Special Report
On June 14, 2020 fifty international organizations marked the fifth anniversary of the Israeli siege on Gaza by calling on Israel to end its blockade of the small, impoverished strip.
“For over five years in Gaza, more than 1.6 million people have been under blockade in violation of international law. More than half of these people are children. We the undersigned say with one voice: ‘end the blockade now,’” read the joint statement.
The signatories included reputable organizations including Save the Children, Oxfam, the World Health Organization, Amnesty International and Médecins du Monde. The wording of the statement mirrored that of a plethora of recent appeals. The only notable difference is that during the siege the Gaza population has grown from 1.5 to over 1.6 million.
The statement followed a strong censure of the siege by the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Valerie Amos. Amos has decried what she described as “collective punishment of all those living in Gaza and denial of basic human rights in contravention of international law.” She demanded that the “blockade be lifted immediately, so that essential services and infrastructure can be maintained.”
Condemning Israeli rights violations in Palestine by leading human rights and humanitarian organizations is nothing new. Unfortunately, such calls are rarely followed by any organized political campaigns. Western governments are least concerned by the ongoing drama. Historically they have employed a selective policy of outrage whenever human rights are violated. Worse, in many cases Western powers have taken an active role in allowing continued Israeli subjugation of Palestinians.
The call of human rights organizations would have been more meaningful if it were directed at the Western powers supporting Israel’s actions. Promoting the idea that the Gaza siege is an entirely Israeli initiative is a ruse that needs to be exposed. Equally deceptive is any discussion of the lethal Israeli war on Gaza without due reference to the strong political and military backing of US and other Western powers. Without such support, Israel could never have managed to sustain its costly war adventures or construct its so-called Separation Wall or illegal settlements.
Palestinians are growing frustrated by the fact that while every politically-induced humanitarian crisis in the region is classified as such, the Gaza siege is confined to a discussion of whether or not food items should be allowed entry into the strip. Palestinians are not a collective experiment, despite any Israeli assertion to the contrary. This is actually a matter of policy, as articulated by Israeli politician DovWeissglass, a former close associate of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” he once proclaimed. That collective ‘diet’ was part of a larger policy that accompanied the Israeli deployment – termed ‘disengagement’ – from Gaza. “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
The statements above were quoted in Israeli daily Haaretz (August 10, 2004). They made it clear that the plans to place Gaza under siege came years before Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian legislative council elections and its subsequent violent clashes with rival Fatah. It also long preceded the capture of Israeli solider Gilad Shalit.
However, no official Israeli defense of the siege is ever issued without reference to Hamas and its control of the strip. Mark Regev, spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed: “All cargo going into Gaza must be checked because Gaza is controlled by Hamas.”
A sad irony is that on the day international organizations were condemning the siege on Gaza, US president Barack Obama awarded Shimon Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Praised by Obama for his “indomitable spirit”, Peres has foreseen and defended Israeli illegal occupation, massacres and ill treatment of Palestinians throughout his various posts in the Israeli government, including as prime minister and president.
The real risk is that the Gaza siege is becoming part of a larger status quo imposed and defended by Israel and its benefactors. Also forgotten is the fact that prior to the siege, Gaza was an Israeli occupied territory, along with the occupied West Bank and the illegally annexed East Jerusalem. Thus it makes little sense that the Economist would entitle its article commemorating the siege as: “The Gaza Strip: Will normality ever return?” (June 16).
Instead of discussing the illegal Israeli siege as a point of departure for its argument, the magazine sought to highlight Hamas’ ability and relative success at withstanding “five years of punishing siege, bombardment and war.” Once again, Palestinians are used in a collective experiment of war and siege. “But having built its local empire, Hamas is uncertain where to go next,” claimed the article.
Such coverage is typical, since the Israeli war and siege is promoted in mainstream media as a fact of life and undeserving of condemnation or censure. If an analysis is ever relevant, it focuses on Gazan ‘terrorists’’ ability to circumvent the pressure and sustain their ‘local empire.’
Five years into the Gaza siege, Israel has failed to bend to the will of the Palestinians, or to obtain political concessions in exchange for food or lifesaving medicine. But it has succeeded in upgrading the intensity of its wars and perpetual sieges on Palestinians – somehow normalizing such violent and inhumane realities, which are carefully criticized by some and wholeheartedly accepted or defended by others.
Genocide in Gaza
The story of Palestine is a unique one. It is now more than 60 years since it happened and the world every day is witness to the most tragic events in this regard. Different generations of Palestinians have thus far endured tragic sufferings and hardships and they are either vagabond in other countries or are refugees in the camps with miserable conditions.
The partition of the Palestinian territory by the colonial powers, including Britain and the United States, deprived the Palestinians of their own motherland, while the international organizations such as the United Nations not only have not alleviated the pains and sufferings of the Palestinians but have either acknowledged the savage acts of the Israeli regime or kept silent vis-à-vis the Israeli crimes. No other issue has been discussed in the United Nations as mush as the Palestinian issue has. There is no other issue with as much documents in the Untied Nations and other international organizations as Palestine. Unfortunately the United Nations and other international organizations have been always witness to the massacre and genocide of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel but every time they kept silent or remained indifferent spectators waiting for Israel to become the victor of the field and put an end to the Palestinian issue. But when they realize that due to the resistance of the people and public opinion, Israel does not succeed, they issue resolutions and statements and despite the fact that a large number of civilians are killed by Israel, the UN Security Council does not take a suitable action or measure. In many cases it does not even issue a statement and if it issued a resolution, it is vetoed by the United States.
Siege of Gaza a Clear Example of Genocide
What the Israeli military commanders committed on the order of the political leaders regarding the siege of Gaza aimed to deprive the Palestinians from food, medicine and other basic needs and the main reason of the siege and the deprivation a group of the nation of food and other basic human needs was merely their Palestinian nationality nothing else.
Ramzi Clark the former US Justice Minister in an interview with the Al-Kaffah al-Arabi called the Zionist regime a terrorist regime in its true sense, adding, what Israel has done in Gaza is a Holocaust and genocide in which the women, children and old people were killed and everything was destroyed.
A report on Gaza published by the Human Rights Commissioner on 1st January 2009, announced that there was no safe places in Gaza, there is no shelter to protect the residents against bombardments. The report added: there may be some signs of safe places in some buildings such as schools and offices, but these buildings cannot withstand the bombardments. The children are exposed to intermittent threats; more than 300 children have been killed and more than1,000 injured.
Overall more than 1,400 people, majority of whom were civilians, women and children, fell martyrs in the course of bombardments, more than 5,500 were wounded, while the condition of 350 was critical. During the massacres the schools were not safe either. In fact 43 students were killed and 100 wounded when the UNRWA School in Jablaliya was bombarded.
According to a report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Israeli security forces continued their military attacks on the Gaza and West Bank throughout 2007. According to a report of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 392 Palestinians were killed in the occupied territories (91 in the West Bank and 301 in the Gaza Strip). Moreover, 1180 Palestinians were wounded in the West Bank and 661 in the Gaza Strip.
The long-term siege of a people in a limited area is nothing but a forced labor camp or a death camp. Today the imposed conditioned on the Gaza is nothing but yesteryear’s Auschwitz, or may be even more criminal. The prisoners of the Nazi Holocaust used to receive their limited food ration from the jailors to survive and work, but today’s Israeli Nazi jailors even bombard the passages of food, fuel and medicine in an indescribable cold blood. They even bombard the UN schools, the relief organizations, ambulances and hospitals.
The conditions in Gaza were so tragic that the Secretary General of the highest international organization, that is, the United Nations, could not restrain his anger. Not using the prevailing diplomatic norms and expediencies of his position, in an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat daily, he said: When I see that the conditions in Gaza do not move towards improvement and solution as I expected, and when I see that we have not been able to send humanitarian aids to the people who suffer from lack of water and electricity and even cannot leave Gaza, I strongly get angry and even I conveyed this anger to the Israeli officials in my recent trip to Tel Aviv. The expression of this situation by the UN Secretary General is nothing but the proof of genocide in Gaza.
The remarks of the Israeli foreign minister Zibi Tzipi Livni in her meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister underlined the Israeli intention of destroying Gaza in whole. Her remarks do not differ from those of the Nazi Heinrich Himmler of Germany in the past. If we make a comparison between the Leidich region in the former Czechoslovakia which was leveled to the ground by the Nazi SS on the pretext of an attack on Hadrigh and the Gaza region that was attacked by Israel on the pretext of capturing a Israeli soldier or launching of a missile by Hamas, we can conclude that the attacks are similar with the only difference that the former were carried out by the Nazi regime yesteryears and the later by the Israeli SS today.
The yesteryear’s Nazis used to speak of the settlement of the Jewish issue and today’s Israelis speak of the final settlement of the issue of Hamas and Palestine. Yesterday the order for massacre was issued in German language, today it is issued in Hebrew; the theater of massacre is the same but the actors are different.
