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"Ignoring Gaza's humanitarian crisis" by Juan Cole
From time to time, the
Palestine Center distributes
articles it believes will enhance understanding
of the Palestinian political
reality. The following article by Juan Cole was
published on Salon.com on 21 January 2010. To view this
article online, please go to http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2010/01/21/gaza_blockade/.
"Ignoring Gaza's humanitarian
crisis"
By Juan
Cole
When a relief plane for
Doctors Without Borders isn't allowed to land
by U.S. military authorities at the airport in
Port-au-Prince, there is an outcry.
But
Israeli military authorities will not allow any
relief planes at all to land in the Gaza Strip
(the Israelis destroyed Gaza's airport in
2001).
We cheer when a Haitian child is
rescued from the rubble, but ignore the
thousands of Gazan children who are suffering
malnutrition and being buried by Israeli
policy, a policy that is a war crime. I am of
course not the only to be struck by this
contrast: see also Phil Weiss and others quoted
at his essential site.
On Wednesday, 80
international aid groups called upon Israel to
change its policy of blockading civilians in
Gaza, because it is having severe negative
effects on the health of
Gazans.
Admittedly, the situation in
Gaza is not as dire as that in Haiti. But it is
very, very bad, and it is man-made. The Israeli
government imposed a blockade on the Gaza strip
in 2007 and has maintained it ever since. It
limits the import of fuel and staples, and
punishes the whole population. Since half of
the 1.5 million Gazans are children, the
Israeli siege of the little territory is among
the more massive ongoing cases of child abuse
in the world. There is a virtual news blackout
on this atrocity in the US mass media, and
attempts of two sets of activists to get
humanitarian aid to Gaza in recent weeks were
largely ignored by them.
Nor is the Gaza
blockade a mere preoccupation of utopian human
rights activists. It has become an element of
regional geo-politics. It is part of the reason
for significant tensions between Israel and one
of its few allies in the Middle East, Turkey.
As Turkey has democratized and Muslim
sentiments have become more important in its
politics, and as it has increasingly emerged as
a new Middle Eastern power (some speak of
neo-Ottomanism), its concern with issues such
as Gaza has become more central. The horrible
condition of the Gazans is often the lead story
on Arab satellite news channels such as
al-Jazeera, and public anger about it
(expressed as much toward the US and the
Egyptian regime as toward Israel) is at a
boiling point. That anger feeds into terrorism
against the West. The Gaza blockade is
isolating Israel and fuelling a widespread
boycott movement in Europe, Canada and South
Africa. And, of course, the blockade makes even
the virulently anti-Shiite Sunni
fundamentalists of Hamas willing to take aid
from Iran, bestowing a toehold in the Levant on
Tehran. The French statesman Talleyrand once
observed of Napoleon I's murder of the Duc
d'Enghien, "It is worse than a crime; it is a
blunder." The same could be said of the Gaza
blockade from the point of view of any
realistic Israeli and US foreign
policy.
Last year UNICEF found that
about one in ten children in Gaza is severely
malnourished, to the point of stunting. The
Israeli blockade is deeply implicated in this
semi-starvation of tens of thousands of
children, as is the Gaza War launched by Israel
a little over a year ago, which wrecked nearly
one-fifth of farms and deeply hurt agriculture
in general. Gaza once flourished
agriculturally, but it was cut off by Israel
from its natural markets in the Levant, and the
US and Egypt have been induced to support the
blockade.
The World Health Organization
fact sheet on Gaza's plight, issued yesterday,
reads like a post-apocalyptic Hollywood film.
WHO says:
Many specialized treatments, for example for complex heart surgery and certain types of cancer, are not available in Gaza and patients are therefore referred for treatment to hospitals outside Gaza. But many patients have had their applications for exit permits denied or delayed by the Israeli Authorities and have missed their appointments. Some have died while waiting for referral. . .
Supplies of drugs and disposables have generally been allowed into Gaza. However, there are often shortages on the ground mainly because of shortfalls in deliveries . . . Delays of up to 2-3 months occur on the importation of certain types of medical equipment, such as x-ray machines and electronic devices. Clinical staff frequently lack the medical equipment they need. Medical devices are often broken, missing spare parts or out of date. . .
Health professionals in Gaza have been cut off from the outside world. Since 2000, very few doctors, nurses or technicians have been able to leave the Strip for training eg to update their clinical skills or to learn about new medical technology. This is severely undermining their ability to provide quality health care. . . .
GAZA'S ECONOMY IN COLLAPSE
Rising unemployment (41.5 percent of Gaza's workforce in the first quarter of 2009) and poverty (in May 2008, 70 percent of the families were living on an income of less than one dollar a day per person) is likely to have long term adverse effects on the physical and mental health of the population [the unemployment is a direct result of the Israeli blockade]. . .
OPERATION "CAST LEAD" -- IMPACT ON HEALTH FACILITIES AND STAFF [I.e. the Israeli war on Gaza in winter 2009-2010]
- 16 health workers killed and 25 injured on duty
- Damaged health services infrastructure:
+ 15 of 27 Gaza's hospitals
+ 43 of its 110 Primary Health Care services
+ 29 of its 148 ambulances
The lack of building materials is affecting essential health facilities: the new surgical wing in Gaza?fs main Shifa hospital has remained unfinished since 2006. Hospitals and primary care facilities, damaged during Operation Cast Lead, have not been rebuilt because construction materials are not allowed into Gaza.
The UN complained that while Israel has a fair record of allowing treatment of Gazans in Israeli hospitals, and that record has improved, some 300-400 requests a month are met with substantial delays or turned down. This issue was foregrounded by a lot of the wire services who picked up the story, but it seems to me not the most important problem. The blockade is the problem.
The Israeli blockade is aimed at weakening Hamas, a fundamentalist party-militia that won power in the Palestine Authority in the elections of January 2006. (Ironically, the Israelis had supported Hamas the late 1980s in hopes of splitting the Palestinians) When the Bush administration and Israel successfully induced the Palestine Liberation Organization of Mahmoud Abbas to make a coup in the West Bank and dislodge the elected Hamas government there, Hamas managed to hang on to power in Gaza, in part because of strong public support. Hamas has committed terrorism against Israeli civilians, and launched small rockets at nearby Israeli towns. It had however made a truce with Israel in 2008, which it observed until Israel broke it, and no Israelis had been killed by Hamas rockets in the lead-up to Israel's war on the small territory.
Collectively punishing 1.5 million Gazans in order to weaken Hamas is in any case strictly illegal in international law and is a war crime. According to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949:
Pillage is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.
Not only is today's ongoing blockade a war crime, but it follows on and continues destructive policies of the Israeli military during the Gaza War, as the Goldstone Report for the United Nations concluded. The Boston Globe reported Goldstone's defense of his findings at Brandeis University (hat tip to Mondoweiss).
Very little of this destruction deliberately visited on civilians has been repaired, in large part because the Israelis won't allow the materiel in necessary for rebuilding.
Until President Obama does something to end the Gaza siege and its attendant horrors, his Mideast policy will remain an abject failure.
Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Engaging the Muslim World."
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.