“Chaos reigns in the occupied territories, the prison’s inmates turning on one another while their jailors look on smugly. It is hard not to feel anger, especially at those responsible for the incarceration of the Palestinian people (now in their fortieth year of occupation), but also at those nominally responsible for the fate of this people, who are failing dismally.”
It is easy to sympathise with Rashid Khalidi’s frustration. The humanitarian disaster currently unfolding in the Gaza Strip (Israel claims, as always, that it is only attacking “Hamas targets”; others beg to differ) could so easily have been avoided, if the Palestinians had a more responsible leadership and if the occupiers weren’t so determined to avoid peace with a Palestinian leadership that is unwilling to cede to its political demands.
It is important to recognise that, just as last year’s military operations had nothing to do with the capture of Cpl. Shalit, the latest spate of violence is not about the Qassam missiles. It is instead the latest act in a long-standing U.S./Israeli strategy to topple the elected Hamas government, principally by collectively punishing the Palestinian population. It is for this reason that the number of military roadblocks in the West Bank was increased by 40% last year – the Israeli system of restrictions on freedom of movement within the West Bank, of which the roadblocks and checkpoints are an integral part, has, according to the World Bank, `divided the occupied West Bank into 10 economically isolated enclaves, severing financial links and denying Palestinians access to some 50 percent of the land’. According to the World Bank,
“[These restrictions have] fragmented the territory into ever smaller and more disconnected cantons…Estimates of the total restricted area are difficult to come by, but it appears to be in excess of 50 percent of the land of the West Bank…
While Israeli security concerns are undeniable and must be addressed, it is often difficult to reconcile the use of movement and access restrictions for security purposes from their use to expand and protect settlement activity and the relatively unhindered movement of settlers and other Israelis in and out of the West Bank”.
Similarly, Israel’s decision in early 2006 to steal the Palestinian money it collects every month, as the occupying power, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority was part of the overall strategy aimed at bringing down the Hamas government, outlined in late 2006 by Dov Weisglass, an aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert:
“It’s like a meeting with a dietician. We have to make them [the Palestinian people] much thinner, but not enough to die”.
The international aid boycott of the Palestinian Authority, which is ongoing, furthered the same objectives. The point is to make it very clear to the Palestinian people that their welfare depends upon the overthrow of the Hamas government. As Ha’aretz reports,
`Nonetheless, the Shin Bet is also not optimistic about the long-term future. This assessment will only change if there is a major revival in Fatah, and if a majority of the Palestinian public concludes that Hamas is the source of serious damage.` [my emphasis]
The international boycott and the collective punishment that has been inflicted upon the Palestinian population for the past year have been about precisely that – drilling it into Palestinian minds that retaining a Hamas government will entail great suffering for them. This policy is, of course, illegal under international law. John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, last year described the boycott as “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions…[imposed] in modern times”. Dugard recalled that at the height of apartheid in South Africa, “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”, and noted that “[n]o such sympathy is extended to the Palestinian people or their human rights.” It is perhaps worth repeating, then, the recent comments of Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa’s Minister for Intelligence Services and a son of Lithuanian Jews. Speaking to Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, he stated,
“The occupation reminds me of the darkest days of apartheid, but we never saw tanks and planes firing at a civilian population. It’s a monstrousness I’d never seen before. The wall you built, the checkpoints and the roads for Jews only – it turns the stomach, even for someone who grew up under apartheid. It’s a hundred times worse…
We know from our experience that oppression motivates resistance and that the more savage the oppression, the harsher the resistance. At a certain point in time you think that the oppression is working, and that you’re controlling the other people, imprisoning its leaders and its activists, but the resistance will triumph in the end.”
In essence, then, the Palestinians have been subjected to a form of blackmail, although the word hardly does the policy justice. It is not mere blackmail when the very states responsible for the degradation of Palestinian life, to the point where the majority of them are dependent on international aid for survival, then condition that aid upon the political obedience of their victims. This is analogous to beating an old man to the point of death, and then withholding medical care from him until he agrees to do one’s bidding (all the while pretending to be supremely concerned about his welfare, of course). “Collective torture” more adequately describes the moral bankruptcy of this policy, supported, as far as I can tell, by all three major political parties in Britain and both parties in the U.S.
International aid to the Palestinians has massively increased over the past year, a reflection of their worsening condition. There can be no doubt, however, about the effects the international boycott has had on Palestinian welfare. A recent House of Commons International Development Committee report (.pdf) outlined the depths to which Palestinian life has sunk.
* 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.
As I wrote at the time,
`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.’
According to Oxfam International, reporting in late February 2007, `conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories [are] close to melt-down’. `Since 2006 poverty has shot up’, it continued. `Two thirds of Palestinians now live in poverty, a rise of 30 per cent last year. The number of families unable to get enough food has risen by 14 per cent. More than half of all Palestinians are now are `food insecure’, unable to meet their families’ daily requirements without assistance. The health system is disintegrating.’ Jeremy Hobbs, the Director of Oxfam, was correct when he said,
“The Quartet needs to take off its blinkers and see the damage its policies are having on ordinary Palestinian families. Using international aid as a battering ram to force through political change is not only immoral but also counter-productive. While the Palestinian Authority is bled dry by Israel’s seizure of tax revenue and the international aid boycott peace will be a distant dream.”
There can, as I say, be no doubt about the catastrophic effects the aid boycott has had on the Palestinian population. What one has to bear in mind, however, is that all this humanitarian suffering has been utterly intentional. The policies pursued by Israel and the U.S. were designed with the express purpose of collectively punishing the Palestinian people. The New York Times, reporting in February 2006, was fairly blunt about the objectives underpinning the policies of economic warfare:
“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.”
As John Dugard wrote late last year, “[r]egime change, rather than security, probably explains Israel’s punishment of Gaza.”
All the above, of course, is without mentioning the extreme violence meted out by the Israeli army in Gaza last year, and the psychological as well as physical damage this has caused. `Operation Summer Rains`, as Israel cynically dubbed it, was driven by precisely the same objectives as the economic starvation. As John Dugard explained, even before the full-scale military assault began last June,
“It seemed clear to me that the Government of Israel had embarked upon a siege in order to bring about regime change. In the process little attention was being paid to human rights, as shelling and sonic booms violated the fundamental rights to life and human dignity, and even less attention was paid to the constraints of international humanitarian law; it was already clear that collective punishment was to be the instrument used to bring about regime change.”
It is in this context that the current spate of violence must be understood. Hamas yesterday declared that it is willing to accept a ceasefire with Israel, as long as it applies to both Gaza and the West Bank. This was, of course, offered to Israel months ago, before the current round of attacks began. The response then was an Israeli rejection, and it looks as though this attitude is set to continue. Hamas’ proposal is a rejection of Abbas’ plan of a month-long ceasefire in Gaza, followed by an extension to the West Bank. Hamas has always demanded reciprocity, and in any event, militant groups like Islamic Jihad cannot be expected to just sit there doing nothing in Gaza even as their brothers in the West Bank are being kidnapped and killed. It would be like Hamas proposing a truce with Haifa and Tel Aviv, but not with Jerusalem or Sderot.
It is quite clear that the recent spate of Qassam missile attacks on Sderot were intended primarily to refocus the Palestinian resistance back onto the occupation, as opposed to the disastrous internecine fighting that has been rampaging through the territories of late. Indeed, if you look at the front page of the Palestinian Ma’an news service, you’ll see a poll that explicitly asks, “Do you think the projectile attacks on Sderot succeeded in ending the Hamas-Fatah infighting?” (currently, 64% of respondents say `no’).
The role of Israel and its international supporters in the current internal Palestinian violence is therefore crucial to understanding the cause of the current crisis, which threatens to make 2007 an even worse year for the Palestinians than 2006. The fighting between Fatah and Hamas reflects in large part the quite openly proclaimed U.S.-Israeli policy, discussed above, of collectively punishing the Palestinian population for the purpose of toppling the elected Hamas government. Only recently, a secret 16-page document was leaked that made explicit the U.S. plan for `undermining and replacing the Palestinian national-unity government’. It essentially outlined a two-pronged strategy – to finance and equip President Abbas’ security forces on the one hand, and to ease some short-term economic restrictions (such as removing a few roadblocks, or opening the crossings more frequently) on the other, making clear that these rewards have been won by President Abbas. In the documents’ words, the strategy aims to “[d]eliver a strong political blow to Hamas by supplying the Palestinian people with their immediate economic needs through the Presidency and Fatah”. The idea is to both ensure that Abbas’ forces are strong enough to win any future civil war and to “build up his political capital”, which would then enable him to comfortably call “parliamentary elections by the beginning of autumn 2007″.
The contempt this strategy has for Palestinian democracy is obvious – it is, after all, a secret programme of subversion whose goal is regime change. What is particularly striking, however, is the sheer indifference with which it regards the welfare of the Palestinian people (striking, but not surprising, given the policies outlined above). Humanitarian suffering is totally subordinated to political concerns – the sole objective of the document is regime change. As the Missing Links blog, which translated part of the document from Arabic to English, puts it,
“The unifying theme in this is the following: Everything that was to be done was for the ultimate purpose of enabling Abbas to call, and then to win, new parliamentary elections in fall 2007, so as to definitively and legally sideline Hamas. The document spells out the idea that World Bank financing was to be considered from that perspective; wage-payments were to be arranged with that in mind; even the idea of negotiating with Israel was to set up an atmosphere of optimism that would similarly help Abbas; strengthening of law and order were also for the purpose of enhancing the position of Abbas. What this document shows is that not only was the US still intent, after the Mecca agreement, on dislodging the elected government of Hamas, but that all of the component parts of the scheme, political, financial and economic, were all subordinated to that.”
The effect of the crippling aid boycott, outlined above, together with the frequent Israeli abductions of Palestinian legislative officials and bombings of Palestinian government infrastructure, has been to exacerbate tensions within the Gaza Strip and reduce PA control, to the point where inter-factionary violence has erupted. This was entirely predictable. As Amira Hass wrote last year,
“The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called `what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.`”
It was not only predictable, but predicted, by both U.S. and Israeli policy makers. As Ha’aretz reported in October,
“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.”
To that end, the U.S. and Israel have funded, armed and trained Abbas’ private militia. To its shame, Fatah has collaborated with the occupation, accepting U.S. and Israeli military aid, knowing full well the motives behind it. Whether the main culprit for this betrayal is President Abbas or his thuggish National Security Advisor Mohammed Dahlan, the fact is that Fatah has a long history of cooperating with the occupiers against Palestinian interests to consolidate its own power (indeed, this is precisely what the “Oslo process” in reality represented). It is worth recalling that Fatah accepted U.S. money to help fight its electoral campaign last January, in which Hamas emerged victorious. (Laila El-Hadad is correct to note, however, that Hamas is itself no stranger to Israeli money).
This also explains Israel’s recent campaign, which has involved violations of international and perhaps Israeli law, of targeted assassinations, home demolitions, mass kidnappings and air strikes against Hamas activists, officials and infrastructure. It must be understood that the primary goal of U.S./Israeli policy over the past year has been to depose the Hamas government – that is what explains the current assault on Gaza, and that is what is in large part responsible for the internal Palestinian “civil war”, which is in reality more accurately described as a military coup.
There has been a realistic ceasefire offer on the table for months, and the terms are quite simple. If Israel halts its offensives in Gaza and the West Bank, so Hamas and the other Palestinian factions will stop launching missiles at Israel. That Israel continues to reject this in favour of increased violence and destruction demonstrates further that halting the Qassam missile strikes is simply not a high priority for the Israeli government. This should not be surprising in the least – Israel has, after all, chosen expansion at the expense of security for decades.
So instead of looking upon the intra-Palestinian violence with smug condescension and even contempt, exemplified by this recent Ze’ev Schiff article in Ha’aretz, let’s instead work to change the policies of occupation and collective punishment that have brought it about. Even if the moral argument is set aside for a moment, it is clear that Israel will never enjoy security in the absence of a political settlement. For the sake of the residents of Sderot, then, as well as the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel must sign a comprehensive ceasefire with the Palestinian factions and the devastating boycott of the Palestinian Authority must be brought to an end. The sad truth is that it almost certainly won’t, because peace is not Israel’s objective. Regime change is, and it comes with a heavy humanitarian cost – one born chiefly by the occupied Palestinian people, which probably explains our shocking indifference.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander
(Source for image)