In het voorbijgaan zag ik vanochtend, ik geloof in de Volkskrant, een voorpagina-artikel over Hamas die weer met terreur zou zijn begonnen. Dat is nieuws. Het gekke is dat de terreur van Israel nooit gestopt is, maar kennelijk geen nieuws is. Misschien omdat de Volkskrant-correspondent in Israel, Alex Burghoorn, voor het CIDI optreedt, een volgens Haaretz "
pro-Zionistische lobbygroep", waarvan een bestuurslid meewerkt aan de bouw van de, volgens het Internationaal Gerechtshof, illegale muur op bezet gebied. Hoeveel Burghoorn daar al dan niet mee verdient weet ik niet, maar uit zijn berichtgeving blijkt in elk geval wel hoe weinig onafhankelijk hij is. Daarom maar weer eens echte informatie over de Israelische terreur uit een serieus tijdschrift, The Nation. Informatie die de Nederlands commerciele massamedia doorgaans verzwijgen:
' "
Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be
intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the
knowledge, acquiescence and--some would say--encouragement of the
international community," the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned
recently.
The Strangulation of Gaza
by SAREE MAKDISI
[posted online on February 1, 2008]
The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last
week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating
the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds
of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has
been transformed over the past few years--the terminal stage of four
decades of Israeli occupation--and to shop for desperately needed
supplies in Egyptian border towns.
Gaza's doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting
pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched
additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle
prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of
supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in
effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of
Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate
expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side
of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most
of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel)
waiting for them.
Now that Gaza's fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to fade, the
grim reality facing the territory's 1.5 million people is once again
looming large. "After feeling imprisoned for so long, it has been a
psychological relief for Gazans to know that there is a way out,"
said John Ging, the local director of the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency (UNRWA). "But it does not resolve their crisis by any
stretch of the imagination."
Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns brought
into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and other relief
agencies have been blocked by Israel from delivering to the people
who depend on them for their very survival. As long as the border
with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses to open its own
borders with Gaza to anything other than the bare minimum of
industrial fuel to keep the territory's one power plant operating at
a subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a day.
UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid it had
previously built up in Gaza. Only thirty-two truckloads of goods have
been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel imposed its total closure on
January 18; 250 trucks were entering every day before last June, and
even that was insufficient to meet the population's needs.
On January 30 UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the daily
ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute
refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component: the canned meat that
is the only source of protein in the food parcels--which even under
the best of circumstances contributes less than two-thirds of minimum
daily nourishment--is being held up by Israel, and the stock of those
cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food Program, which
feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has brought in nine trucks of
food aid in the past two weeks; in the seven months before that, it
had been bringing in fifteen trucks a day.
Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical Israeli
restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the population now depends
on food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the aid, they were
receiving "enough to survive, not to live," as the International Red
Cross put it. Without it, they will die.
All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian militant
groups' firing of crude homemade rockets into Israel, which rarely
cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse for firing rockets at
civilian targets, but Israel was squeezing Gaza long before the first
of those primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal
rocket attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying
Gaza for four decades.
The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991. It was tightened with the
institutionalization of the Israeli occupation enabled by the Oslo
Accords of 1993. It was tightened further with the intensification of
the occupation in response to the second intifada in 2000. It was
tightened further still when Israel redeployed its settlers and
troops from inside Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory into
what John Dugard, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the
occupied territories, referred to as a prison, the key to which,
Dugard said, Israel had "thrown away." It was tightened to the point
of strangulation following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, when
Israel began restricting supplies of food and other resources into
Gaza. It was tightened beyond the point of strangulation following
the deposition of the Hamas-led government in June 2007. And now this.
When Israel limited commercial shipments of food--but not
humanitarian relief--into Gaza in 2006, a senior government adviser,
Dov Weisglass, explained that "the idea is to put the Palestinians on
a diet but not to make them die of hunger."
Israel's "diet" was taking its toll even before last week. The World
Food Program warned last November that less than half of Gaza's food-
import needs were being met. Basics including wheat grain, vegetable
oil, dairy products and baby milk were in short supply. Few families
can afford meat. Anemia rates rocketed to almost 80 percent. UNRWA
noted at about the same time that "we are seeing evidence of the
stunting of children, their growth is slowing, because our ration is
only 61 percent of what people should have and that has to be
supplemented."
By further restricting the supply of food to an already malnourished
population, Israel has clearly decided to take its "diet" a step
further. If the people of Gaza remain cut off from the food aid on
which their survival now depends, they will face starvation.
They are now essentially out of food; the water system is faltering
(almost half the population now lacks access to safe water supplies);
the sewage system has broken down and is discharging raw waste into
streets and the sea; the power supply is intermittent at best;
hospitals lack heat and spare parts for diagnostic machines,
ventilators, incubators; dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer
available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.
Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer patients cut off from
chemotherapy regimens, kidney patients cut off from dialysis
treatments, premature babies cut off from blood-clotting medications.
In the past few weeks, many more Palestinian parents have watched the
lives of their sick children ebb slowly, quietly and (as far as the
global media are concerned) invisibly away in Gaza's besieged
hospitals than Israelis have been hurt--let alone actually killed--by
the erratic firing of primitive homemade rockets from Gaza, about
which we have heard so much. (According to the Israeli human rights
organization B'Tselem, these rockets have killed thirteen Israelis in
the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000
Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone,
almost half of them civilians, including some 200 children.)
Israel's squeeze is expressly intended to punish the entire
population for the firing of those rockets by militants, which
ordinary civilians are powerless to stop. "We will not allow them to
lead a pleasant life," said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when
Israel cut off fuel supplies on January 18, thereby plunging Gaza
into darkness. "As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza's residents can
walk and have no fuel for their cars."
Olmert's views and, more important, his policies were reaffirmed and
given the legal sanction of Israel's High Court. In what human rights
organizations referred to as a "devastating" decision, on January 30
the court ruled in favor of the government's plan to further restrict
supplies of fuel and electricity to Gaza. "The decision means that
Israel may deliberately deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel and
electricity supplies," pointed out Sari Bashi, of the Gisha human
rights organization in Israel. "During wartime, the civilian
population is the first and central victim of the fighting, even when
efforts are made to minimize the damage," the court said. In other
words, harm to the civilian population is an inevitable effect of war
and therefore legally permissible.
That may be the view of Israel's highest legal authority, but it is
not how the matter is viewed by international law, which strictly
regulates the way civilian populations are to be treated in time of
war. "The parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between
the civilian population and combatants in order to spare the civilian
population and civilian property," the International Red Cross points
out, invoking the Geneva Conventions and other founding documents of
international humanitarian law. "Neither the civilian population as a
whole nor individual civilians may be attacked."
Moreover, no matter what Israel's High Court says, what is happening
in Gaza is not a war in the conventional sense: Gaza is not a state
at war with the state of Israel. It is a territory militarily
occupied by Israel. Even after its 2005 redeployment, Israel did not
release its hold on Gaza; it continues to control all access to the
territory, as well as its airspace, territorial waters and even its
population registry. Over and above all the routine prohibitions on
attacks on the civilian population and other forms of collective
punishment that hold true in case of war, in other words,
international law also holds Israel responsible for the welfare of
the Gaza population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention
(1949) specifically demands, for example, that, "to the fullest
extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty
of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it
should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical
stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory
are inadequate."
Israel's methodical actions make it clear that it is systematically
grinding down and now actually starving people for whose welfare it
is legally accountable simply because it regards Gaza's 1.5 million
men, women and children as a surplus population it would, quite
simply, like to get rid of one way or the other: a sentiment made
quite clear when Israel's chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed, shortly
after the current crisis began, that the entire Palestinian
population of Gaza should just be removed and transferred to the
Egyptian desert. "They will have a nice country, and we shall have
our country and we shall live in peace," he said, without eliciting
even a murmur of protest in Israel.
The overwhelming majority of Gazans are refugees or the descendants
of refugees who were expelled from their homes when Palestine was
destroyed and Israel was created in 1948. Like all Palestinian
refugees, those of Gaza have a moral and legal right to return to the
homeland from which they were expelled. Israel blocks their return
for the same reason it expelled them in the first place, because
their presence would undermine its already tenuous claim to
Jewishness (this is the nature of the so-called "demographic problem"
about which Israeli politicians openly complain). As long as the
refugees live, what Israel regards as the mortal threat of their
right of return lives on. But if they would somehow just go away...
"Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be
intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the
knowledge, acquiescence and--some would say--encouragement of the
international community," the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned
recently.
The question now is whether the world will simply sit and watch, now
that this unprecedented threshold is actually being crossed.
Having taken matters into their hands and destroyed the wall cutting
them off from the outside world, it is most unlikely that the people
of Gaza will simply submit to that fate. A hermetic closure
ultimately depends not merely on Israel's whims but on Egypt's
willingness--or ability--to cut off the Palestinians of Gaza and
watch them starve. For all the US and Israeli pressure on Egypt, and
for all the steps Egypt is now taking, it seems most unlikely that it
would let things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow Arabs
from the Israeli occupation is one thing; actually participating in
their repression is quite another. The Egyptian government would have
to answer not only to the people of Palestine but to its own people,
and indeed to all Arabs.
Working together, Hamas and the people of Gaza have forced Egypt's
hand and made much more visible than ever before the role it had been
playing all along in the Israeli occupation and strangulation of
Gaza; now that its role in assisting Israel has been revealed, it
will be difficult for Egypt to go back to the status quo. Gazans have
thrown Israel's plans into disarray, because Israel's leaders could
do little more than watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza
burst out of their prison. And they have placed Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas and the government of Ramallah in a corner:
they will have to choose between defending their people's rights and
needs or confirming once and for all--as indeed they are doing--that
the PA is there to serve Israel's interests, not those of the
Palestinians. In which case they too will one day be called to account.'
- Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at
UCLA, is the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation
(Norton).
Lees verder:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/makdisiEn de Nederlandse politiek en het Nederlandse volk zwijgen even hard als toen Nederlandse joden door nazi's werden vernietigd. We hebben het te druk met onszelf en bovendien hebben we nooit echt geloofd in mensenrechten en internationaal recht. Alleen als het uitkomt en het ons geen geld kost. Dus mag deze vernietiging van de Palestijnse burgerbevolking en etnische zuivering doorgaan. Dankzij mijn collega's, hun broodheren en de politici, die hun mond altijd weer vol hebben over de persvrijheid.
'The problem with Wikipedia and bias
