Who’s Starving Who?

Many, including this commenter here, seem to think that Israel is doing everything it can to block the flow of supplies into the Gaza strip. This paragraph from a story in today’s New York Times gives the lie to that.

In addition, a mortar shell hit the Nahal Oz fuel terminal on Israel’s boundary with Gaza as badly needed fuel was being transferred into the Palestinian area to supply the local power station, the military said. The terminal, which has opened only sporadically in recent weeks because of attacks, closed down again.

Misery

I was going to write something about Hamas’s policy of making it as hard as possible for Israel to send supplies in to Gaza but I see Dutchblog Israel has beaten me to the punch. Money quote:

The unrelenting efforts, carried out and/or supported by Hamas, to make it virtually impossible for Israel to supply gas and fuel to the Gaza Strip are proof that the leaders of Hamas are absolutely convinced that they will be the better for their people’s misery.

Nahal Oz

Israel has recently come in for much criticism, some of it justified, with regard to restrictions it has sometimes placed on the supply of food and fuel to Gaza during its ongoing conflict with Hamas. It is rightly said that it is illegal and immoral to punish an entire population for the actions of a handful of people. Today this happened.

I wonder if Hamas will now be subjected to similar criticism by the concerned of the world for endangering the supply of fuel to the civilian population of Gaza. And I wonder what arguments one might reasonably offer to Israelis workers to persuade them to to take up the vacancies left by the men murdered today.

How?

Santiago O’Donnell finds it difficult to write an article about international affairs without getting basic facts wrong and leaving out critical information. In his piece in today’s Pagina/12 he says that wall separating Gaza from Egypt,

… had been built in 2006 to seal the Egyptian frontier after Hamas, led by Ismael Haniyeh, had won the right to form a government of the Palestinian Authority after winning free and fair elections.

This is false. Israel had withdrawn from Gaza by September 2005 having built the wall before it left. Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in January 2006.

He goes on to say that,

Olmert decided that the best response would be to impose an international boycott [on the new Hamas government] with the support of his allies the United States, the European Union, Egypt and Jordan.

So the government of Israel decided what attitude the United States, the European Union, Egypt and Jordan were going to take to the Hamas government. I guess the Israeli Foreign Ministry just sends a daily e-mail with instructions to their colleagues in Washington, Brussels, Cairo and Amman. Or maybe that isn’t necessary, maybe the Israelis have their own people embedded in all those governments and it’s they who are in charge of setting policy in the Middle East.

He then goes on to say that Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers on the border with Lebanon. In fact the number of soldiers kidnapped was two (Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev) not three.

And now we come to the really fun part. He writes,

The boycott led to tension between Hamas and Al Fatah and put Palestine on the edge of civil war until in June last year when there was a carve-up (repartija) of territory with Hamas taking control of Gaza and Fatah keeping the West Bank.

I’ll leave aside the question of whether the Palestinian factions might have had their own reasons for hating each other and not simply have been responding to external pressures. What actually occurred in June 2007 was rather more than a rise in tension; Hamas and Fatah slugged it out for control of Gaza in bloody combat that cost the lives of 161 Palestinians. Full details of what happened are available here. The upshot of the fighting was that President Abbas accused Hamas of having launched a coup d’état, withdrew recognition of Haniyeh’s government and set up his own administration in Ramallah. So, far from having been on the edge of civil war the Palestinians actually had the first round of it with Hamas coming out as the clear winner.

How does this guy manage to make a living as a journalist when he can’t even get the most basic facts right? How?

Subjects

There’s a piece about recent events in Gaza over at the Cedar Lounge. Referring to the breaching of the border fence with Egypt, the pseudonymous blogger says,

The genius of this act was to do something that was essentially non-violent and yet which pointed up the manner in which Palestinians are hemmed in within defined geographic areas as they wait for the parties which continue to protest their adherence to their best interests to actually do something to validate them.

The Palestinians are seen here as passive creatures waiting for others to vindicate their rights for them.  The “genius” of this particular act resides in how it “pointed up” something, in other words how it drew the attention of third parties to it rather than any intrinsic value connected with allowing people access to goods and services while simultaneously dishing the plans of the Israelis.

It’s a variation of a common enough trope in commentary on the Middle East. The writer, while sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, writes about it in such a way as to limit or deny the political subjectivity of the Palestinians themselves. The Palestinians patiently wait for others to make good on their promises, they suffer, when their suffering becomes excessive they lash out and the actions of their leaders are barely, if at all, analysable in normal political terms i.e. in relation to whether they are likely to bring closer the achievement of their goals.  The only political subjects seem to be the United States and Israel. They have plans, intentions and schemes and they try to put them into effect. Others act, Palestinians react.

There’s more of the same further on in the article where the writer approvingly quotes from a Guardian editorial,

Entering into or encouraging some form of political dialogue with Hamas would stop the Qassams, but Israel has set its face against this while Hamas refuses to recognise Israel’s existence.

The Palestinians don´t even get the credit for their own actions. The ongoing bombardment of Sderot is seen as a result of an Israeli decision, not a Palestinian one. And note that the text says “would stop”, not “might” or some other less conclusive modal verb. There can therefore be no doubt about the matter.

Those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause could do it and themselves a favour by treating the Palestinians as political grown-ups and not just the objects of the knavish schemes of others.