Is it possible for Tony Blair's economic measures for Palestine to succeed while Israel still controls society?
By Martin Woollacott
The Guardian
".....Nothing, however ambitious or well funded, will work unless the Israelis get out of their checkpoints and, more fundamentally, unless the essentially punitive system the checkpoints serve is dismantled. The checkpoints, more than 500 of them, supposedly filter out bomb carriers and armed opponents. But they are also the principal instruments of a system which allows the Israelis to control Palestinian society by alternating increasing and decreasing pressure on it, while the costs of the occupation are passed on to donors, most of them European. Their aid subsidises the crippled Palestinian economy that is the inevitable result of Israeli policies, keeping it just this side of total collapse. If it did not, and Israel itself had to pay to keep the Palestinians from starving, the effort would soon drag down the Israeli economy as well......
.....But the closures are not there in the first instance to trap or deter armed enemies, although they can have that effect. They are there as a way of swiftly increasing the level of pain among Palestinians, in the hope that Palestinian leaders will then deal more effectively with militant groups. The same philosophy of pain lay behind the attacks on Lebanese infrastructure last year, and now lie behind the power cuts and closures inflicted on Gaza......
.... Prosperity follows justice, not the other way round."
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