Agony of Gaza

The Agony of Gaza
by Patrick Seale


In a flagrant breach of international law, Israel has once again tightened its siege on Gaza, imposing punitive collective punishment on its 1.5 million people.


Because of Israel’s closure of the crossing points, the UN has been unable to deliver the food packages on which some 750,000 people depend. Israel has also stopped delivering fuel to the Strip’s single power plant, with the result that half the population is without electricity. Battered, starved, cut off from the world, its economic activity reduced to nothing, Gaza is on the edge of the abyss.


The international community has been criminally indifferent to Israel’s cruel behaviour towards the captive Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank. But this time, it seems to be reacting with somewhat greater vigour.


At the United Nations in New York, in government circles in London and Paris, and even in Washington -- as it prepares for the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama -- there is a sense that the situation in the Palestinian territories is untenable. An explosion there could ignite the whole region.


Twelve UN agencies have warned of an impending humanitarian crisis, while the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has himself repeatedly warned Israel that it was in breach of international humanitarian and human rights law.


But Israel seems indifferent to these appeals. On the contrary, in the year since the Annapolis Conference of 27 November 2007, which was meant to re-launch the peace process, it has killed 514 Palestinians and injured a further 2,112 (many of them children); it has demolished 330 Palestinian homes, including 95 in East Jerusalem; and it has issued tenders for the construction of 2,210 new housing units in its illegal West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements.


Meanwhile, movement throughout the West Bank has been restricted by some 630 checkpoints and roadblocks, while the Palestinian population has suffered countless attacks and humiliations from soldiers and settler thugs.


In an unusual move, Switzerland last week accused Israel, in a sharply-worded note, of destroying Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and near Ramallah in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which lays down the obligations of occupying powers. Britain, in turn, has announced that it will refuse to extend tariff exemption to goods grown or manufactured in Israel’s West Bank settlements.


The present crisis in Gaza started on 4 November when Israeli forces, in violation of the current six-month truce, entered Gaza to destroy a tunnel that Israel alleges could have been used to kidnap Israeli soldiers, if completed. In that operation, six members of Hamas were killed. Another five were killed in an Israeli raid last week. Hamas responded by firing its homemade rockets towards the Israeli town of Sderot in the Negev, slightly wounding one Israeli. A number of others were “treated for shock.”


Unless extended, the truce is due to end on 19 December. Both sides would like to extend it -- but on their own terms. Hamas wants the truce to be accompanied by the opening of the crossing points, but Israel wants to be free to besiege and starve Gaza at will, in the hope of bringing down the Hamas government. Hamas wants the truce extended to the West Bank, but Israel refuses.


Israel wants the freedom to strike and kill, but not to be hit back. It wants protection for its own people, but refuses it to others. Yet, security is indivisible. Israel cannot hope to enjoy security at the expense of the insecurity of its neighbours. This is the dilemma at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.


Israel seems not to care about the serious damage to its international image and -- perhaps worse still -- about the way its oppression of the Palestinians has brutalized its own young people. It has also aroused great hate among Palestinians and in the Arab and Muslim world in general.


Daniel Barenboim, the celebrated pianist and conductor, has warned Israel that hate is transmitted from one generation to another, meaning that Israel’s present crimes will, no doubt, have to be paid for in the future. In a gesture of reconciliation with the Palestinians, Barenboim, a brave peace activist, accepted a Palestinian passport to add to his current Israeli and Argentinian passports.


A desperate Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, was in Paris last week to plead for French intervention to stop the expanding Israeli settlements, which, he said, were killing the chance of a two-state solution of the conflict. “We can wait no longer,” he told the press. “The international community must intervene to save the peace process.” He lamented the fact that, in the current campaign for Israel’s general elections next February, not a single Israeli politician thought it necessary to mention the expanding settlements.


Speaking on CNN last week, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter declared that President-elect Barack Obama had given him a personal promise that he would address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict immediately on taking office in January.


The world must hope that Obama will find the courage to honour this pledge.




Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.


Copyright © 2008 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global