Gaza, the lesser child of Israel’s occupation
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I bade farewell to the Gaza Strip. In thrall to the great illusion, sweet and dizzying, that were the 1993 Oslo peace accords, I was sure that Gaza was about to be liberated from Israel’s occupation. The fate of that stretch of land mattered to me very much. There were nearly 700,000 Palestinian refugees there at the time, many already second- and third-generation. Most lived in camps, in disgraceful conditions.
Two decades later, Gaza is even worse off. The number of refugees there has almost doubled, reaching 1.3 million, out of a total population close to 1.9 million. Its residents are even less free. In fact, they have been under blockade by Israel after the militant group Hamas took power in 2007. Unemployment has reached nightmarish figures: more than 46 per cent overall in late 2017, and close to 65 per cent for people under 30. Israel continues to tighten its hold, building an underground wall into the sandy soil to block tunnels that Hamas has dug.
Last Friday, April 20, like the three Fridays before, thousands of Gazans faced off hundreds of Israeli soldiers across a fence. They are expected to gather again for more protests every Friday until May 15, the day that commemorates what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
The Gazan protesters, most of them barehanded, wear cheap and tattered clothing. Behind them are Palestinian ambulances, waiting for the next casualties. Some demonstrators have tires, ready to be set on fire; others hold mirrors, hoping to temporarily blind the soldiers of one of the world’s strongest, best-equipped armies on the other side.
Israel, being Israel, is deploying unbridled force against a helpless population. Dozens of snipers, backed by tanks, fire live ammunition against demonstrators whose only weapons are their own bodies — and maybe a tire or a mirror. Israel has always acted like this in Gaza, because it can; the West Bank, by comparison, seems like an island of moderation and enlightenment. And most Israelis, it seems, couldn’t care less.
For Gaza is the lesser child of the Israeli occupation, and also the lesser child of the world. Gaza is far from the holy sites, far from the elegant hotels and fashionable bars of Jerusalem and Ramallah, and far from what little attention the world still pays to the Palestinian problem. Israel uses that remoteness effectively. Although it has moved out of Gaza, its occupation hasn’t stopped. The jailers who once worked inside that prison now operate outside it, which is comfortable for them anyway.
The Israeli government ramped up its abuse after Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. It couldn’t have wished for more than Hamas’s rise: No one would expect it to negotiate with those fundamentalists. The rest of the world has boycotted any talks with them. It speaks with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, but it won’t speak with Ismail Haniya, the political leader of Hamas.
So Israel is permitted everything in Gaza. And it has turned the territory into its training field, a giant lab — for gauging the reactions of the nearly two million people it keeps under siege there, and for testing its innovative weapons, as well as the limits of what the world will let it get away with.
The long siege of Gaza is an unparalleled collective punishment. Israel’s methods, disproportionate under international law, are carefully planned and considered. At one point, the military justified restrictions on food imports into Gaza by calculating the number of calories a person there needed daily to survive.
No wonder living conditions have only gotten worse over the years. A United Nations report was already warning in 2012 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, and matters have only gotten worse in the meantime.
But the fate of these almost two million human beings forced to live in a vast cage — most of them youngsters with no past, no present and no future — mainly because of Israel’s inhuman policies, doesn’t seem to touch the country’s conscience. Israelis live in denial; they barely even talk about Gaza. Much of the local media, betraying its mission, hardly covers life there: No matter what, Gaza is simply characterised as a hive of terrorism and a constant threat to security. “Go to Gaza!” is a common Hebrew curse.
A United Nations report was already warning in 2012 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, and matters have only gotten worse in the meantime