On Friday, UN’s Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes, visited Gaza and expressed shock about the ‘grim and miserable’ situation there, and he said the Gaza Strip’s borders should be open.
On Sunday, Holmes visited the Israeli city that has been the target of many Qassam rockets fired by Palestinians from Gaza, and said, according to the Jerusalem Post, that “there was ‘no excuse’ for the Kassam rocket fire at the town, which contained no military targets. He said the real victims were the civilians, and that this was a violation of all principles of human rights. He stressed that the children were suffering emotional damage as a result of exposure to the security threat”.
The JPost added that Holmes “advocated Israel’s keeping up military pressure on the heads of Hamas”. This JPost article is here.
However, Haaretz did not make the same interpretation of Holmes’ words.
Haaretz reported that Holmes told the Associated Press: “We condemn absolutely the firing of these rockets. There’s no justification for it. They are indiscriminate, there’s no military target … We just need to keep on saying to the people in Gaza, to the Hamas leadership, they have to stop these rockets. They do no good. They cause suffering”.
Haaretz said that Holmes said “the only way to solve the problem is through a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. ‘At the end of the day, the only thing that will make a lasting difference is a peace settlement’, he said. ‘You can’t stop these problems militarily. They have to be solved through negotiations’.” The Haaretz report is posted here.
According to an Israeli Cabinet Communique Sunday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke about Sderot and the Israeli communities bordering Gaza during the weekly cabinet meeting, and said that “The Government has several tracks for dealing with this issue. First of all, there is the operational activity of the IDF and the security establishment. I have already said that there is an almost daily war in the south and terrorist leaders are certainly a target and we will not slacken on this issue and we will continue to struggle in order to reduce to nil the threat that is upsetting the quality of life of residents of the south. Of course, there are also other measures that we are using, including sanctions and striking at the supply of materials that could serve the terrorist organizations, including energy, and this is being carried out according to the decision of the Cabinet, in coordination with the considerations of the security establishment at the behest of Defense Minister Ehud Barak, with my assent. I think that this is being done correctly, prudently and responsibly. This may not always be loved but it is an important part of counter-terrorist activity”.
On Thursday evening, the Israeli military was supposed to have ordered another phased reduction in directly-supplied Israeli electricity to Gaza, though there has been no public confirmation of that.
Meanwhile, the also-visiting French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told Israel’s State President Shimon Peres in a meeting today that “the mood emanating from the Palestinian street was one of despair, frustration and lack of hope regarding the chances of a Palestinian state being established. ‘This is a dangerous thing’, Kouchner said and underscored the fact that since the Annapolis conference and donors’ conference in Paris there had been no real progress in the peace process and that it was imperative to immediately start implementing economic-oriented projects on the ground so as to generate some hope in the Palestinian people”.
In the context of Gaza, this sounds almost surreal. (In the West Bank, people are worrying that the situation is so bad it may lead to a new intifada.)
Palestinians detained today at Kerem Shalom crossing
An interesting analysis in the latest issue of MERIP (the Middle East Research and Information Project), by Harvard PHD candidate Darryl Li, who has lived and worked in Gaza before, and who also spent the month of January there, gives a bleak picture of the situation.
Harsh as it is, this analysis is not more harsh than the reality.
Entitled “Disengagement and the Frontiers of Zionism”, it says that “the stranglehold on Gaza is not simply a stricter version of the policies of the past five years; it also reflects a qualitative shift in Israel’s technique for management of the territory. The contrast between Israel’s expedited transfer of animal vaccines to Gaza and its denial of medicine for the human population is emblematic of this emergent form of control, that, for lack of a better term, we may call ‘disengagement’. ‘Disengagement’ is, of course, the name Israel gave to its 2005 removal of colonies and military bases from the Gaza Strip. But rather than a one-time abandonment of control, disengagement is better understood as an ongoing process of controlled abandonment, by which Israel is severing the ties forged with Gaza over 40 years of domination without allowing any viable alternatives to emerge, all while leaving the international donor community to subsidize what remains. The effect is to treat the Strip as an animal pen whose denizens cannot be domesticated and so must be quarantined. Disengagement is a form of rule that sets as its goal neither justice nor even stability, but rather survival — as we are reminded by every guarantee that an undefined ‘humanitarian crisis’ will be avoided … From 1967 to the first intifada of 1987-1993, Israel used its military rule to incorporate Gaza’s economy and infrastructure forcibly into its own, while treating the Palestinian population as a reserve of cheap migrant workers. It was during this stage of labor migration and territorial segregation that Gaza came closest to resembling the South African ‘bantustans’ — the nominally independent black statelets set up by the apartheid regime to evade responsibility for the indigenous population whose labor it was exploiting. During the Oslo phase of the occupation (1993-2005), Israel delegated some administrative functions to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and welcomed migrant workers from Asia and Eastern Europe to replace the Gazans. A new infrastructure of movement controls also emerged. Permits for travel to Israel and the West Bank, once commonly granted, became rare. Ordinary vehicular traffic ceased. In the second half of the decade, Israel erected a fence around the territory and commenced channeling non-Israeli people and goods through a handful of newly built permanent terminals like the ones that have recently come to the West Bank. It was during this period that Gaza under Israeli management most resembled a giant internment camp. The detainee population was, to a certain extent, self-organized and appointed representatives to act on its behalf (the PA) who nevertheless operated under the aegis of supreme Israeli military authority, within the framework of agreements concluded by Israel and a largely defunct Palestine Liberation Organization (which are now basically agreements between Israel and itself) … In any event, in Gaza the Oslo experiment in indirect rule seems to be over. Israel now treats the territory less like an internment camp and more like an animal pen: a space of near total confinement whose wardens are concerned primarily with keeping those inside alive and tame, with some degree of mild concern as to the opinions of neighbors and other outsiders … In order to understand the management differences between an internment camp and an animal pen, it may help to start with the place where Israel’s control over Gaza is most physically manifest: the crossings. Karni crossing is the sole official crossing point for commercial traffic between the Gaza Strip and Israel, a highly fortified facility straddling the frontier on the site of an old British military airfield near Gaza City. Karni has approximately 30 lanes for handling different types of cargo — from shipping containers to bulk goods — needed to meet the diverse needs of a modern economy. Karni is a creature of the Oslo period, concretizing its logic of impressive spectacle and laborious inefficiency in order to balance Israeli control with the image of Palestinian autonomy. The crossing operates on the wasteful principle of ‘back-to-back’ transport: Goods are left by one party in a walled-off no man’s land and then picked up by the other without any direct contact, essentially doubling shipping costs.
In recent months, Israel has completely shut down Karni except for occasional shipments of wheat grain and animal feed. At the same time, Israel has routed a few types of permitted ‘essential items’ mostly through the Kerem Shalom and Sufa crossings further south. Unlike Karni, Kerem Shalom and Sufa are operated entirely by Israel and make no gestures toward Palestinian partnership. They are not commercial crossings but essentially gates in the fence, never designed for trans-shipment of goods and incapable of handling many types of difficult-to-package items such as building materials and piped gases. When open, Kerem Shalom and Sufa together can process perhaps 100 truckloads of cargo per day compared to Karni’s capacity of approximately 750 truckloads. Most revealing, however, is the manner of transfer: Cargo at Kerem Shalom and Sufa is offloaded from trucks and then left on pallets in the open for Palestinians to come and pick up when they are allowed to approach. The contrast with Karni’s elaborate security procedures and regimented distribution system is striking. ‘At least in prison, and I’ve been in prison, there are rules’, Gazan human rights lawyer Raji Sourani told the New York Times. ‘But now we live in a kind of animal farm. We live in a pen, and they dump in food and medicine’. The physical move from Karni to Kerem Shalom and Sufa and the official restriction of passage only to ‘humanitarian items’ embody the shift in Israel’s blockade policy, from trying to punish the Gazan economy to dispensing with the economy altogether (except when Israeli producers need to dump cheap surplus in Gaza). Israel is also selectively disengaging from other economic relations with Gaza: Major Israeli banks have announced their intention to sever ties with Gaza, and Israel has since autumn limited the inflow of US dollars and Jordanian dinars, endangering Gazans’ ability to purchase imports and make use of remittances … In practice, the neat distinction between vital needs and luxuries is often impossible to implement since it ignores the enormous swath of human activities and desires in between that are no less important simply because they can be temporarily deferred. This has been most poignant in the case of permits to leave Gaza for medical treatment, which are now granted only to those with ‘life-threatening’ conditions. Under the scheme, according to Human Rights Watch, permits for mere ‘quality of life’ procedures such as open heart surgery have been denied, leading to patient deaths. In the case of the electricity cuts, the Supreme Court blithely acted as if Gazans could easily redirect remaining power to hospitals and sewage networks despite clear evidence to the contrary. To the extent that electricity can be redistributed within areas, technicians must physically go to substations several times per day and manually pull levers that are designed to be operated only once a year for maintenance purposes. As a result, there have been numerous breakdowns and at least two engineers have been electrocuted. Even if it was possible to implement and was done with the best of intentions, the logic of ‘essential humanitarianism’ (it is unclear what would constitute the ‘inessentially’ humanitarian) promises nothing more than turning Gazans one and all into beggars — or rather, into well-fed animals — dependent on international money and Israeli fiat. It allows Israel to keep Palestinians and the international community in perpetual fear of an entirely manufactured ‘humanitarian crisis’ that Israel can induce at the flip of a switch (due to the embargo, Gaza’s power plant only has enough fuel at any one time to operate for two days). And it distracts from, and even legitimizes, the destruction of Gaza’s own economy, institutions and infrastructure, to say nothing of ongoing colonization elsewhere in Israel-Palestine. The notion of ‘essential humanitarianism’ reduces the needs, aspirations and rights of 1.4 million human beings to an exercise in counting calories, megawatts and other abstract, one-dimensional units measuring distance from death …
Disengagement, however, is not merely the latest stage in a historical process; it is also the lowest rung in a territorially segregated hierarchy of subjugation that encompasses Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and within the Green Line. Half of the people between the Mediterranean and the Jordan live under a state that excludes them from the community of political subjects, denies them true equality and thus discriminates against them in varying domains of rights. Israel has impressively managed to keep this half of the population divided against itself — as well as against foreign workers and non-Ashkenazi Jews — through careful distribution of differential privileges and punishments and may continue to do so for the foreseeable future … As Israel has experimented with various models for controlling Gaza over the decades, the fundamental refusal of political equality that undergirds them all has taken on different names, both to justify itself and to provide a logic for moderating its own excesses. During the bantustan period, inequality was called coexistence; during the Oslo period, separation; and during disengagement, it is reframed as avoiding ‘humanitarian crises’, or survival. These slogans were not outright lies, but they disregarded the unwelcome truth that coexistence is not freedom, separation is not independence and survival is not living”. This analysis, published by MERIP, can be seen in full here.