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 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 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.”......

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......."