Despite talking peace at Annapolis, the Israeli Government — more particularly, the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak — are planning to tighten the squeeze on Gaza, by ratchetting up sanctions on 2 December.
Meanwhile, intrepid “foreign” journalists are risking all to schlep into Gaza and report to all of us how bad the situation there is already. [Israeli journalists are not allowed to enter the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, apparently because it might cost a lot of money — and perhaps also lives — if the Israeli Defense Forces had to go in and rescue them].
That means, of course, going from Israel — a modern, Western-style country — into, well, a very different world, where 1.5 million people have been cut off from the outside, from the rest of the world.
How does a “foreign” journalist manage to go to a place where people don’t have … well, many consumer items? He/she will carry some in, of course.
The McClatchy newspaper group’s Jerusalem correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, has recently reported on his sanctions-busting activity:
“It began innocuously enough for me in 2005 with requests from friends to bring booze into Gaza. Hamas hard-liners had long ago torched the major bars that served alcohol to customers and driven the stores selling booze out of business. Wenever I made the trek from Jerusalem to Gaza, I always asked my colleagues trapped in Gaza if they needed anything. More often than not, what they wanted was booze. Absolut. Rum. Red wine. Whatever. Just something to take the edge off in a place filled with an abundance of edges. It wa easy. Even after hard-liners bombed the UN club nearly two years ago and effectively shuttered the last known spot openly selling booze in Gaza City, I felt no risk in smuggling booze for my friends. Things took another turn in June after Hamas seized control of Gaza.
“Within weeks, the Israeli-led economic blockade had starved Gaza of its regular supply of nicotine. A black market quickly evolved, one that was based largely on cigarettes being smuggled into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt. The price for a pack of smokes tripled. Soon, friends in Gaza weren’t asking for booze as much as they were asking for cigarettes. The price for a pack of smokes skyrocketed from about two-and-a-half bucks a pack to seven or eight bucks a pack. Soon, the space in my backpack once reserved for vodka and rum was competing for space with cartons of Lucky Strikes and L&M cigarettes.
“This weekend, on my latest trip to Gaza, I asked my colleague if he needed more cigarettes. No, thank you very much, he said, I am fine. I thought it odd, but it wasn’t long before I learned that he had persuaded one of my colleagues to be his nicotine mule and transport nine cartons of L&M cigarettes into Gaza for him. He didn’t need smokes from me. Instead, he wanted something else that had disappeared from the store shelves: Coke. “If you can bring me a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola I would be very grateful,” said my colleague. It had come to this. first it was booze. Then nicotine. Now: Coke. My smuggling career had advanced to sugary, All-American drinks. One of the main casualties of the economic siege of Gaza has been Coke. Israel isn’t allowing soda into Gaza. Carbon dioxide to make the drinks fizzy is also barred. So the store shelves are stocked with sickly sweet sodas and a bad production line of Mecca Cola that no one wants to drink. When I pulled the three bottles of Coke out of my backpack, my friend’s face lit up like I’d never seen before. He was sitting in the front seat with cartons of cigarettes in his lap and he yelped with joy at the site of the soda. This is more important than the cigarettes, he said with a smile”… The blog posting by McClatchy’s Jerusalem bureau chief Dion Nissenbaum can be read here.
[n.b. Are you listening, Condoleeza Rice? American competitivity is at risk. And, with the dollar dropping like a lead weight, the Gazan purchasing power is that much greater. Think of the Coke sales being lost by these sanctions … ]
The NYTimes’ Steven Erlanger has also recently reported on the shrinking life of people in Gaza. He reports that the sanctions, initially imposed because of Hamas’ electoral victory in January 2006, affect everyone in Gaza, and not just Hamas supporters: “Raji Sourani, director of Gaza’s Palestinian Center for Human Rights, is himself stuck in Gaza. No friend to Hamas, he has a new metaphor. ‘At least in prison, and I’ve been in prison, there are rules’, he said. ‘But now we live in a kind of animal farm. We live in a pen, and they dump in food and medicine’.”
Erlanger adds that “Israel says that it will ensure that no one starves in Gaza, and that the essentials of life will be provided. But Israel also wants to see that Hamas suffers, by making Gazans suffer, to impress on them that the best path lies in accommodation and negotiation with Israel for a Palestinian state. Fatah backs that strategy … In the last year, life in Gaza has been plagued by criminal gangs as well as fighting among Palestinian groups. Some rocket barrages aimed at Israel fall on Gaza itself, and Israeli retaliation for the rest ranges from military strikes to economic quarantine. Months of battling between the main political factions, Fatah and Hamas, culminated in a Gazan civil war in June, with 160 people killed and 800 wounded, many of them civilians. Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist group by Israel, the United States and the European Union, was the winner. The struggle is hardly finished, with Fatah trying to consolidate in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Just last week, a large Fatah demonstration on the third anniversary of Yasir Arafat’s death ended in violence when Hamas police fired into a rock-throwing crowd and killed six people, while beating others. Hamas is under siege, and with it, the people of Gaza. It’s not just that Hamas is shunned by the West and Israel, which has declared Gaza ‘a hostile entity’ and is moving to restrict supplies of gasoline, diesel fuel and electricity. Gaza is also shunned by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who is a ready accomplice in the effort to punish and pressure Hamas“. Steven Erlanger’s report from Gaza for the NYTimes is
here.