The Boycott Continues

The EU earlier this week affirmed that it would continue to uphold its boycott of the Palestinian national unity government. EU Foreign Policy chief Javier Solana explained, “I have to say that this government does not comply fully with the [Quartet] principles”. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said,

“I’m not going to try to interpret what the right of resistance means but I’ll tell you it doesn’t sound very good to me when one talks about `all forms of resistance’…

So I would put the question to the Palestinian government and to its prime minister – do you mean the right of resistance by violence? And let’s get an answer.”

In fact, it’s a totally irrelevant question. Just as the French had the right to violently resist the Nazi occupation, just as the Algerians had the right to violently resist the French occupation, just as the West Papuans have the right to violently resist the Indonesian occupation, so the Palestinians have the right to violently resist the Israeli occupation.

In this post, I want to ignore for a moment the legitimacy of the three Quartet conditions (which I have discussed at length elsewhere). I want to set aside for now the rights and wrongs of each side in the conflict as a whole, and just focus on the morality and the effects of the international sanctions currently being imposed on the Palestinian people.

A recent British House of Commons International Development Committee report paints a devastating picture of the effects of the boycott on Palestinian welfare. As a result of the sanctions, together with Israel illegally withholding roughly $60 million per month (or approximately half the PA’s monthly revenue) of tax and customs it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, last year saw a serious decline in Palestinian quality of life.

• Real GDP declined by 9 percent in the first half of 2006 and was predicted to fall by 27 percent by the end of 2006, with personal income falling by 30 percent.
• 160,000 public sector workers have not been paid since March 2006, affecting 25 percent of the population.
• Their coping strategies include: postponing paying bills (83.5 percent), living on past savings (26.3 percent), selling jewellery (29.6 percent) and reducing consumption of fresh meat (88.6 percent). Fully 65 percent are reliant on informal borrowing just to subsist.
• 70 percent of the Gazan workforce is without work or pay.
• 51 percent of the Palestinians now depend on food assistance, a 14 percent increase on last year.
• Malnutrition rates in 2004 were as bad as parts of sub-Saharan Africa. It is the main public health problem, with 37.9 percent of children under five and 31.1. percent of women of child bearing age being anaemic. Twenty-two percent of under-fives are deficient in vitamin A and 20 percent are deficient in iodine.
• Infant mortality is 25.2 per 1,000 live births, while under-five mortality is 29.1 per 1,000 live births.
• Hospital fees are unaffordable to most Palestinians. The effect of the closures imposed by Israel, non-payment of salaries and subsequent strikes by staff have interrupted the supply of medication and equipment. This has drastically reduced access to hospitals and healthcare.
• While the average number of births in Hebron is about 600, last September, just 100 babies were delivered in public hospitals, with a further 200 traced to private or NGO hospitals. Three hundred could not be traced and were assumed to be home deliveries, most without access to trained midwives.
• 25 percent of Gaza’s residents do not have sufficient access to water.
• The bombing of Gaza’s power plant by Israel during the summer offensive has further restricted access to water, causing problems for the hospitals and an increase in diarrhoea, particularly in children under three.
• Palestinians consume an average of 83 cubic metres of water per person per year, compared with Israeli consumption of 333 cubic metres and settler consumption of 1,450. Settlements on hilltops often drain their waste water into the valleys below, contaminating the Palestinians’ water supplies.
• Only 7.3 percent of West Bank land is irrigated compared with 50 percent of comparable Israeli land.
• 64 percent of Palestinians fell below the poverty line in 2006, but this figure rises to 78 percent in Gaza. This has grown from 20 percent in 1998 and 54 percent in 2005.
• In the first half of 2006, a massive 1,069,200 people had consumption levels below the deep poverty line, an increase of 418,400 in just six months. They had an average daily consumption equivalent to about US$1.66 per person per day, which is below the accepted level of consumption of US$2.10 needed to meet basic needs.
• Real per capita consumption had fallen by 12 percent in 2006, with food consumption down by 8 percent.’

The Palestinian economy shrank by 21% in the fourth quarter of 2006. To put Gaza’s 70% unemployment rate in some perspective, the U.S. at the height of the Great Depression had an unemployment rate of 23.6%. The House of Commons report (.pdf) concludes that the “current phase” of the humanitarian crisis in the OPT has been “largely triggered by the withholding of Palestinian Authority revenues by the Government of Israel and the withdrawal of budgetary assistance by the major donors.” “These actions have made a bad situation worse” and are “harming ordinary people”. It should be remembered that the international community decided to impose sanctions on a population that was already experiencing “the worst economic depression in modern history“. Talk about kicking them when they’re down.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) recently reported that over a third of Palestinians cannot afford a balanced meal, and another 12 percent are at risk of reaching this state. According to Arnold Vercken, the WFP country director for the Occupied Palestinian Territories,

“The poorest families are now living a meagre existence totally reliant on assistance, with no electricity or heating and eating food prepared with water from bad sources. This is putting their long-term health at risk”.

This, combined with tightened Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement and a ban on fishing in Gaza, has resulted in mass Palestinian malnutrition. According to the UN, around 46% of households in Gaza and the West Bank are malnourished. A nutrition survey found that `Iron deficiency (anaemia) is estimated to affect one-third of women and children. More than 22 percent of children aged between one and five had a vitamin A deficiency – levels higher than 20 percent are considered a severe public health problem.’ According to the UN in 2003, 9% of Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition-induced brain damage. The situation has undoubtedly got much worse since then. The UN reported in July that 70% of Palestinians live in poverty, whilst a World Bank report in September concluded that the Palestinians face “a year of unprecedented economic recession — real incomes may contract by at least a third in 2006, and poverty [will] affect close to two thirds of the population.” According to the WFP, more than 80% of Gazans have had to reduce expenditures, including on food, as a result of deepening poverty. When asked for her assessment of the humanitarian crisis in the West Bank and Gaza, Karen AbuZayd, the Commissioner General of UNRWA (the UN Palestinian refugee agency), replied,

“It is worse than ever. Our emergency appeal this year for 2007 is US $246 million – that’s just the UNRWA part of the CAP [Consolidated Appeals Process]. This is higher than it was at any time during the intifada [Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation], which means that the needs are much greater [now] than they were during the intifada. And that’s mainly because of the boycott of the Palestinian Authority over the past year.”

Medecins Sans Frontieres described a few of the effects of the sanctions:

`Since major international donors (namely US, EU, Japan, Canada) suspended their financial support to the Palestinian Authority, the social and economic situation in the territories has decreased to a precarious level. One visible consequence of the funding cuts to the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) is a critical shortage of drugs and medical materials, in spite of direct donations made by different agencies…’

The House of Commons report (.pdf) cited above shows that the British government (and, by extension, the international community) knows full well the effect its boycott of the PA is having on Palestinian welfare. The significant increase in international humanitarian aid to the Palestinians last year also indicates that the international community is aware of the devastating effects of its policies. The aid boost does just enough to stop the Palestinians starving, but is no substitute for a functioning economy. In fact, the EU is simply following the policy outlined by Dov Weisglass (an advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) last year:

“It’s like a meeting with a dietician. We have to make them much thinner, but not enough to die”.

Despite knowing the suffering the boycott is causing, the international community continues to enforce it. What this means is that all those states participating in the boycott of the PA (and, in the case of democracies like Britain and the U.S., all the citizens of those states) are morally responsible for every malnourished and brain-damaged Palestinian child, every Palestinian mother forced to sell her jewellery to put food on the table and every Palestinian civil servant who has gone without pay for months and has barely enough money to feed his/her family as a result of the sanctions policy. All these tragedies are the intended consequences of the international boycott. If a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a bus and claims that he didn’t mean to kill any of the passengers, no one would take him seriously, because it is a basic moral truism that one is responsible for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions. As Frank J. Menetrez puts it,

“One always intends not only one’s ultimate purpose but also one’s chosen means for achieving that purpose.”

So when Tony Blair or George Bush claim that they don’t intend to starve the Palestinian people, they just want to put pressure on Hamas, they should get laughed off the stage. The damage to Palestinian welfare is a foreseeable consequence of the economic boycott. It is at this point worth recalling, as John Dugard (UN special rapporteur for human rights in the OPT and the father of modern human rights law in South Africa) does, that “Western states refused to impose meaningful sanctions on South Africa to compel it to abandon apartheid on the grounds that this would harm the black people of South Africa”. “No such sympathy,” he notes, “is extended to the Palestinian people or their human rights.” Instead, the Palestinians have been subjected to “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions…in modern times”, the “first time an occupied people have been so treated.”

In fact, we don’t need to speculate about the goals of the economic warfare – it has all done quite openly. So on February 14 2006, the New York Times reported,

“The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.”

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz was similarly candid:

“Israeli sources say that the United States is interested in the fall of the Hamas government currently in power in the Palestinian Authority…

“During the Quartet meeting in London, the Americans expressed their satisfaction with the results of the boycott of Hamas’ government, which has undermined its standing among the Palestinians…

“However, the U.S. administration is also certain that the sanctions against Hamas will inevitably result in a violent confrontation between Hamas and Fatah, and in such a scenario, they would prefer to strengthen the “good guys” headed by Abbas.”

As John Dugard wrote, “[r]egime change, rather than security, probably explains Israel’s punishment of Gaza.” Indeed, looking at the data, it seems pretty clear that Israel’s policies over the past year have been designed been to make life more difficult for the Palestinian people in order to precipitate the overthrow of the Hamas government from within. That is collective punishment and it is, of course, illegal under international law. In 2006 the number of Israeli roadblocks in the West Bank increased by 40%. The Rafah crossing was open (.pdf) for an average of only 57% of scheduled days per month, whilst the Karni crossing (vital for Palestinian trade) was operational for an average of only 18 days a month, down from 22 in 2005. David Shearer, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian affairs (OCHA), described the effects of the border closures thus:

“Thousands and thousands of people have been stopped from moving – students, medical cases, people who have come to visit families, people returning from holidays…From a humanitarian point of view, it’s a major crisis for these people who are effectively trapped within and outside of Gaza.”

Israeli forces killed almost triple the number of Palestinian children in 2006 than they did the year before (141 compared to 52) whilst Israel’s illegal bombing of Gaza’s power plant in June left much of Gaza without electricity for months. Residents of Gaza continue to suffer daily power cuts eight months after the attack. Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, wrote in December that,

“Most [Palestinian] civilian deaths have been the result of deliberate and reckless shooting and artillery shelling or air strikes by Israeli forces carried out in densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip.”

To summarise, then: the boycott of the PA, intended to undermine and ultimately topple the democratically elected Hamas government, has predictably had a devastating effect on the welfare of the Palestinians, resulting in mass poverty and malnutrition.

Those are the facts. Morally speaking, one can take those facts and say, `Yeah, that seems like a great policy’. That’s a moral judgement, although I suspect it’s not one many people will make. Those that do – the U.S., British and Israeli governments, for example – should at least be morally consistent. If it is acceptable to starve millions of people and bring them to their knees because their government sometimes violates the law or adopts policies we don’t agree with, then let us starve the Israelis into submission until they quit using Palestinian kids as human shields. Let’s force a third of all Israelis to be dependent on food aid for survival. Let’s ban Israeli ships from fishing, and cause mass malnutrition in Israeli children.

In fact, let’s do it to the U.S. until it agrees to stop launching aggressive wars like the one in Iraq. Let’s do it to Australia, Britain, Canada, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Russia and every other country in the world that is either complicit in or directly responsible for violations of the law.

Or, alternatively, let’s accept the relatively simple proposal that you don’t starve a population because you disagree with its choice of government.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander