Time for Palestinians to ride on peace momentum
0 Comments | New Straits Times, Jul 28, 2010 | by Kamrul Idris
AMONG the consumer items allowed into Gaza after Israel eased its blockade early this month is Chocapic, a breakfast cereal similar to Koko Krunch in Malaysia.
Grocers driven to depression by depleting store shelves had reason to smile, but appearances deceive. In a crushed land where 70 per cent live on less than a dollar a day, and 40 per cent on less than half that, few can afford the 17 shekels (US$5 or about RM16) it costs for a packet. (A comparable 170g box of Koko Krunch sells for under RM6 in the bigger Kuala Lumpur retailers.)
“These are international prices,” supermarket owner Hani Asri told the BBC.
Because they are mostly out of reach, they also count as another cruelty to add to the heap inflicted on Gazans, from the starting cruelty of the peeling away of the Gaza Strip as a slum for Palestinians run out of their homes by Israel’s creation in 1948.
The fenced-in, 360-square-kilometre sliver (less than half the area of Perlis, with almost seven times as many people) is a concentration camp by another name, an irony that is lost on the children of Auschwitz as they insist that enough supplies have been let in to keep its 1.5 million souls from starving.
That may be true, but life in Gaza otherwise qualifies by any objective measure as a humanitarian crisis.
“Years of occupation, conflict and an ongoing blockade have left the vast majority of the population in need of international assistance,” said UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).
By adjusting the screws of its embargo, Israel can regulate the amount of insult it slaps on to injury. The number of Palestinians forced to walk to schools or clinics, the periods of daily blackout endured by up to 90 per cent of households, the size and stink of sewage lagoons in Gaza’s refugee ghettoes, among others, can go up or down depending on how much fuel and power are allowed through.
“In addition to the serious harm caused to the civilian population during Operation Cast Lead (Dec 27, 2008 to Jan 18 last year), Israel also caused heavy damage to residential buildings, industrial plants and agriculture, and to electricity, sanitation, water and health infrastructure that was already on the verge of collapse,” reported B’Tselem (Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories).
Even before Cast Lead, UNRWA had been banging on doors for help to relieve Gaza’s misery.
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza is shocking and the political failure to respond effectively and humanely is shameful,” its Gaza operations director, John Ging, told the international development committee of the British House of Commons in April 2008.
He also pointed to the psychological strain on Gazans, leading to a breakdown so pervasive that it cripples the hopes of the young and impairs attitudes towards a negotiated settlement.
“History teaches us that peace is the dividend of economic well- being, while poverty and despair are the fertile ground for extremism and conflict,” he said.
As pressure mounted on Israel to lift its blockade, the New York Times, usually sympathetic to the Jewish state, published a portrayal of Gaza two weeks ago that included its busy mental health workers.
“Scores of interviews and hours spent in people’s homes over a dozen consecutive days here produced a portrait of a fractured and despondent society unable to imagine a decent future for itself as it plunges into listless desperation and radicalisation,” correspondents Michael Slackman and Ethan Bronner wrote.
Yet Gaza struggles to stay on the world’s radar screens. Ging and many others have been provoked into strong language by the onset of compassion fatigue, when an onrush of aid following the Strip’s transfer to Palestinian Authority control under the Oslo Accords in 1994 appeared to have been frittered away.
Average annual spending per refugee has fallen from US$200 in 1975 to about US$110, despite Israel’s progressive strangulation of the territory since its “disengagement” in 2005.
International attention eventually waned not by inurement to Israeli atrocity but by Palestinian rivalry. In June 2007, Hamas, winner of elections a year and a half earlier, kicked out incumbent Fatah from Gaza in a civil war so ferocious that Palestine supporters were struck dumb or compelled to take sides. Most, by dint of expediency, habit or long investment, chose Fatah and its umbrella coalition, the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Gaza would have remained in limbo, and Israel in self-satisfied status quo, had it not been for an astonishing incident – the May 31 Israeli commando assault on the Mavi Marmara, the largest in a group of aid-bearing ships seeking to breach the blockade, in which nine Turkish activists were killed.
The multinational convoy’s diversion did not just expose Israel’s brute flouting of international law against third-party non- combatants
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