By: Ramzi Kysia
“I will send fire upon the walls of Gaza…” — Amos 1:7
In a small cafe in Gaza City, Amjad
Shawa, the coordinator for the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), sips
black coffee and ruminates on the Israeli blockade of Gaza. “This siege
isn’t about ‘security’ or even about Hamas,” he says. “Israel’s
ultimate aim is to separate Gaza from the West Bank and kill the
Palestinian national project.”
The Gaza Strip, a 25-mile-long narrow
coastal plain wedged between Israel and Egypt, is home to 1.5 million
Palestinians. Despite its small size, Gaza in many ways encapsulates
the essence of two of the world’s major conflicts: the rise of
political Islam and the use by the West of collective punishment and
economic coercion as a brutal counterweight.
Since Hamas won parliamentary elections
in January 2006, Israel has subjected Gaza to an increasingly severe
blockade. In June 2007, after Hamas defeated militants aligned with
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and forcibly asserted control of
Gaza, Israel tightened the blockade to include everything except
occasional deliveries of humanitarian goods. The local economy has
shattered as a result, leading to steep increases in unemployment,
poverty and childhood malnutrition rates.
While Abbas and the Fatah party still
govern the West Bank with Israel’s full support, Hamas faces an
uncertain future. Although Gazans have rallied around the government,
there is also increasing public frustration with the moribund economy.
Rawya Shawa, an independent member of
the Palestinian Legislative Council from Gaza, describes Palestine as
being in political limbo. “When you’re in power it’s never the same as
when you’re on the outside,” Shawa says. “Seventy percent of Gaza are
refugees. Fatah led the Palestinians for 45, 50 years. Fatah failed.
They didn’t deliver anything. Hamas, now, they are trying. They didn’t
succeed yet, so people are still just waiting.”
The Rise of Hamas
Confronting the decline of pan-Arab
nationalism which had peaked during the 1960s and ’70s and the collapse
of the 1993 Oslo Accords, Hamas found fertile ground in Palestine by
combining social welfare projects, religious traditionalism,
anti-elitism (Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh still lives in the house
where he grew up in Beach Camp, one of Gaza’s poorest neighborhoods)
and a hard-line stance toward Israel. Although Hamas is currently
observing a unilateral ceasefire, in the past its military wing has
sent small rockets and suicide bombers into Israel, leading to its
designation as a terrorist group by Israel and the United States.
Few Gazans agree with that description.
According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, 955 Palestinian
minors have been killed by Israeli security forces, while 123 Israeli
minors have been killed in Palestinian attacks since the start of the
second intifada in September 2000. With the blockade, 3,500 out of
3,900 factories in Gaza have closed, leading to over 100,000 private
sector layoffs. Per capita income in Gaza is less than two dollars a
day, and 80 percent of families are completely dependent on
international food aid.
The siege has led to massive shortages
that have rippled through the economy and society. Shortages in fuel
caused gasoline prices to spiral to $50 a gallon in early summer,
leading to sustained power cuts. Hospitals, dependent on diesel-powered
generators, regularly lost power for up to 12 hours a day. Unable to
operate irrigation pumps, farmers experienced significant loss of
crops. Most family homes have running water for less than six hours a
day, and almost a third of homes have no running water.
Without electricity, sewage treatment
facilities are unable to work, and raw sewage is being dumped into the
Mediterranean — turning the sea into a toilet. Over 15 billion liters
of raw sewage has been released into the Mediterranean in 2008 alone,
killing much of the marine life in the immediate vicinity.
Compared to December 2005, less than 20
percent of the supplies needed for normal trade are allowed into Gaza
by Israel, and foreign investment has fallen off by over 95 percent,
leading both the World Bank and some Israeli human rights organizations
to call for an end to the siege.
“This is not a natural disaster,” says
John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza. “It is
a man-made disaster created by policies that are not humane.”
Direct Action
The people of Gaza aren’t waiting for
the siege to end to deal with the crisis. In January, hundreds of
thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt when Hamas demolished a border
wall that Israel had erected in 2003. In February, the Popular
Committee Against the Siege organized thousands of Gazans into a “human
chain” that stretched along the entire length of the Gaza Strip.
“My phone was ringing off the hook all
day because they [the Israelis] thought we were going to storm the
border,” says Sameh Habeeb, one of the event organizers. “Israel
couldn’t believe that thousands of Arabs could peacefully protest. When
there’s armed resistance Israel can send their rockets and F-16s, but
they don’t know how to respond to civil resistance. Nonviolence makes
the Israelis crazy.”
The greatest act of nonviolent
resistance in Gaza has been simply surviving. Some families have taken
to catching and raising wild rabbits and birds to supplement their
diet. A network of perilous tunnels that cross into Egypt has claimed
several lives, but has also helped to relieve shortages with smuggled
goods. In recent weeks, an underground pipeline for gasoline has
substantially eased the fuel crisis. Automobile conversion kits,
allowing cars to run off cooking gas, sell for about $300. Shortages in
propane have led families to revert to wood-burning stoves for cooking
and, with the scarcity of concrete, Gazans have returned to using
earthen bricks for construction.
The collapse of Gaza’s economy is an
example of imperialism at its most extreme: prevent raw materials from
entering the economy, weaken and tear down native industries through
military violence and blockade, allow access only to finished products
imported from the outside (in this case, Israeli products) and force
the local population and its uncooperative government to expend and
exhaust whatever resources and reserves they had managed to set aside.
When the Gaza blockade is finally lifted, people here will be hard
pressed to recover, even with increased humanitarian assistance.
PNGO Director Amjad Shawa points out
that the blockade is part and parcel of the ongoing Israeli occupation.
“Gaza is still occupied, legally and physically,” says Shawa, “and the
siege is simply one part of this aggression. We don’t need more aid.
What we need is an end to the occupation.”
- Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American
writer and activist, and one of the organizers of the Free Gaza
Movement. To find out more, visit www.FreeGaza.org. (This article was first published in the Indypendent - www.indypendent.org.)
SOURCE: http://jnoubiyeh.blogspot.com/2008/11/gazans-resist-by-surviving.html