|
|
|
|
Making Life Unlivable in the Inferno of Gaza
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by Liza Burr, W A M M
|
“Gaza cannot sleep!” wrote a Palestinian Catholic parish priest in Gaza in early November. “The people . . . have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low-flying [Israeli] aircraft. They need food: bread and water. . . . People have no money to buy food,” which has “doubled and tripled” in price. Clean drinking water has to be purchased, but there is no work in Gaza, and therefore no money to buy water and food with. The sonic booms throw people, especially children, out of their beds at night, often breaking their arms and legs. There is no hope in Gaza.
How has such a terrible humanitarian disaster developed in the wake of Israel’s dismantling of its illegal Gaza settlements in August 2005 (when settlers were paid as much as $250,000 to leave?) After the much-publicized “disengagement” from Gaza, as Israeli journalist Uri Avnery explains in an article entitled “The Great Experiment” published on October 14, Israel effectively sealed all the crossing points into and out of Gaza, including the one in Rafah. Israel has continued to control Gaza’s airspace and sea space; the Gazans have no harbor, and Israel bombed out their Oslo-era airport in January 2002. When Palestinian elections were held in January 2006, the Palestinians elected a Hamas government. Shortly thereafter, on the grounds that the Palestinian Authority (PA) was now “controlled by terrorists,” the U.S. and the European Union cut off all financial aid to the PA. For its part, Israel – in violation of the Paris Protocol, attached to the Oslo Accords—began to withhold the customs duties and tax revenues of $55 million per month that it legally owes to the PA. This comprehensive economic boycott, with which the Arab states have also complied, has continued up to the present.
As a result, thousands of Palestinian civil servants (teachers, police, and garbage collectors, etc.) have received no paychecks for about nine months. Israeli economic policy in the Occupied Territories had already essentially ruined the local economy: After conquering the Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel progressively integrated Gaza’s economy into its own economy until 1993, when it closed the Gaza-Israel border with a “highly effective fence”; by then Gaza lacked the resources to develop an autonomous economy. Compounding the effects of the 1993 closure and additional measures taken in response to the second intifada (begun in the fall of 2000), the ongoing 2006 economic embargo had produced a poverty rate among Gazans of 79 percent by last April (see Sara Roy’s “The Economy of Gaza,” published on October 4 for The Palestine Center). Gaza’s GNP is projected to have decreased by 28 percent from 2005 to 2006. Hunger and malnutrition are increasingly evident; the UN identifies 70 percent of Gazans as “food insecure,” according to Jeremy Bowen in a BBC report of November 10.
In late June 2006, after the Palestinian capture of an Israeli soldier, Israel unleashed or renewed its military assault against Gaza with the name “Operation Summer Rains,” to be followed on November 1 by “Operation Autumn Clouds.” Within a few days Israel had bombed Gaza’s only power station, the source for 45 percent of Gaza’s electricity. Roy reports that “the [resulting] cuts in power have been extremely harmful to healthcare delivery, food and water supplies, and the treatment of sewage among other problems.” The Israeli organization for Palestinian human rights B’tselem condemned the bombing of the power station as a war crime. Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip has born the brunt of Autumn Clouds: Ilene Prusher (Christian Science Monitor, November 6) quotes a father of seven who spoke of Israeli soldiers shooting “at anyone who moves” and of Israeli tanks being ”everywhere, cutting up our citrus trees.” Nine days later, Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported in the November 15 issue of Haaretz that the Israeli invasion of Beit Hanoun had destroyed or damaged “about one-tenth of the 4,500 residential buildings in the town,” which would cost $14.5 million to repair or rebuild – this loss on top of the “$6 million in damages from July’s attack.” Then there is the loss of lives.
Since the removal of the Israeli settlers, the military siege of Gaza has intensified in several respects. One is the use of sonic booms, which are produced by the shock waves of a simulated earthquake when low-flying planes break the sound barrier; the effects can be physical injury as well as acute psychological trauma, especially among children. Sonic booms have been condemned as a means of illegal collective punishment of civilians.
A second, insidious innovation is the apparent use of an experimental “focused lethality” or “direct energy” weapon, as reported by Meron Rapoport in the October 11 issue of Haaretz. Evidence for the deployment of this weapon (“launched by remote-controlled drones”) consists of otherwise “inexplicably serious injuries”: living victims whose legs were amputated by the weapon, wounds inflicted with no sign of metal shrapnel, and “completely burned bodies.” Hypothetically likened to the American Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) it is thought to be “highly carcinogenic” and environmentally dangerous. Third, after the killing of nineteen family members in Beit Hanoun on November 8, it became more widely known that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had some months previously “reduced the ‘safety’ margins that separate artillery targets from the built-up civilian areas of Gaza” by 200 meters; the “new shelling policy,” reported by Peter Beaumont in the British Observer on November 12, replaced 300 meters of separation with 100 meters of separation.
Among statistics revealing the gross imbalance in armaments and casualties between the two “sides” are the following: From August 2005 to mid-November 2006, 15,000 artillery shells have been fired by Israel versus 1,700 Qassam rockets fired by Gazan Palestinians. Israel’s weapons arsenal extends well beyond artillery. In the two-year period from June 2004 to July 2006, Palestinian Qassams killed 14 civilians; in the four-week period from June 26 to July 24, 2006, the IDF killed 126 Palestinians (half of them uninvolved in fighting). UN records as of early November show a death count of 450 Palestinians in Gaza since late June (Beaumont). Israeli artillery kills very effectively, but does not stop the firing of Qassams, which many Palestinians see as “a response to the war Israel has declared on them.” (Tanya Reinhart, Independent Weekly, September).
Why is Israel wreaking havoc on Gaza in a political vacuum of its own making? If terrorism is the targeting of civilians for political ends, then the Israeli siege of Gaza is a clear example of state terrorism. According to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in the November 19 issue of Haaretz, the Gazan Palestinians are fast becoming “one of the most helpless populations in the world.” “Soon Gaza,” he writes, “will look like Darfur,” and he continues: “There are thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people in Gaza, unable to receive any treatment. Those on respirators are liable to die due to the frequent power outages since Israel bombed the power plant. Tens of thousands of children suffer from existential anxiety, while their parents are unable to provide help. They are witnesses to sights that even Gaza’s old-timers have never seen before.”
One answer to the question of why Israel is attacking Gaza comes from Israeli academic and activist Tanya Reinhart in her article (cited above) entitled, “Why Israel will never truly let go of Gaza.” She suggests that, if the Gaza Strip were really free, “it would become the center of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, with free access to the Western and Arab world. To control the West Bank, Israel needs full control of Gaza.” Refusing to end the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank diplomatically, Israel is left with the military option: “breaking the Palestinians by devastating brutal force,” which she elaborates: “They should be starved, bombarded, terrorized . . . until they understand that rebellion is futile and accepting prison life is their only hope for staying alive.”
Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has studied Israeli militarism and the Israeli military establishment, whose double “hidden agenda,” he concludes, is “to prevent the Palestinians from establishing a sustainable sovereign state, while . . . strengthening the settlements,” and “to inflame the hatred and the desire for revenge on both sides” so that the fiction that there is no Palestinian partner is seemingly validated (see Kimmerling’s November 16 article in Haaretz). Returning to Uri Avnery’s “great experiment,” this former member of the Knesset discerns the endgame as the near-starvation of the incarcerated Gazan population until it agrees to a neutralized, compliant Palestinian government “ruling” over a so-called Palestinian state made up of discrete enclaves. Even more alarming is the program of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) political party, to which recently inducted Israeli deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman belongs, which advocates mass transfer of the Palestinians out of Palestine, whether “voluntary” or involuntary.
The backdrop to Gaza’s misery (and the West Bank is not far behind) is the triple demand of the U.S. and Israel that the Hamas government renounce violence, recognize Israel, and honor prior agreements. During his recent talk here in Minneapolis, Norman Finkelstein, professor of political science at DePaul University, noted that in the context of the second intifada Israeli state terrorism was four times as lethal as Palestinian terrorism, and that no reciprocal demand has been placed on Israel to renounce its own far more deadly violence. Nor has any demand been placed on Israel officially to recognize the Palestinians’ right to a state within the pre-1967 borders (West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem). The fluidity of Israel’s borders also calls into question exactly what the Palestinians would be recognizing if they did “recognize Israel.” Again, no reciprocal demand has been placed on Israel to honor prior agreements such as the 2003 Roadmap, which required that Israel freeze “all settlement activity.”
Perhaps the last word should go to Jennifer Loewenstein, visiting research fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre of Oxford University. In a November 15 Counterpunch article narrating her most recent exit from Gaza (“Alice in Erez”), she paints a picture of unfathomable desolation followed by a searing indictment of all the mute voices (U.S., EU, Arab League, G-8, etc.) in the “international community” who are afraid to speak the truth about the Israeli military occupation: “that Israel’s apparatus of inhumanity is an abomination on the face of the earth.” |
|
|
Word-UP!
Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
—Jean-Paul Marat
(1743 –1793) Swiss-born scientist and physician
No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.
—Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978), Spanish writer, diplomat, and historian, noted for his service at the League of Nations
I was a bombadier in WW II. When you are up 30,000 feet you do not hear the screams or smell the blood or see those without limbs or eyes. It was not ’til I read Hersey’s Hiroshima that I realized what bomber pilots do.
—Howard Zinn
|
|
|
|
|
© 2006 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
|
 |
|
Complete December 2006 / January 2007 Index - click here
|
|
 |
|
|
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
|
|
|
|
|
