It is easy enough to predict the likely consequences of imposing a year’s comprehensive financial blockade on one of the poorest places on Earth. And yet the findings of last Friday’s Oxfam report [pdf] on the effects of the West’s enforced economic isolation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories – imposed in response to the victory of Hamas in the elections of January 2006 – are no less chilling for that.
According to the report, “…the decision to suspend aid to the PA [the Palestinian Authority] and withhold tax revenues has led to immense suffering. One year on, the number of Palestinian people living in poverty has jumped by 30 per cent, essential services are facing meltdown, and previously unknown levels of factional violence plague Palestinian streets. If this situation continues, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) risk becoming a ‘failed state’, destroying the chances of achieving a two-state solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict].”
The blockade has resulted in a 60 per cent drop in the PA’s income, impacting on its ability to run “1,600 schools, 22 hospitals, and 416 primary health clinics, [to provide] welfare payments to nearly a quarter of a million people”, and to pay “161,000 [PA employees] who in turn support nearly 1 million dependants”.
As a result: “46 per cent of Palestinians do not have enough food to meet their needs. The number of people in deep poverty, defined as those living on less than 50 cents a day, nearly doubled in 2006 to over 1 million”
Palestinian attempts to cope with the crisis have become increasingly desperate. “Each government worker had built up an average personal debt of $2,000. Households have resorted to borrowing, selling possessions, reducing healthcare and food consumption, and taking children out of school”. In September last year, The Independent reported that Palestinian mothers had been reduced to scouring rubbish dumps to find enough food to feed their children once a day.
Essential services have been hit particularly hard. “Throughout the financial crisis”, say Oxfam “hospitals have reported a shortage of essential drugs and, in the absence of salaries, health professionals have found it difficult to travel to work. In Gaza, 400 doctors have lost their jobs as there are no funds to cover their salaries”. Other services have also suffered. For example, “the police were unable to implement plans for a special unit dealing with domestic violence owing to the financial boycott”.
The West’s disapproval of the Palestinian’s choice of government is being conveyed in no uncertain terms, even to abused wives and children in Gaza and the West Bank.
The prospects for reversing the human costs of the blockade diminish as long term damage is done to the viability of a Palestinian economy whose “GDP declined by around 10 per cent last year”.“As Palestinian incomes have fallen”, the report continues “shops and small businesses have gone bankrupt” and in bypassing official PA channels in providing (wholly inadequate levels) of interim aid, the West risks the “disintegration” of fragile public finance systems in the OPT that have taken years to nurture, according to the World Bank and the IMF.
This punishment has been visited on a Palestinian economy that was already a disaster. Economically debilitating restrictions of movement set in place by Israel, including checkpoints, roadblocks, roads for the exclusive use of Israeli colonists, and an illegal separation wall stretching 700km (not to mention four decades of vicious colonial occupation) were already taking their toll. “GDP declined by 30 per cent between 1999 and 2004 and poverty increased by 30 per cent.” according to the report, as ”many Palestinians [could not] access their land or water resources, travel to work, or sell their goods in the market”. The addition of the blockade caused poverty to rise by 30 per cent again in 2006.
The blockade goes beyond a refusal to grant aid to the PA. It also involves Israel’s effective theft of tax revenues that it collects on the PA’s behalf. And in the event that some national government might take pity on the Palestinians and attempt to lend assistance, the US threatens to blacklist any bank transferring money to the PA.
These policies, surely constituting crimes against humanity by any meaningful definition of the term, are fully signed up to by the EU, rendering Britain, as a member state (and the US and Israel’s main ally in Europe) fully complicit both in the implementation of the policies and their grim results.
Western measures to overrule the January 2006 election result do not end there.
Firstly, the damage caused by the blockade has been accompanied by crippling attacks from the Israeli military. Oxfam points out that “in the past year, the Israeli Defence Force has fired thousands of rockets and shells into Gaza and has destroyed aid projects worth millions of dollars. This includes the destruction of vital water and electricity infrastructure, with severe humanitarian consequences”. These attacks are claimed to be in response to Palestinian home-made rocket attacks which, though serious, cause nothing like the damage inflicted by Israel’s devastating reprisals.
Secondly, tentative attempts have been made to topple the elected Palestinian government in a “hard coup” backed by Washington and effected by local proxies – primarily Fatah, the defeated party in the 2006 election. This has resulted in devastating factional violence bringing the OPT to the brink of civil war.
The extremity of the West’s reaction to the unfavourable OPT election result , and the threat that what remains of Palestinian society may collapse altogether, has horrified even our government’s closest allies in the region. Fearing the blowback that would result from the Palestinian nation effectively dying on their watch, normally obedient Arab leaders have stepped decisively out of line, moving to counteract the West’s policy of isolating Hamas. In February 2007, in a dramatic split with the White House, Saudi Arabia ignored protestations from Washington and moved to broker a deal that would result in the forming of a coalition government that would include Hamas, whether or not it agreed to the West’s demands.
Throughout, Hamas has repeated its long standing position on the conflict: a preference for a peaceful settlement based on two states residing along the 1967 borders. This is in accordance with international law and the view of the international community, and is the solution that has been on the table for decades. The offer was repeated once more by the Arab states last month, with a warning that this may represent the last opportunity for Israel and its allies to accept the settlement according to international law, since yet another rejection would drastically reduce the likelihood of further offers being made in the future. With Western allies ever-willing to match and underwrite its intransigence, Israel gave little indication of any serious interest in the peace offer.
Peace offers are not enough for states that, as was demonstrated in the Lebanon war last summer, are more interested in victory, whatever it takes to achieve it, than peace. Instead, the Palestinians are told that our boot will only be lifted from their necks when their government adopts three policies that we have chosen for them. These are:
the acceptance of past Israeli-Palestinian agreements; and
the renunciation of violence.
Few words need be wasted on these absurdities, which Condoleezza Rice, with the usual affectations of piety, describes as “principles”. It will suffice to point out that “principles” are things that apply to everyone, whereas in the case of each of these three demands:
Israel, far from recognising the “right to exist” of a Palestinian state has worked assiduously for sixty years to ensure that the Palestinians will have nothing that so much as resembles a state, nor any kind of autonomy or self-determination;
Israel’s contempt for past Israeli-Palestinian agreements is epic, not least its extensive, illegal colonisation of Palestinian land; and
what can one say about point three? Except that only a person of remarkable self-discipline could keep a straight face when saying the words “Israelrenouncesviolence”.
The fiction that there is a moral basis to the West’s demands need not detain us further; not while Hamas has largely observed a unilateral ceasefire for over two years and is offering a peace deal on terms consistent with international law. This is a question not of terrorism, peace or stability – the standard platitudes – but of obedience. A peace settlement will come on the West’s terms or not at all, and dissention from this script must neither be tolerated nor be seen to be tolerated. As Michael Ledeen – an influential US scholar close to the Bush administration – once put it: every so often “the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”.
Our own complicity in the manufactured collapse of Palestinian society is neither compulsory nor inevitable. In what is a relatively free country, our government and its policies are the net result of our political action and inaction. If we are uncomfortable with the idea that there are children in Gaza eating food found on rubbish dumps, when they are able to eat at all, because their parents voted for people that our government disapproves of, then there are plenty of things that we can do about it.
We can start by emailing our local MPs, MEPs and writing to Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in advance of the 23 April EU Foreign Minister’s meeting. Citing the Oxfam report’s recommendations, we can ask that Britain move to end the boycott of the PA immediately and without reservation.
In the longer term we can campaign for a total cessation of all British arms sales to Israel, the adoption of which would be Britain’s greatest victory so far in the “war on terrorism”.
Our government, which claims to lead the way in democracy promotion abroad and the alleviation of third world poverty, may be comfortable with impoverishing a society to punish it for voting the wrong way in a free election. But there is no reason for us to acquiesce in the implementation of such an obscene policy when we have the power to change it.
David Wearing is a regular contributor to UK Watch. His articles have also appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique and ZNet. He is currently studying for an MSc in International Public Policy at University College London. His website is www.democratsdiary.co.uk
It is easy enough to predict the likely consequences of imposing a year’s comprehensive financial blockade on one of the poorest places on Earth. And yet the findings of last Friday’s Oxfam report [pdf] on the effects of the West’s enforced economic isolation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories – imposed in response to the victory of Hamas in the elections of January 2006 – are no less chilling for that.
According to the report, “…the decision to suspend aid to the PA [the Palestinian Authority] and withhold tax revenues has led to immense suffering. One year on, the number of Palestinian people living in poverty has jumped by 30 per cent, essential services are facing meltdown, and previously unknown levels of factional violence plague Palestinian streets. If this situation continues, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) risk becoming a ‘failed state’, destroying the chances of achieving a two-state solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict].”
The blockade has resulted in a 60 per cent drop in the PA’s income, impacting on its ability to run “1,600 schools, 22 hospitals, and 416 primary health clinics, [to provide] welfare payments to nearly a quarter of a million people”, and to pay “161,000 [PA employees] who in turn support nearly 1 million dependants”.
As a result: “46 per cent of Palestinians do not have enough food to meet their needs. The number of people in deep poverty, defined as those living on less than 50 cents a day, nearly doubled in 2006 to over 1 million”
Palestinian attempts to cope with the crisis have become increasingly desperate. “Each government worker had built up an average personal debt of $2,000. Households have resorted to borrowing, selling possessions, reducing healthcare and food consumption, and taking children out of school”. In September last year, The Independent reported that Palestinian mothers had been reduced to scouring rubbish dumps to find enough food to feed their children once a day.
Essential services have been hit particularly hard. “Throughout the financial crisis”, say Oxfam “hospitals have reported a shortage of essential drugs and, in the absence of salaries, health professionals have found it difficult to travel to work. In Gaza, 400 doctors have lost their jobs as there are no funds to cover their salaries”. Other services have also suffered. For example, “the police were unable to implement plans for a special unit dealing with domestic violence owing to the financial boycott”.
The West’s disapproval of the Palestinian’s choice of government is being conveyed in no uncertain terms, even to abused wives and children in Gaza and the West Bank.
The prospects for reversing the human costs of the blockade diminish as long term damage is done to the viability of a Palestinian economy whose “GDP declined by around 10 per cent last year”. “As Palestinian incomes have fallen”, the report continues “shops and small businesses have gone bankrupt” and in bypassing official PA channels in providing (wholly inadequate levels) of interim aid, the West risks the “disintegration” of fragile public finance systems in the OPT that have taken years to nurture, according to the World Bank and the IMF.
This punishment has been visited on a Palestinian economy that was already a disaster. Economically debilitating restrictions of movement set in place by Israel, including checkpoints, roadblocks, roads for the exclusive use of Israeli colonists, and an illegal separation wall stretching 700km (not to mention four decades of vicious colonial occupation) were already taking their toll. “GDP declined by 30 per cent between 1999 and 2004 and poverty increased by 30 per cent.” according to the report, as ”many Palestinians [could not] access their land or water resources, travel to work, or sell their goods in the market”. The addition of the blockade caused poverty to rise by 30 per cent again in 2006.
The blockade goes beyond a refusal to grant aid to the PA. It also involves Israel’s effective theft of tax revenues that it collects on the PA’s behalf. And in the event that some national government might take pity on the Palestinians and attempt to lend assistance, the US threatens to blacklist any bank transferring money to the PA.
These policies, surely constituting crimes against humanity by any meaningful definition of the term, are fully signed up to by the EU, rendering Britain, as a member state (and the US and Israel’s main ally in Europe) fully complicit both in the implementation of the policies and their grim results.
Western measures to overrule the January 2006 election result do not end there.
Firstly, the damage caused by the blockade has been accompanied by crippling attacks from the Israeli military. Oxfam points out that “in the past year, the Israeli Defence Force has fired thousands of rockets and shells into Gaza and has destroyed aid projects worth millions of dollars. This includes the destruction of vital water and electricity infrastructure, with severe humanitarian consequences”. These attacks are claimed to be in response to Palestinian home-made rocket attacks which, though serious, cause nothing like the damage inflicted by Israel’s devastating reprisals.
Secondly, tentative attempts have been made to topple the elected Palestinian government in a “hard coup” backed by Washington and effected by local proxies – primarily Fatah, the defeated party in the 2006 election. This has resulted in devastating factional violence bringing the OPT to the brink of civil war.
The extremity of the West’s reaction to the unfavourable OPT election result , and the threat that what remains of Palestinian society may collapse altogether, has horrified even our government’s closest allies in the region. Fearing the blowback that would result from the Palestinian nation effectively dying on their watch, normally obedient Arab leaders have stepped decisively out of line, moving to counteract the West’s policy of isolating Hamas. In February 2007, in a dramatic split with the White House, Saudi Arabia ignored protestations from Washington and moved to broker a deal that would result in the forming of a coalition government that would include Hamas, whether or not it agreed to the West’s demands.
Throughout, Hamas has repeated its long standing position on the conflict: a preference for a peaceful settlement based on two states residing along the 1967 borders. This is in accordance with international law and the view of the international community, and is the solution that has been on the table for decades. The offer was repeated once more by the Arab states last month, with a warning that this may represent the last opportunity for Israel and its allies to accept the settlement according to international law, since yet another rejection would drastically reduce the likelihood of further offers being made in the future. With Western allies ever-willing to match and underwrite its intransigence, Israel gave little indication of any serious interest in the peace offer.
Peace offers are not enough for states that, as was demonstrated in the Lebanon war last summer, are more interested in victory, whatever it takes to achieve it, than peace. Instead, the Palestinians are told that our boot will only be lifted from their necks when their government adopts three policies that we have chosen for them. These are:
Few words need be wasted on these absurdities, which Condoleezza Rice, with the usual affectations of piety, describes as “principles”. It will suffice to point out that “principles” are things that apply to everyone, whereas in the case of each of these three demands:
The fiction that there is a moral basis to the West’s demands need not detain us further; not while Hamas has largely observed a unilateral ceasefire for over two years and is offering a peace deal on terms consistent with international law. This is a question not of terrorism, peace or stability – the standard platitudes – but of obedience. A peace settlement will come on the West’s terms or not at all, and dissention from this script must neither be tolerated nor be seen to be tolerated. As Michael Ledeen – an influential US scholar close to the Bush administration – once put it: every so often “the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”.
Our own complicity in the manufactured collapse of Palestinian society is neither compulsory nor inevitable. In what is a relatively free country, our government and its policies are the net result of our political action and inaction. If we are uncomfortable with the idea that there are children in Gaza eating food found on rubbish dumps, when they are able to eat at all, because their parents voted for people that our government disapproves of, then there are plenty of things that we can do about it.
We can start by emailing our local MPs, MEPs and writing to Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in advance of the 23 April EU Foreign Minister’s meeting. Citing the Oxfam report’s recommendations, we can ask that Britain move to end the boycott of the PA immediately and without reservation.
In the longer term we can campaign for a total cessation of all British arms sales to Israel, the adoption of which would be Britain’s greatest victory so far in the “war on terrorism”.
Our government, which claims to lead the way in democracy promotion abroad and the alleviation of third world poverty, may be comfortable with impoverishing a society to punish it for voting the wrong way in a free election. But there is no reason for us to acquiesce in the implementation of such an obscene policy when we have the power to change it.
David Wearing is a regular contributor to UK Watch. His articles have also appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique and ZNet. He is currently studying for an MSc in International Public Policy at University College London. His website is www.democratsdiary.co.uk