[NYTr] Chris Hedges: Starvng Gaza

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TruthDig - Aug 20, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070820_starving_gaza/

Starving Gaza

by Chris Hedges

Gaza has become the Sarajevo of the Middle East. Israel, in an action
similar to that of the Serbs in Bosnia, has surrounded and cut off
nearly a million and a half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the
Islamic militant group Hamas took control in June. Electric fences and
watch towers manned by Israeli soldiers keep the Palestinians trapped
inside the strip. The land and sea blockade, the halting of all but
minimal humanitarian aid and the refusal to allow Gaza to receive
financial support are crushing Gaza’s industry, farming and
infrastructure.

The tactic is clear: Israel and the United States will strangle Gaza by
cutting off all money and goods, including fuel and most food, to
reduce one of the most densely populated places on the planet to an
impoverished ghetto. Hunger and anarchy, they hope, will motivate
Gazans to turn on Hamas, and the anarchy will perhaps be used to
justify a reoccupation by the Israeli military and see the return of
the quisling President Mahmoud Abbas, who was ousted after he led an
abortive coup to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas government.
He is now in the West Bank.

The Bush administration has, in an effort to bolster the credibility of
Abbas, promised to provide his government with $190 million in aid and
$80 million in security assistance. And the Israeli prime minister has
traveled to Jericho to tout Abbas as a partner for peace.

The effects of the siege are disastrous. Palestinians in Gaza are not
allowed to travel abroad. They cannot enter Israel for work. They do
not fish off the coast because Israeli gunboats open fire at any
vessels that are more than a mile offshore. Gaza has seen 75 percent of
its factories closed since June, with the loss of 68,000 jobs,
according to the World Bank. There is a 70 percent unemployment rate,
and 1.1 million of the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza depend on U.N.
assistance to survive. The boycott has forced the United Nations to
suspend $93 million worth of construction projects for homes, schools
and sewage treatment in Gaza because cement and other building supplies
have run out. These U.N. projects once employed 121,000 people. About
80 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza survive on $2 a day. Basic
foodstuffs such as milk powder, baby formula, vegetable oil and medical
supplies are running out. Families, unable to get food or find work,
are living on little more than tea and bread.

The instability is compounded by the internecine violence among
Palestinian factions, gangs, clans, militias and criminals, as well as
the Israeli warplanes that bomb refugee camps in an effort to strike at
militants and Israeli patrols that make incursions into the strip to
round up suspects. It is impossible for nearly all Palestinians to
enter or leave Gaza. The only connection the trapped population has
with the outside comes through deep tunnels that Palestinians dig
across the border into Egypt. These tunnels are used to smuggle goods,
weapons and people, as a tunnel under the airport in Sarajevo was
during the war in Bosnia.

The looming humanitarian crisis, manufactured and orchestrated by the
Israeli government, in violation of international law, is a brutal form
of collective punishment. It has, however, the support of the compliant
Abbas government. Abbas has ordered all government officials in Gaza,
including the police, to refuse to go to work and government offices to
shut their doors. Those who do go to work, he says, will no longer
receive their salaries. He suspended the Gaza Strip attorney general’s
office and, in order to keep money out of the hands of the Hamas
government, led by Ismael Haniyah, he told government-run hospitals not
to collect fees. Abbas has even threatened not to recognize high school
exam results in Gaza because the education system is being administered
by what he called an illegitimate government.

On the public relations front, Abbas, knowing what buttons to push in
Washington, has linked the Hamas government with al-Qaida and branded
its military wing “a terrorist organization.”

“Yes, through Hamas, al-Qaida has entered Gaza and through Hamas,
al-Qaida is protected,” he told Italian RAI TV in Rome on July 10.

The decision by Israel and the United States to widen the schism and
increase tensions between Hamas and Abbas is a blunder of catastrophic
proportions. The hatred for Israel and the United States, which already
runs deep among Palestinians, will only grow the longer the siege
continues. Abbas, by dancing to the tune of those seen by the
Palestinians as the enemy, is becoming a reviled, weak and discredited
figure. The schism makes a peace agreement and future cooperation only
more elusive. Hamas is an unsavory organization, but as long as it has
broad support among the Palestinians, and it does, it is going to have
to be included in any eventual settlement if civility and peace are to
be restored in Gaza and the West Bank. The ham-fisted attempt to make
Hamas go away by meting out draconian punishments on the Palestinians
in Gaza will radicalize more Palestinians and see the civil war spill
into the West Bank. Despite all the aid Abbas gets, he may soon be
battling Hamas militants in Ramallah.

Violence begets violence. Iraq should have taught us that. The road
chosen by the Bush administration and the Israeli government is one
that failed in Iraq, failed in Lebanon and will fail in the Palestinian
territories. It will only increase the chaos, suffering and death.
Hamas is not going to vanish because of Israeli repression. Radical
organizations, on the contrary, count on this repression to build a
militant base and silence the voices of reason within their own
societies. These two apocalyptic extremes-represented by Hamas and the
Israeli right wing-need each other to further their frightening
visions. The Israeli right wing dreams of a broken and compliant
Palestinian population living on impoverished reservations surrounded
by the Israeli military. Hamas dreams of destroying the Jewish state.
Neither dream is based on reality. Neither dream will work. But a lot
of people will suffer and die to find this out.

[Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for
nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is
the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America.“]

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