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An excellent article and worthwhile to read all of it …
(The Independent) – Beyond the issues of whether or not the killings were perpetrated in self defence, whether the pro-Palestinian activists were right to ignore the warnings issued by the Israeli military and steam ahead, or even who was or wasn’t justified in international law, is an issue about which high-level denial in the past three years has been all-too easy.
Amid all the expressions of outrage at the killings one of the most telling was that issued by the International Crisis Group in the name of Robert Malley, the director of its Middle East Programme and a member of President Bill Clinton’s team at the tragically abortive peace talks at Camp David in 2000. The assault on the flotilla was “but a symptom of an approach that has been implicitly endorsed by many”, Malley said in a statement which charged that it was also an “indictment of a much broader policy toward Gaza for which Israel does not bear sole responsibility”. Malley did not put it quite like this, but what he clearly had in mind was that the very same Western powers now wringing their hands have been complicit in a disastrous and counter-productive policy in Gaza itself over at least the past three years.
Perhaps too much of the argument about Gaza, on both sides, has used the word “humanitarian” as if the only question for the territory’s 1.5m inhabitants is whether they do or not have the essentials for bare physical survival. For while there is deep and corrosive world-class poverty in many parts of Gaza, people are not dying in the streets from hunger. There are traffic jams in Gaza City; the grocery stores are relatively full, as much thanks to smuggled – and therefore expensive – goods from Egypt through the tunnels as to the hundreds of truckloads of supplies a week which are indeed admitted from Israel.
Yet the real crisis developing in Gaza beneath this veneer of semi-normality is something much less visible than famine, and much more dangerous than the mystery of why Israel’s opaque regime of permitted goods puts coriander but not cinnamon on its banned list. It is the gradual but systematic dismantling of a vital, historically well-educated, and in many respects self-reliant civilization.
CIVILIANS HURTING MORE BY BLOCKADE THAN HAMAS
It is widely accepted internationally that the blockade is hurting the civilian population much more than Hamas, whose grip has tightened in the last three years. It has destroyed a once-entrepreneurial and productive economy, ensured that 80 per cent of its population now depend on food aid, left most of its water undrinkable, and prevented reconstruction of some 75 per cent of the buildings destroyed by Israel’s devastating military offensive in the winter of 2008-9, not to mention many, many thousands more destroyed since the beginning of the intifada in 2000; or the building of 100 new schools the UN refugee agency Unrwa desperately needs to meet its ever-soaring demands. It’s because world leaders understand this – at least on a theoretical basis since few ever enter Gaza – that the Quartet of the US, EU, Russia and the UN has repeatedly called for the siege to be lifted.
The results are unimpressive. Take the single example of cement. After nine months of negotiation Israel agreed to imports for a very limited number of internationally supervised infrastructure projects and to finish a derisory 150 houses in Khan Yunis that had been 85 per cent completed before the 2008-9 war. A consequence is that the UN, which is wholly dependent on Israel since it cannot patronise the “tunnels economy”, looks increasingly weak compared with the de facto Hamas government, which faces no such constraints. Similarly the bona fide private sector entrepreneurs – most have long had the Israeli security clearance which gave them the freedom to travel freely across the border in better times and sometimes still does – have lost out to a tunnels-based black economy controlled by Hamas and its handpicked middlemen, the new businessmen of Gaza.
JERUSALEM (AP) – The international Mideast envoy says the 3-year blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza has been counterproductive but that the policy is difficult to change because of strong Israeli objections.
Envoy Tony Blair also said in an interview that the raid earlier this week on a Gaza-bound ship was a reminder that Gaza cannot be ignored as the West tries to broker a peace deal between Israel and Hamas’ moderate rivals in the West Bank.
Blair said the international community’s demand to allow more goods into Gaza has been “a matter of strong disagreement with Israel.” Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade after Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in 2007, and only allow in basic humanitarian supplies.
Blair visits Middle East amid pressure to broker ceasefire – Dec. 2008
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
