[Prefatory Note: I post below two items pertaining to Gaza—my short poem, and a collection of responses to the question “What is the Future of Gaza” by a clever online publication, called ‘One Question,’ which true to its name poses a single question to a number of people presumed to have something to say in response, is the creation of Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes. I only learned about this format because I am among the respondents represented below. My current concern is that while the world of states, and even the UN, has virtually abandoned the people trapped in Gaza, we who support their empowerment and liberation, must not lose faith in their future, nor weaken our emotions of empathy so long as their ordeal persists.]
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Great March of Return and the Unspeakable
This wordless borderland
Where love and atrocity meet
Where free fire zones
Fill pools with blood
Overflowing hatred
Climb forlorn fences
Call forth silences
Of heart and mind
Words of rage
Rightless rights
March and return
Return and march
Tears are not enough
Nor outrage nor silence
When tending the wounded
Become a capital crime
It’s time to say
This world is doomed
27 June 2018
Yalikavak, Turkey
One Question
Gaza
28th June 2018 Cihan Aksan And Jon Bailes <stateofnatureblog.com/one-question-future-gaza>
One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question. This month, we ask:What is the future of Gaza?
With responses from: Ramzy Baroud; Richard Falk; Sara Roy; Abdalhadi Alijla; Norman Finkelstein; Toufic Haddad; Atef Alshaer; Helga Tawil-Souri; Hagar Kotef; Joel Beinin; Magid Shihade; Ran Greenstein; Richard Hardigan; Salman Abu Sitta.
Ramzy Baroud
Journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story(Pluto, 2018). He has a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
The ongoing siege on the Gaza Strip was interrupted by three major Israeli wars: in 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, with a total death toll that exceeded 5,000. Tens of thousands were wounded and maimed, and hundreds more were killed in the in-between, so-called ‘lull’ years. Coupled with a hermetic blockade, Gaza cannot rebuild most of its destroyed infrastructure, leading the United Nations to conclude that the tiny but overcrowded enclave will become ‘uninhabitable’ by 2020. In many ways, however, and tragically so, it already is.
The future of Gaza will follow the same path of horrific wars and a suffocating siege if no new positive factors are injected into this dismal equation. Without a regional and international push to force Israel to loosen its grip, or to find alternative routes to assist the isolated Strip, misery will continue, even beyond 2020. ‘Uninhabitable’ or not, Israel has no plans to allow Gaza’s 2-million inhabitants, mostly refugees from historic Palestine, today’s Israel, to lead normal lives.
It is important to note that Israel is not solely responsible for Gaza’s current fate; Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are also culpable, each with its own agenda. Egypt, which shares the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, wants to ensure that Hamas, which it perceives as an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement, is isolated and weakened. The PA, which is controlled by the largest Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) faction, Fatah, is also hell-bent on defeating Hamas. Fatah lost a parliamentary election to Hamas in 2006, and does not wish to repeat that perceived folly by allowing another democratic election to take place.
Thus, the Palestinian political rift is important for all parties involved: Israel needs to demonise Hamas and, by extension, all of Gaza; Egypt wants to marginalise any strong Islamic political tide, and the PA in the West Bank wants to keep its rivals at bay. Despite Hamas’ regional politicking, it has so far failed to break away from its isolation. Gaza is, therefore, not a victim of Israel alone. True, the latter owns the largest shares in Gaza’s desolation, but other Arab and Palestinian parties are greatly invested and equally keen on keeping the hapless Strip on its knees.
If the status quo persists, a backlash is on the way, not just in terms of another deadly Israeli war to ‘downgrade’ the defenses of Palestinian resistance, but also in terms of social and political upheaval in Gaza and the West Bank. The large protests against the PA in Ramallah in recent days were violently suppressedby PA police and thugs, but West Bankers are growing angry over the subjugation of their Gaza brethren. Meanwhile, the mass ralliesat the Gaza-Israel fence are an indication that Gazans are seeking alternative methods to fight back, even at the price of a high death and injury toll, as has been and continues to be the case
.
Richard Falk
Professor Emeritus in International Law, Princeton University; between 2008-2014 he served as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council; his most recent books are Power Shift: On the New Global Order(University of Chicago, 2016) and Revisiting the Vietnam War(University of Cambridge, 2017).
It is important to understand some essential features of the distinctive place of Gaza in the wider context of the Palestinian struggle for elemental rights. Perhaps most fundamentally, unlike the West Bank and Jerusalem, Gaza is not considered part of the ‘promised land’ that forms the substance of the Zionist Project to form a Jewish State that corresponds with its understanding of the scope of biblical entitlement.
At the same time, Gaza has a long history of centrality in the Palestinian national experience that stretches back before the time of Mohammed, and thus the inclusion of Gaza in Palestine’s vision of self-determination is vital. This collides with Israel’s desire to maintain a Jewish majority state, which would make it desirable for Gaza to be absorbed or at least administered separately by either Jordan or Egypt.
Gaza, more than the West Bank, has also been the center of Palestinian resistance, being the site where the First Intifada was launched in 1987 and where Hamas came to govern after it prevailed in internationally supervised elections of 2006 and in a struggle for governing authority the following year.
The intense hostility between Hamas and the PLO has fractured Palestinian political unity, weakening Palestinian diplomatic leverage, and making it more plausible for Israel to claim it has no Palestinian ‘partner’ in the search for a peaceful solution.
Such a background helps us understand why Gaza has experienced massively destructive attacks by Israel in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014, as well as the recent border massacre in response to the Great Return March that is the latest example of Israeli reliance on excessive violence and cruel tactics to crush Palestinian resistance.
Gaza also partakes of the wider fate of the Palestinian people, which in the time of Netanyahu and Trump seems extremely unfavorable, with respect to relief from the ordeal of a suffocating blockade that has lasted more than a decade and control policies designed to achieve de-development of the Gazan economy. In this regard, the safest prediction is a continuation of the cycle of repression and resistance with no change of basic circumstances. Even the Israeli expansionists do not seek to absorb Gaza, although its offshore deposits of natural gas might create a future temptation.
The longer vision of a Gazan future is clouded at present. Ideally, Gaza would participate in a single secular state embracing the whole of historic Palestine. Increasingly, the impracticality of the two-state solution has focused Gazan hopes either on a long-term ceasefire or a genuine peace process that establishes a single democratic state.
Sara Roy
Senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, specialising in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her books include: The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995, 2001, third edition 2016 with a new introduction and afterword and Arabic edition forthcoming in 2018); Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Pluto Press, 2007); and Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton University Press, 2011, 2014 with a new afterword).
The question itself reflects the problem. It speaks to Gaza as separate and apart – severed from Israel, the West Bank, and the world. In this regard, Israel has been stunningly successful; it has not only removed and contained Gaza geographically, economically and legally; it has convinced us to understand and accept Gaza as something distinct and awful, unenduring, and therefore undeserving of a normal, worthwhile existence.
Gaza’s temporality has always defined Israel’s approach to the territory because Israel has never really known what to do with Gaza. Gaza has always been unruly, guilty of what for Israel is indefensible and unforgiveable: defiance. This accounts in part for Israel’s brutal treatment of the territory including a blockade now in its 12thyear, which has destroyed the local economy. Gaza was – and remains – the center of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and the injustice that sustains it.
The recent protests along the fence isolating Gaza from Israel, which at times exceeded 30,000 people, were a nightmare for Israel, a harbinger of things to come. No doubt one issue plaguing the Israeli government right now is how better to control Gaza.
This question, I am told, is at the heart of the American peace plan (especially since the West Bank has effectively succumbed to Israeli rule). Controlling Gaza in the future, however, will be no different from the past. Gaza will continue to be treated as a humanitarian problem requiring nothing more than subsistence relief. Defining the parameters of Israel’s policy toward the territory, an Israeli defense official was clear and succinct: ‘No development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis.’
Gaza’s future must be informed by its past; yet, its lived reality has no connection to a past or a future. The majority of Gazans have no memory of Gaza before the destruction. History – both recent and far – is not so much absent as it is vacant, and without that history to navigate a way forward, there are no prospects worth thinking about or expectations worth having. People are so consumed by the present that mundane needs have become aspirational. The future is beyond conceptualisation.
If Gaza has a future outside incarceration, it lies in ending its liminality and present state of exception. It lies in admittance and inclusion. And it lies in returning to Gazans what they want most – a predictable, unexceptional life.
Abdalhadi Alijla
Palestinian-Swedish researcher and writer. Since April 2018, he has been an Associate Fellow at the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a member of the elected Executive Committee of the Global Young Academy for 2018-2019, Director of Institute for Middle East Studies, Canada (IMESC), and Regional Manager of the Varieties of Democracy Institute (Gothenburg University) for Gulf countries. His work has appeared in OpenDemocracy, Huffpost,Qantara, Your Middle East, Jaddaliyaand other media outlets.
Gaza has two futures: the future that the Palestinians living in Gaza are looking for, a Gaza open to the world with no fear, and the future that seems to be their destiny, which is the current reality of a life filled with misery. When I left Gaza more than a decade ago, I knew that I was leaving a place which seemed like another planet behind me, where the unemployment rate was high, Palestinian internal division was deepening, and the Israeli siege had only just started. Today, the situation in Gaza is catastrophic, literally.
The Palestinians of Gaza are paying the price for Israel’s occupation, and the detrimental policies of both Hamas and Fatah. The recent incidents in Ramallah and the Gaza strip, where Hamas and Abbas’s forces broke up protests taking place in opposition to the sanctions against Gaza by the PA, has proven that both political entities are acting as de-facto, Israel-delegated authoritarian forces.
The Palestinians of Gaza look for a bright future where they can move freely, study and have access to health care without being dehumanised. The future Gazans want is the future where ICT incubators flourish, and industries that have been destroyed by Israel, such as textiles, will return. The future of Gaza should be without the occupation, the siege, and political division.
The other future, which I see as the most probable, is the continuation of the suffering and dehumanisation of the Palestinians of Gaza by settler colonial Israel, as well as the negligence of the Palestinian leadership with respect to the demands of their citizens for unification and elections. This future is the one that nobody wants except the Israeli occupation. It is the future characterised by high rates of suicide, a slaughter every four years, and miserable economic and societal conditions.
Norman Finkelstein
Received his PhD from the Princeton University Politics Department. He has written many books, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering(Verso, 2000), and most recently, Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom(University of California, 2018).
T
he modern history of Gaza begins in 1948 with the massive influx of expellees from the newborn state of Israel. In 1967, Gaza came under a brutal Israeli occupation. Israel alleges that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but the consensus among legal specialists – including top Israeli authority Yoram Dinstein – is that Israel remains the occupying power. In 2006, after Hamas won ‘completely honest and fair elections’ (Jimmy Carter), Israel imposed a medieval-like blockade on Gaza. In the meantime, Israel has visited not fewer than eight ‘operations’ on Gaza since 2004. After the last massacre, Operation Protective Edge (2014), President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, went to Gaza and observed, ‘I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.’
UN agencies have now pronounced Gaza ‘unlivable.’ ’I see this extraordinarily inhuman and unjust process of strangling gradually two million civilians that really pose a threat to nobody,’ UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Robert Piper, observed last year. Echoing him, UN Human Rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, recently deplored the fact that Gazans have been ‘caged in a toxic slum from birth to death.’
On March 30, the people of Gaza initiated weekly mass demonstrations to break the illegal siege. Human rights groups report that the marches have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But more than 110 Gazans have been killed and more than 3,700 injured (many permanently) with live ammunition by Israeli snipers. ‘Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip since March 30, 2018, against Palestinian demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life,’ Human Rights Watch concluded in a major investigation, ‘may amount to war crimes.’
What is the future of Gaza?
Sara Roy of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies has observed that ‘innocent human beings, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink, and likely by the soil in which they plant.’ Experts say that before long Gaza will be overrun by typhoid and cholera epidemics. It is impossible to predict the future except to say, if the international community doesn’t act, Gaza won’t have one.
A 2015 UN report by New York State judge Mary McGowan Davis called on Israel to lift the blockade ‘immediately and unconditionally,’ while the European Parliament in 2018 called for an ‘immediate and unconditional end to the blockade.’ If Israel isn’t compelled to end the illegal and inhuman siege, the judgment of History will not be kind. Will it one day be asked, why was the world silent when Gaza was crucified?
Toufic Haddad
Completed his PhD in Development Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 2015, and has recently engaged in postdoctoral research for the Arab Council for Social Sciences, exploring the political economy of siege and resilience in the Gaza Strip. Author of Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and National Liberation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory(I.B. Taurus, 2016).
The future or Gaza needs little prognostication: what after all could be the future of a territory of 360 km2crammed with two million people, two thirds of whom are refugees; whose water is entirely poisoned; whose civilian infrastructure has effectively collapsed; where food dependency exceeds 80 percent, and unemployment is the highest in the world? In 2017, the UN advanced its own 2012 prediction that the territory would become ‘unlivable’ by 2020, declaring the territory had already passed this dubious threshold.
Gaza has long been a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ well documented by the not-so-small cottage industry of local and international organisations designated to confer such designations.
And here lies part of the problem: the perpetually deteriorating humanitarian and developmental conditions that have come to define the ‘Gaza ghetto’ continually frame their subject matter as an object of international humanitarian appeal, or as a festering security dilemma.
It is this dual approach that bears much of the blame for Gaza’s tortured predicament, because the ‘problem of Gaza’ is ultimately a political problem. And it has been the deliberate attempt on behalf of these actors to avoid or suppress the political nature of Gaza that has led to its persistent worsening situation.
What after all is ‘the Gaza Strip’? The territory has no natural precedent, and can only be understood as a rump territory created in the wake of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s southern and coastal plains during the creation of the state of Israel.
Gaza’s concentration of historical and political injustices is too long to document in 400 words. The resulting ‘open air prison’ the territory has become is a scourge on the conscious of humanity.
Absented in the statistics documenting Gaza’s travails is the untold story of how this ugly brother of the West Bank consistently generated the Palestinian movement’s political vanguard, organising for refugee return, statehood and national liberation. While today this movement is led by Islamo-nationalists (Hamas), years ago this mantle fell to communists, Nasserists, Left nationalists (PFLP), and secular nationalists (Fateh).
The myth that this predicament can continue ad infinitum, solved through ‘technological fixes’, aid and yet more sophisticated military means – from drones and remote controlled machine guns, to underground walls, is precisely that – a myth.
Eventually Palestinians and their allies will develop means to more effectively counter their predicament, be this violently or nonviolently.
The question then becomes how much blood is to be shed before then, and perhaps more importantly, what history will write about those who perpetuated this bloodshed, by design or by default.
Atef Alshaer
Lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He has written several research papers and monographs, including Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World(Hurst, 2016); Language and National Identity in Palestine: Representations of Power and Resistance in Gaza(IB Taurus, 2018); the co-authored The Hezbollah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication, with Dina Matar and Lina Khatib (Hurst, 2014); and an edited volume, Love and Poetry in the Middle East(Hurst, 2018).
Known as the biggest open air prison, Gaza’s future lies in it being totally liberated. Besieged and battered by three devastating wars and constant attacks by Israel, ruled by Hamas without any regimes nearby to cooperate with its partisan rule, Gaza is left to fend for itself in the face of a world that seems content to look at it as an abyss, the ultimate brainchild of Israel and its ideology of racist Zionism, with its irrational and irresponsible American patronage.
Much has been written about Gaza, but little has been done to alleviate its suffering, that of two million people trapped for more than a decade in 365 square kilometres. It is crowded as well as poverty-stricken, and lacking in opportunities for its vibrant and often educated youth. It is depleted of humane prospects for the future, yet Gazans continue to resist and innovate in their resistance; and the latest manifestation of this is the Great March for Return, held to commemorate the 70thanniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the dispossession from historic Palestine.
The past of Gaza has been tragedy and resistance and so is its present and so will be its future. The only meaningful future for Gaza is for it to be reunited with historic Palestine within a one democratic state solution, where every citizen from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea has equal political and human rights. Short of that, Gaza will remain deadlocked between uncaring Egypt on the one hand and deadly Israel on the other. Alas, it will continue to be without an open border to connect it to the outside world, and without viable infrastructure reinforced with fair political solutions that address the root cause of its wretched state. This is anchored in the liberation of the whole of Palestine from the Israeli occupation and its entrenched mind-set of apartheid.
I
t is utterly sad that Gaza lacks a future that befits its extraordinarily warm and movingly steadfast people, notwithstanding the pain. Gaza was once part of the fabric of the Mediterranean world. Wrenched from its natural bosom, Gaza will most unfortunately remain a suffering shadow of its former prosperous self.
Helga Tawil-Souri
Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University where she is also the Director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. She co-edited Gaza as Metaphorwith Dina Matar (Hurst, 2016), and teaches and writes on technology, media, territory and politics in the Middle East, with a focus on Palestine-Israel.
That the question of a future of Gaza separate from Palestine makes sense already foretells a destination. Gaza has been severed: from Palestine, and from the world; while that world either supports Israel’s leading role in Gaza’s undoing, or, at best, throws up its arms in despair or in disregard, and lets Gaza sink into an abyss.
There is no doubt – looking at the past five, then, twenty, fifty, seventy years – that Gaza gets progressively worse. Based on that calculation, the future is grim: dispossession, destitution, misery, abjection; more of the past seven decades, for a growing population whose age is younger, who has never known anything outside of the man-made disaster called Gaza.
In the immediate future, Israel is hell-bent on making Gazans disappear… How, I’m not sure. The coming years and decades are too painful for me to ponder.
So my thoughts move along the measure of centuries instead. I think of the Maya (or the Mycenaeans): disappeared civilisations about whom we rely mostly on archaeologists to reconstruct an understanding, while we treat their ruins as playgrounds on which to take holidays along pretty seasides. Gaza might become a tourist destination with beautiful beaches in three or four-hundred years. But unlike with the fate of the Maya, or the Mycenaeans, our task today is to document – so that centuries from now, Gaza’s fate is not sealed as yet another disappeared culture.
There should be records, notes, reports; recipes, stories, biographies, pictures. Accounts and illustrations about life with constant military machines flying overhead and life forcefully severed from outside contact except virtually. Recordings, compilations, archives of sub-local dialects, idioms, performances, prayers, songs, architectural details, engravings, memories (of those who remember ten, twenty, seventy years ago). Details of weddings and burials and surgeries performed in the dark and the din of generators; figures, measurements and reports of babies orphaned, footsteps taken, high school graduation ceremonies held, regardless of physical and psychological scars wreaked.
Centuries from now, the disappearance of Gaza will be a permanent stain on humanity’s conscience, a moment of failure when society allowed a mighty victim to do away with a group of individuals because of the circumstances they were born in. There will be records that this disappearance wasn’t a miracle, a freak series of natural causes (as what presumably befell the Maya), or an inexplicable migration of millions of people. No, in Gaza, it was a protracted, painful, relentless sociocide, and the world clapped along or shed a tear, but not more. And we would have the records.
Hagar Kotef
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Comparative Politics at SOAS, University of London. Her book Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015) examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces.
’m writing these words as the future of Gaza seems to oscillate, once again, between a bright (?) economic future promised by the new American peace-enterprise, and yet another round of the ongoing ‘cycles of fighting’, as they are officially termed. In recent days, we have seen increasing attacks on ‘Hamas’ infrastructures’ (which in Gaza often means simply ‘infrastructure’), retaliations on Hamas’ part, and an inflated rhetoric that we know too well from previous rounds. (Is there a future for a place that seems to be situated within a cyclical temporality?)
Trying to predict the future would therefore be foolish, but I am also not sure I want to use this question as an opportunity to imagine. As a Jewish Israeli, this is not my imagination to unfold, not my space to occupy.
The point of departure should therefore be the imagination of people in Gaza, and the recent demonstrations at Israel’s buffer zone provide an opportunity to listen. Those demonstrations entailed a demand for a future: a demand to be set free of the siege that has lasted (depending how and what one counts) at least 11 years, but also, through the name ‘the Great March of Return’, a demand to change the terms through which this freedom is understood.
It is not just a demand for basic human conditions: electricity for more than four hours a day, drinking water (96% of the water in Gaza is not drinkable), the right to fish, to work, to reconstruct demolished homes, the right to move, to see family members, to receive education, medical treatment; it is also a demand for a political language, a space, where the people of Gaza have a place not just as humanitarian subjects but as political actors. This demand, I believe, calls us to question initiatives such as the new American enterprise, but also to reflect on the terms of the question itself. As a question about the future of Gaza it undermines, I believe, precisely this latter – political – call for a future.
The future of Gaza should be integral to the future of Palestine, and any effort to separate the two questions already surrenders itself to the terms Israel has worked so hard to construct. Since 1967, and increasingly after the disengagement of 2005, and then the rise of Hamas and the division of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2007, Israel has been doing everything within its capacity – politically and militarily – to separate the future of Gaza from the future of the West Bank.
The recent attacks of the PA on demonstrators supporting Gaza show that the PA itself has accepted this division (if only as a tool to re-gain control over Gaza). The American enterprise seems to already take the isolation of Gaza almost for granted. When we ask about the future of Gazawe have already given up the question of the future of Palestine or have excluded Gazans from this question. We need to ask a different question then, or ask the question differently.
Joel Beinin
Donald J McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. In 2002 he served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. He has written or edited eleven books, most recently, Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016).
The Palestinian Great March of Return exposed both the diplomatic impasse over Israel/Palestine and the emergence of a new political alignment in the Middle East. The campaign, which began on March 30, was initiated by politically unaligned young men and women of the Gaza Strip as a protest against their miserable futures. They did so independently of both Hamas and Fatah, which have become increasingly corrupt while failing to improve their lives or to advance Palestinian political and human rights. Demonstrators demanded that the decade-long siege by Israel and Egypt be lifted and called for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes – highlighting the origins of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, rather than its post-1967 consequences.
On May 14, as President Donald Trump’s coterie of hardline Zionist funders and supporters, represented by Sheldon Adelson and anti-Semitic evangelical Protestant preachers John Hagee and Robert Jeffress, celebrated the inauguration of the future US Embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli forces shot dead over 60 Palestinians and injured over 2000. Beyond verbal denunciations, the only practical response by any Arab state was Egypt opening its border with the Gaza Strip for the month of Ramadan, allowing a limited number of Palestinians to exit. The reason for the measured response of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt is that they have been forging an alliance with Israel directed against Iran.
While several secret meetings between Israelis and Emiratishave been reported, Saudi Arabia is reluctant to openly acknowledge its alignment with Israel. Israel is pursuing a more public relationship. Before Saudi Arabia and Russia kicked off in the opening game of World Cup 2018, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s official Arabic Twitter account wished Saudi Arabia ‘best of luck!‘
By withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, President Trump signalled willingness to follow Israel’s lead in pursuing realignment of the Middle East around an anti-Iranian front. Palestinians may become collateral damage of this agenda, first and foremost the 1.9 million residents of the Gaza Strip, which may become ‘unliveable’ by 2020 according to a UN report. However, the Saudis and Emiratis, who have recently bailed out Egypt to the tune of $8 billion, could easily become the lead funders for the rehabilitation of Gaza if they became convinced that their anti-Iranian project requires it.
Magid Shihade
Assistant professor of International Studies at Birzeit University. His book, Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict among Palestinians in Israelwas published in 2011 by Syracuse University Press. His recent articles include: ‘Global Israel: Settler Colonialism, Ruptures and Connection’, Borderlands, 2015, and ‘Education and Decolonization: On Not Reading Ibn Khaldun in Palestine’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 2017.
In thinking about the future of Gaza, one has to consider the history of modern Palestine, and the founding of the Israeli settler colonial state in 1948, which has led to a process of elimination of the native Palestinian society, through displacement, separation, maiming, encampment, caging and killing.
The Israeli state is a racialised and racist state which affects not only the native Palestinians but also Jews of non-western origin, and migrants from Africa and Asia. Since its founding it has been engaged in violence against the native Palestinian population, and peoples in neighbouring states. It has also been engaged in wars, arms exports and support for criminal regimes, creating havoc around the world. Like all settler colonial states, its impact can be seen locally, but more than other cases it has been a global issue from the start.
Thus, while the Israeli state must be seen as a European settler colony (like the US and others), its specific features must be considered. Its uniqueness lies in its claims to represent world Jewry – implicating Jews wherever they live, forcing them to take a stand either as supporters of Zionism, or as detractors of a racist ideology and state – as well as in its self-image as the West’s front against Asia and Africa. But it is also unique because it has created millions of Palestinian refugees since 1948, who live in many countries and have gained the support of the local populations. And, by being part of the western global exportation of arms and violence, it has created mass opposition around the world.
In short, the Israeli state and its policies towards Gaza and Palestine must be seen in their global context, and in their connection to the rise and dominance of racist western capitalist, colonial, and imperialist policies. They are part of a larger structure that has been at war against the most vulnerable at home and abroad, those who are considered ‘Other’ or disposable, and against nature and its limited resources.
So, the future of Gaza-Palestine is part of the future of the world. It is the future of surviving the current conditions, created by the many who have been negatively affected by them, and needs a global framework. In thinking about the possibility of a better future, one is reminded of the concept of asabiyya(social solidarity) defined by the 14-15th century scholar Ibn Khaldun. In his analysis of how societies manage to survive, Ibn Khaldun argued that some form of common feeling is needed among the members of a group. And this cooperation between people is not just an ethical issue, but a practical one.
Taking that concept to a global scale, one can imagine the majority of people having in common a respect for human lives, human dignity, equality, fair pay for labour, quality of life, the right to mobility, and a world where natural resources and the environment are respected, without which we cannot survive. For Gaza-Palestine to have a better future, we are responsible for working to create a different and a better world for much of its population.
Ran Greenstein
Associate professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Among his publications are Zionism and its Discontents: A Century of Radical Dissent in Israel/Palestine(Pluto, 2014), and Identity, Nationalism, and Race: Anti-colonial Resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine(forthcoming).
For the last 70 years Gaza has been stranded between Israel and Egypt in a state of limbo. Not wanted but not given up; dominated but not subordinated; always controlled from the outside but left to its own devices from the inside; separated from the rest of Palestine but linked to it; incorporated into the system of domination but not integrated socially and politically.
Does its future have to look the same as its past and present?
To avoid that, it needs to reverse course, to become re-integrated with the rest of Palestine, to overcome the image of the bogeyman it has acquired in Israeli eyes.
Why has Gaza been such a problem for its neighbours? It epitomises the Palestinian situation; most of its population are refugees who regard pre-1948 Palestine as their true home after generations of life in exile. Yet, unlike other refugees, its people live within the boundaries of historical Palestine, a few miles away from their ancestral land. For three decades they could hop on a taxi and in an hour find themselves in Ashkelon or Jaffa, able to see the sights and work but not spend the night there, let alone return on a permanent basis. For the last two decades even this symbolic relief has been blocked, increasing the sense of isolation and desperation.
What can be done to change the future? First, Gaza must cease being a bone of contention between rival forces. The PA must stop punishing its people for making the ‘wrong’ electoral choice; Hamas must stop using it as an alternative political centre. Both sacrifice the interests of the people for the sake of power. This is replicated on the broader scene, with regional forces using diplomacy and money to play one faction against another. Internal Palestinian unity is essential for a move forward.
Reaching out to Israeli constituencies is another necessary step. Gaza’s only viable future is with the rest of Palestine and that means Israelis are essential to the picture. They must be seen as part of the solution not only part of the problem. A strategy that gathers progressive forces on a platform of individual and collective equality, redress and justice for all, is needed. Only through political dialogues among all population segments can a common solution be developed, aided by global solidarity that is guided by local actors.
Richard Hardigan
University professor based in California. He is author of The Other Side of the Wall(Cune, 2018). His website is richardhardigan.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @RichardHardigan.
The quality of life in the Gaza Strip is appalling. According to a 2017 studyby the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, the unemployment rate hovers at 44% (61.9% for those under the age of 29). 80% of Gazans depend on humanitarian aid, while 60% suffer from food insecurity. 96.2% of the Strip’s water is contaminated and undrinkable. Electricity is cut for all but a few hours every day. Raw sewage is pumped into the sea. And the situation is only worsening. A reportissued by the United Nations in 2015 predicted that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable by 2020.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has calledthe situation in Gaza ‘one of the most dramatic humanitarian crises that [he has] seen in many years working as a humanitarian in the United Nations.’
The crisis in Gaza is entirely man-made. It is a result of the Israeli blockade of the enclave, which began in 2007 after Hamas’ election victory that followed Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005. Israel insists the purpose of its blockade is to diminish Hamas’ capacity to maintain or increase its weapons arsenal, but a quick scan of the items it bans – which includes such goods as chocolate and potato chips – reveals the mendacity of its claim. In fact, a US diplomatic cable quotedIsraeli officials as saying they wanted to ‘keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse.’
Since the imposition of the blockade Israel has also engaged in three major assaults on Gaza, the consequences of which were devastating. Thousands of Palestinians – most of them non-combatants – died; tens of thousands of homes were destroyed or badly damaged; schools, hospitals, factories, farms, mosques, and infrastructure such as power and water plants were hit.
Israel’s policy vis-à-vis the Gaza Strip is to raise the level of suffering of the civilian population to such an extent that it will have no choice but to overthrow the Hamas government. But this is a serious miscalculation. Over the last decade Israel’s harsh measures have given Hamas the opportunity to cement its stranglehold on power. Only by easing its restrictions on the embattled enclave and allowing for its reconstruction can it hope to create an environment in which an extreme political movement such as Hamas cannot thrive. If Israel continues on its current path, the civilian population will eventually reach its breaking point. And when it does, the Gaza Strip is going to explode in a paroxysm of violence, the consequences of which will be devastating not only for the Palestinians, but for Israel, as well.
Salman Abu Sitta
A writer and activist on Palestinian refugees and the Right of Return. He has authored over 300 papers and articles and five books including the encyclopaedic Atlas of Palestine 1948and the expanded Atlas of Palestine 1917- 1966published in 2010. He is founder and president of the Palestine Land Society, UK, for the purpose of documenting the land and people of Palestine. The society website has a wealth of information at www.plands.org.
Gaza is the symbol of Palestine. Gaza is the part of Palestine which never willingly raised a flag other than that of Palestine. Gaza represents the conscience of the Palestinian people, which can express itself freely (most of the time), unlike in other regions in Palestine, under Israeli rule.
Gaza is not only the symbol but the centre of resistance to the occupation of a homeland. In Gaza, the first commando operations to liberate occupied Palestine started in 1950. In Gaza, demonstrations against settling Palestinians in Sinai in 1954 and 1955 were met with killings and jail sentences. The cry of the people in the streets was ‘we want to return home, not further exile.’
In Gaza, the first popular movements to liberate occupied Palestine started just after al-Nakba. Fatah, Arab Nationalists, Muslim Brothers and Communists each vied to find the best strategy to liberate Palestine throughout most of the 1950s.
In Gaza, the first democratically elected Palestine Legislative Council was formed in 1961. From Gaza, the first Palestinian delegation travelled to New York in 1962 to address the UN on behalf of the Palestinian people. All previous representations at the UN had been made by Arab League members.
Why is Gaza Strip the most crowded place on Earth?
During the British Mandate on Palestine (1920- 1948), Britain, in contravention of its obligations to bring independence to Palestine, allowed European Jewish settlers to come to Palestine. During this period, the settlers, with British collusion, managed to control only 6% of Palestine. Armed and trained by the British, these Zionist settlers (later called Israelis) depopulated 675 Palestinian towns and villages and occupied by military force 80% of Palestine in 1948/49, after the unceremonious British departure.
Nowhere are the effects more striking than in southern Palestine. The southern half (50%) of Palestine was totally ethnically cleansed by the Israelis and the inhabitants of 247 villages have been pushed into 1.3% of the territory. That is the Gaza Strip. They now live in 8 refugee camps at a density of 7000 people/km2.
They literally see their land and homes across the barbed wire. Their land is still empty; the settlers’ density is only 7 people/km2.
The longest standing resolution in UN history since 1948, UNGA resolution 194, calls for the return of the refugees to their homes.
Three generations of refugees, as the youngest eloquently demonstrated in April and May 2018, insist on their Right of Return. There can never be any peace in the region without the right of 7 million Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, now occupied by 2% of Israelis.
The future of the whole region resides in Palestine. And the future of Palestine resides in Gaza. And the future of Gaza is in the Right of Return. And that calls for justice, well over due.
Tags: Future of Gaza, Gaza, Gaza Massacre
Health and Human Rights in Gaza: Shame on the World
27 Nov[Preliminary Note: This post devoted to health and human rights in Gaza. It is based on a video presentation some weeks ago to a conference on this theme held in Gaza. It makes no effort to update by reference to the latest cycle of violence sparked by the targeted assassination of Baha Abu-Ata, an Islamic Jihad military commander, on November 12. I feel strongly about the issues raised by this post not only because I have witnessed living conditions in Gaza and have friends in Gaza who have endured hardship and injustice for so long without losing their warmth or even their hope. My contacts with Gaza and Gazans over the course of many years has been at once inspirational and deeply dispiriting, a deep insight into the deficiencies of the human condition coupled with an uplifting glimpse at the spiritual courage of those so severely victimized.
Reflecting on the terrifying destiny bestowed upon the people of Gaza I became ashamed of stultifying silences, especially of those governments and their leaders in the region and those countries with a historical responsibility (the UK) and with geopolitical leverage (the US). I also take alarmed note of the refusal of the mainstream media to accord attention to the misery so long endured by the people of Gaza. If ever the norm of ‘the responsibility to protect’ was applied according to humanitarian need, Gaza would be at the top of the list, but of course there is no list, and if ever there were one, given the present international atmosphere, Gaza would remain among the unlisted! This neglect of the people of Gaza is so acute as to extend the web of criminal complicity far beyond the borders of Israel.]
Health and Human Rights in Gaza: Shame on the World
I want to begin by offering my greetings to all those here today. I dearly wish that conditions in Gaza were different, enabling me to share the experience of the conference directly with you by taking part directly and actively. The theme of the conference touches the policies and practice of Israeli abuse that have been victimizing the people of Gaza for such a long time. The population of Gaza already faced a lamentable situation ever since the occupation began in 1967, but it has grown far worse since the Gaza elections of 2006, as reinforced by the changes in political administration that occurred in the following year. Israel’s policies have been systematically cruel and abusive, disregarding the legal standards and moral values applicable to the behavior of an Occupying Power. These standards and values are embodied in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and International Human Rights Law (IHRL).
Upholding the right to health is among the most fundamental of human rights, first articulated in the 1946 Constitution of the World Health Organization: “The right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” This right is further articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially in Article 25, and then put in a treaty form by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966. The deliberate interference with the right to health is among the worst imaginable collective abuses of a people subject to belligerent occupation. Israel, which relies on an apartheid regime to maintain control over the Palestinian people in the face of their internationally protected right of resistance, has been particularly guilty of behavior that hasflagrantly, consistently, and intentionally encroached upon and violated the right to health of the entire civilian population of Gaza in a variety of ways.
The Great March of Return epitomizes the brutalities of Israeli occupation policy, which include a shocking disregard of the physical and mental health of the Palestinian civilian population taking part in the demonstrations. It also offers us a metaphor for the abuses of the right to health and other rights of the Gaza population regarded as a collective entity. This pattern of abuse occurs in the context of persistent and courageous Palestinian acts of resistance in support of their right of return to their homeland, a right affirmed at the UN and clearly established in international law, which Israel has refused to uphold for seven decades, that is, ever since the Nakba. In the face of such a failure of international procedures to uphold Palestinian rights, a recourse to a politics of self-reliance seems reasonable, and in fact the only path presently capable of yielding positive results. The people of Gaza have waited long enough, indeed too long, without having their most basic international rights protected by the organized world community.
A preliminary matter is whether, as Israel alleges, it is relieved of all international legal obligations to the people of Gaza as a result of its supposed ‘disengagement’ from Gaza in 2005. From an international law perspective, the physical removal of IDF occupying troops from the territory of Gaza and the dismantlement of unlawful Israeli settlements did not affect the legal status of Gaza as ‘occupied Palestinian territory.’ Israel has maintained tight control over Gaza, which has included massive military attacks in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014, as well as frequent uses of excessive force, unlawful weapons and tactics, and disregard of the constraints of law. Despite ‘disengagement’ Israel maintains effective and comprehensive control over Gaza’s borders, air space, and offshore maritime waters. In fact, as a result of the blockade in existence since 2007, the occupation is more intense and abusive than was the oppressive form of occupation that existed in Gaza prior to disengagement. From the perspective of IHL and IHRL, Israel is fully obligated under international law in exercising its role as an occupying power, and its claims to the contrary are legally irrelevant. Unfortunately, due to geopolitical realities and the weakness of the UN, these Israeli claims continue to have a political relevance as Israel’s obligations are unenforced and mostly ignored, creating an unacceptable situation in which Israel enjoys de facto impunity and escapes from all procedures of accountability provided by recourse to international law and international judicial institutions.
It is also important, in our view, to understand the significance of the findings of the 2017 ESCWA report prepared by Virginia Tilley and myself. We concluded after examining the evidence that Israel maintains an apartheid structure of control over the Palestinian people as a whole, which of course includes the population of Gaza. Our main point is that Israel uses a variety of means to subjugate and victimize the Palestinians so as to establish and sustain an exclusivist Jewish state in which, according to Israel’s Basic Law of 2018 gives only Jews authority to claim a right of self-determination. To circumscribe the right of self-determination by exclusionary racial criteria is a virtual acknowledgement of an apartheid ideology.
It needs to be more widely appreciated that apartheid is a Crime Against Humanity, according to Article 7(j) of the Rome Statute that governs the operations of the International Criminal Court. The criminal character of apartheid had been previously confirmed by the 1973 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. If apartheid is indeed present then all governments have themselves legal and moral obligations to join the effort to suppress and punish. As with IHL and IHRL, the criminalization of apartheid is not acted upon by formal intergovernmental mechanisms due to roadblocks erected by geopolitics and the related weakness of the UN, but this does not mean that the designation is politically and morally insignificant. Since governments refuse to act, the responsibility and opportunity for law enforcement falls on the peoples of the world to do what the formal framework of world order is incapable of doing.
Such an anti-apartheid grassroots surge occurred with respect to the South African regime of apartheid, producing an entirely unexpected reversal of approach by the Afrikaner leadership of the country resulting in the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after 27 years of captivity followed by the largely peaceful transition to a multiracial constitutional democracy with human rights promised to all regardless of race. Such an outcome was considered impossible across the entire political spectrum in South Africa until 1994 when it actually happened.
We cannot guarantee, of course, that history will repeat itself and liberate the Palestinian people from their century-long ordeal, but neither can we foreclose the possibility that the combination of Palestinian resistance and global solidarity will have an empowering, liberating effect. In part, the Palestinian national movement is the last great unfinished struggle against European settler colonialism. Looked at in this way, the Zionist Project through the establishment of Israel temporarily reversed the flow of history in Palestine for a series of complicated reasons, but the final fate of Palestine remains in doubt so long as Palestinian resistance is sustained and solidarity robust. In this regard, the Great March of Return is a powerful sign that Palestinian resistance here in Gaza continues to offer inspirational energy to those of us throughout the world who believe that this particular struggle for individual and collective justice by an oppressed people is what human rights are most fundamentally about.
The Great March is a perfect metaphor for both the theme of this conference and of the struggle that motivated the defenseless residents of Gaza to demand this most basic right to return to their homeland from which they have been wrongfully and forcibly displaced. This demand was impressively reasserted every Friday for more than a year in the face of Israel’s vindictive reliance on excessive force since its inception in March 2018. Israel from the very beginning of the protests adopted an approach of excessive force based on terrorizing the demonstrators by resorting to lethal violence in an harsh effort to punish and destroy this formidable creative challenge to Israeli apartheid/colonial control. Israel’s aim seems to be a vain and unlawful effort to undermine the Palestinian will to resist that has survived decades of confinement, discouragement, and unspeakable abuse.
At the same time, such a criminal response by Israel to this anguished claim of right by the people of Gaza was also the culminating expression of Israel’s assault on the physical and mental health of the civilian population of Gaza. It is hardly surprising that the burdens created by 20,000 injured Gazans have overwhelmed Gaza’s already stressed medical capabilities. Many of those injured received life and limb threatening gunshot wounds, causing serious infections and frequently requiring amputation. This crisis situation in health care was aggravated by shortages of needed antibiotic medicines, and by the dismal experiences of those injured Gazans requiring specialized attention that could be obtained only outside of Gaza. Those so desperately in need of medical treatment external to Gaza faced almost impossible difficulties obtaining required exit and entry permits that Israel often even withheld under normal circumstances. In relation to those wounded at Great March events the situation was far worse. Israel was more unwilling to grant exit permits to those wounded in the Great March, discriminating against any Palestinian who dared to protest peacefully against the denial of the rights to which every human being on earth is entitled. Such an abuse is criminally escalated in relation to Gazans who are supposed to be especially protected by virtue of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, and IHL more generally. Instead of protection, the Israeli approach has been one of imposing prolonged collective punishment not only on Palestinian resistors but on the entire population of Gaza in direct violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and not for a short interval associated with special circumstances, but over the course of decades.
Beyond these exceptional conditions associated with the medical fallout from the Great March, Israel by failing to protect the civilian population of Gaza under conditions of rightless prolonged occupation is guilty of several additional forms of collective punishment each of which has an adverse impact of Gazan health. These adverse effects consequences result from its maintenance of a vindictive blockade, the periodic application of excessive force well beyond any reasonable security justifications, and the application of policies and practices reflective of the apartheid/colonial character of its approach to the Palestinian people, which has long assumed a sinister form in Gaza. The health results are disastrous as confirmed by reliable statistical measures of the physical and mental condition of the population, as exhibited by the unavailability of safe drinking water, the existence of untreated open sewage, the frequency of long power outages that interfere with the operation of hospitals and medical equipment, and by studies documenting the high incidence of severe trauma experienced by many residents of Gaza, including young and particularly vulnerable children. For those of us who have visited Gaza even under what could be described as ‘normal’ conditions, we came away wondering how anyone could endure such stress without experiencing a traumatic reaction.
This severe infringement on the right to health of the people of Gaza should be the occasion of outrage in the international community, and receive appropriate media attention, but Israel’s deliberate and massive violations of IHL and IHRL are shielded by geopolitics from censure and sanctions on the part of governments and at the UN, a reality further obscured by a compliant mainstream Western media that is misled and manipulated by a carefully orchestrated Israeli propaganda campaign that presents its criminally unlawful conduct as reasonable behavior undertaken to uphold the national security of a sovereign state, an aspect of its legal right to defend itself against what it labels as a terrorist enemy. Such Israeli propaganda falsifies the realities of the situation in multiple ways, but creates enough confusion outside of Gaza to divert attention from the suffering imposed upon the Palestinian people as a whole, and the civilian population of Gaza in particular.
Against this background, it becomes clear that grassroots solidarity efforts to expose these truths and exert nonviolent pressures on Israel by means of the BDS Campaign and other initiatives are essential contributions to the ongoing resistance struggles of the Palestinian people. And unlike the South African response, Israel with its sophisticated global outreach has tried by every means to discredit such global solidarity work, even going to the extent of using its leverage overseas to criminalize participation in BDS activity by encouraging the passage of punitive laws and the adoption of restrictive administrative policies in Europe and North America.
Let me end these remarks by saying that despite the seeming imbalance of forces on the ground, history remains strongly on the side of the Palestinian struggle against this Israeli apartheid regime. Much of the world realizes that the brave people of Gaza have long been in the eye of a dreadful and seemingly endless storm. It is my honor to support as best I can your struggle for the realization of the right of self-determination. Despite present appearances to the contrary, I am confident that justice will prevail, that Palestinians will achieve their rights, and surprise the world as did the opponents of South African apartheid a generation ago. It is my hope that I will live long enough to visit Gaza in the future at a time of liberation and celebration. In the meantime, I wish you a successful conference.
Tags: collective punishment, Criminal Complicity, Gaza, Health, Human rights