a group of senior European diplomats to visit the coastal enclave. It has also prevented journalists, including those from the BBC, from entering the territory") Israel claims that its blockade policy and its savage attacks are necessary to protect its civilians. But though the primitive Qassam rocket assaults and the shelling of towns in southern Israel are a major problem, they are also highly inaccurate and rarely cause casualties (twenty-some fatalities since 2000). They do not justify imposing hunger and misery on 1.4 million Gazans, most of them children. The truth is that we have wound up in this impasse largely because of policy failures by the Israeli govenment and the Bush Administration, not the Palestinians. First they sidelined Arafat, which had the tendency of boosting Hamas. Then they rejected the unity government worked out in early 2007 by Fatah and Hamas, which would have committed the latter to abide by the PLO's Oslo agreements with Israel, including recognition of Israel. They tried to arm Fatah to overthrow Hamas; but the latter turned the tables on Fatah in June 2007 and took over the Gaza Strip. The rest, as they say, is history. (cf. David Rose, "The Gaza Bombshell", VANITY FAIR, April 2008) It is Israel and the US which have rejected diplomacy in the crisis, not the Palestinians. When Fatah failed to bring down the democratically- elected Hamas government, Israel responded by tightening the siege and engaging in occasional fits of mass violence. They turned down Hamas's offer of a truce in December 2007 and finally accepted it in June 2008. The truce which lasted from June 19 until 4 November was imperfect at best and there has been sporadic rocket fire. But the Israeli raid on 4 November was in a different league from the other technical violations. Hamas could hardly have been expected not to respond. Since Israel could not have reasonably anticipated the truce to survive such a fierce and provocative incursion, we have to interpret the incident as reflecting Israel's deliberate decision to end the truce. And we have to ask why Israel chose to blow everything up at just this moment. The stated reason, of course, is absurd. Gilad Shalit was abducted in June 2006 because the IDF did not know about the tunnel. If they know a tunnel's location, it should be easy to employ countermeasures to prevent it being used for the abduction of a soldier. Violating a ceasefire is not necessary. Hamas, like Israel, would have been engaged in many other types of military preparation during the whole truce period; any one of which might have been used as a pretext for an attack. Why did Israel chose to strike just then? The real answer lies in Israeli domestic politics. An election is approaching in February 2009 and hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu has been leading in the polls. The Israeli public is largely disappointed at the outcome of the Second Lebanon War (July-August 2006), which failed to topple Hezbollah. Many want to see Gaza punished for the continuing pin-prick rocket attacks. Israel has ample reason to believe, based on past experience, that force will not provide a solution. But often people seem to enjoy the use of force as an end in itself. "Until (the Israeli government) started talking tough, the hawkish opposition leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, was leading in the polls. Now the gap has narrowed" (BBC, Katya Adler, "Israel's Mixed Motives for Strikes", 27 Dec. 2008) Both Tzipi Livni, the current Foreign Minister and Kadima Party candidate for Prime Minister and Ehud Barak, the current Defence Minister and Labor Party leader, stand to benefit politically from a new clash against Hamas at this time. They must have calculated that Hamas, as a matter of honor, would not renew the truce when it officially expired on 19 December. They would have found strong allies in the military, many of whom were never happy with the truce to begin with. Thus, as soon as the truce expired, they could let loose an orgy of bloodshed as political theatre. Notably, they struck in the middle of the day, at graduation ceremonies filled with Hamas police recruits, in order to satisfy the electorate with a suitably high body count. The interregnum in Washington is also convenient. The current episode closely resembles an earlier incident in Israel's political history. In April 1996, Shimon Peres launched a major attack against Lebanon during his political campaign against Netanyahu. This foray, known as "Operation Grapes of Wrath", received a green light from the Clinton Administration, which apparently thought it necessary for the success of the Oslo Peace Process, which Netayahu opposed and Peres attempted to revive after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin the previous November. Peres was retaliating against Katyusha rocket attacks by Hezbollah, which were then also noted for their inaccuacy. Nearly 400,000 Lebanese fled their towns and villages in southern Lebanon to escape the Israeli fire, yet the attacks failed to stop the Hezbollah rockets. On 18 April, Israeli shells killed 102 unarmed refugees at the UN base at Qana, and Israel was forced by international public opinion to call a halt. An American-brokered ceasefire was signed, 27 April 1996. Oxford historian Avi Shlaim concludes that one purpose of the assault was "to recast Peres as the hard man of Israeli politics ahead of crucial general elections. " (Avi Shlaim, THE IRON WALL: ISRAEL AND THE ARAB WORLD, New York: WW NORTON, 2001, pp.560-561) Ironically, Peres went on to lose that election to Netanyahu by a razor-thin margin. Despite everything, the evidence of the last two years all points one way. The best way for Israel to afford a reasonable measure of security to its citizens is by pursuing diplomacy, not force. A new Palestinian unity government, a ceasefire and an end to the Gaza blockade are the only real way forward. We will just have to see if the new Administration coming to Washington can muster the skill and energy necessary to undo the disastrous mistakes of the last eight years. Sara Roy, the author of the attached article, is a political economist at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She is an expert on Gaza and, in many articles and books, has documented how, during the whole course of the Occupation, not just in recent years, Israel has pursued polices calculated to dismantle the territory's economy (cf. eg. THE GAZA STRIP: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DE-DEVELOPMENT). She is also Jewish and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. JW ============================================================================== London Review of Books If Gaza falls . . . Sara Roy Israel's siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel's siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population. On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza. Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertiliser, plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer getting through in sufficient quantities or at all. According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005. The two main food providers in Gaza are the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the World Food Programme (WFP). UNRWA alone feeds approximately 750,000 people in Gaza, and requires 15 trucks of food daily to do so. Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade. The WFP has had similar problems, sending only 35 trucks out of the 190 it had scheduled to cover Gazans' needs until the start of February (six more were allowed in between 30 November and 6 December). Not only that: the WFP has to pay to store food that isn't being sent to Gaza. This cost $215,000 in November alone. If the siege continues, the WFP will have to pay an extra $150,000 for storage in December, money that will be used not to support Palestinians but to benefit Israeli business. The majority of commercial bakeries in Gaza – 30 out of 47 – have had to close because they have run out of cooking gas. People are using any fuel they can find to cook with. As the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has made clear, cooking-gas canisters are necessary for generating the warmth to incubate broiler chicks. Shortages of gas and animal feed have forced commercial producers to smother hundreds of thousands of chicks. By April, according to the FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on chicken as a major source of protein. Banks, suffering from Israeli restrictions on the transfer of banknotes into the territory were forced to close on 4 December. A sign on the door of one read: 'Due to the decision of the Palestinian Finance Authority, the bank will be closed today Thursday, 4.12.2008, because of the unavailability of cash money, and the bank will be reopened once the cash money is available.' The World Bank has warned that Gaza's banking system could collapse if these restrictions continue. All cash for work programmes has been stopped and on 19 November UNRWA suspended its cash assistance programme to the most needy. It also ceased production of textbooks because there is no paper, ink or glue in Gaza. This will affect 200,000 students returning to school in the new year. On 11 December, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, sent $25 million following an appeal from the Palestinian prime minister, Salaam Fayad, the first infusion of its kind since October. It won't even cover a month's salary for Gaza's 77,000 civil servants. On 13 November production at Gaza's only power station was suspended and the turbines shut down because it had run out of industrial diesel. This in turn caused the two turbine batteries to run down, and they failed to start up again when fuel was received some ten days later. About a hundred spare parts ordered for the turbines have been sitting in the port of Ashdod in Israel for the last eight months, waiting for the Israeli authorities to let them through customs. Now Israel has started to auction these parts because they have been in customs for more than 45 days. The proceeds are being held in Israeli accounts. During the week of 30 November, 394,000 litres of industrial diesel were allowed in for the power plant: approximately 18 per cent of the weekly minimum that Israel is legally obliged to allow in. It was enough for one turbine to run for two days before the plant was shut down again. The Gaza Electricity Distribution Company said that most of the Gaza Strip will be without electricity for between four and 12 hours a day. At any given time during these outages, over 65,000 people have no electricity. No other diesel fuel (for standby generators and transport) was delivered during that week, no petrol (which has been kept out since early November) or cooking gas. Gaza's hospitals are apparently relying on diesel and gas smuggled from Egypt via the tunnels; these supplies are said to be administered and taxed by Hamas. Even so, two of Gaza's hospitals have been out of cooking gas since the week of 23 November. Adding to the problems caused by the siege are those created by the political divisions between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas Authority in Gaza. For example, Gaza's Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), which is not controlled by Hamas, is supposed to receive funds from the World Bank via the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) in Ramallah to pay for fuel to run the pumps for Gaza's sewage system. Since June, the PWA has refused to hand over those funds, perhaps because it feels that a functioning sewage system would benefit Hamas. I don't know whether the World Bank has attempted to intervene, but meanwhile UNRWA is providing the fuel, although they have no budget for it. The CMWU has also asked Israel's permission to import 200 tons of chlorine, but by the end of November it had received only 18 tons – enough for one week of chlorinated water. By mid-December Gaza City and the north of Gaza had access to water only six hours every three days. According to the World Health Organisation, the political divisions between Gaza and the West Bank are also having a serious impact on drug stocks in Gaza. The West Bank Ministry of Health (MOH) is responsible for procuring and delivering most of the pharmaceuticals and medical disposables used in Gaza. But stocks are at dangerously low levels. Throughout November the MOH West Bank was turning shipments away because it had no warehouse space, yet it wasn't sending supplies on to Gaza in adequate quantities. During the week of 30 November, one truck carrying drugs and medical supplies from the MOH in Ramallah entered Gaza, the first delivery since early September. The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel's failure to ease the blockade. How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza's children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next. Sara Roy teaches at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Other articles by this contributor: 'A Dubai on the Mediterranean' · Trapped in Gaza ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Ltd., 1997-2008