NOVANEWS
murderous sanctions
On the sanctions campaign against Gaza:
The war, when it came, was directed as much against Gaza’s economy as against Hamas militants. Key features of the bombing campaign were designed – as its principal planner, General Gabi Ashkenazi of the Israeli air force, explained to me afterwards – to destroy the ‘critical nodes’ that enabled Gaza to function as a modern society. The air force had dreamed of being able to do this sort of thing since before the 2006 Lebanon War, and Ashkenazi thought the introduction of precision-guided ‘smart bombs’ now made it a practical proposition. Gaza’s electrical power plants, telecommunications centres, sewage plants and other key infrastructure were destroyed or badly damaged. Ashkenazi, I recall, was piqued that bombing in addition to his original scheme had obscured the impact of his surgical assault on the pillars supporting modern Gazan society.
Visiting Gaza in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a devastated Third World standard of living. Gaza City auction houses were filled with the heirlooms and furniture of the middle classes, hawked in a desperate effort to stay ahead of inflation. In the upper-middle-class enclave of Tel al-Hawa, I watched as a frantic crowd of housewives rushed to collect food supplies distributed by the American charity Catholic Relief Services. Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a belief initially shared by Haniyeh). The notion that they would still be in force several years later was unimaginable.
The crossing authorities’ stated purpose was to review and authorise exceptions to the sanctions, but its actual function was to deny the import of even the most innocuous items on the grounds that they might, conceivably, be used in the production of rockets. An ingenious provision allowed any committee member to put any item for which clearance had been requested on hold. So, while UNRWA and other NGOs, and aid-giving nation states, might wish to speed goods to Gaza, Israel and its ever willing American partner could and did block whatever they chose on the flimsiest of excuses. As a means of reducing a formerly functioning territory to a pre-industrial condition and keeping it there, this system would have aroused the envy of the blockade bureaucrats derided by Keynes. Thus in 2007 Israel blocked, among other items, salt, water pipes, children’s bikes, materials used to make nappies, equipment to process powdered milk and fabric to make clothes. The list would later be expanded to include switches, sockets, window frames, ceramic tiles and paint. In 2009 Israeli representatives forcefully argued against permitting Gaza to import powdered milk on the grounds that it did not fulfill a humanitarian need. Later, the diplomats dutifully argued that an order for child vaccines, deemed ‘suspicious’ by weapons experts in Tel-Aviv, should be denied.
Throughout the period of sanctions, Israel frustrated Gaza’s attempts to import pumps needed in the plants treating water from Wadi Gaza, which had become an open sewer thanks to the destruction of treatment plants. Chlorine, vital for treating a contaminated water supply, was banned on the grounds that it could be used as a chemical weapon. The consequences of all this were visible in pediatric wards. Every year the number of children who died before they reached their first birthday rose, from one in 30 in 2006 to one in eight four years later. Health specialists agreed that contaminated water was responsible: children were especially susceptible to the gastroenteritis and cholera caused by dirty water.
Obviously, not exactly the same as in Iraq. I had to do a bit of re-writing, but not so much; replacing place-names nearly suffices. In Gaza, sanctions have alternated with massacres; summer 2008, winter 2008-2009, while sanctions began in 2005 and continue to this day, predated by the violent repression of the Second Intifada. Sanctions were obviously ineffective in both cases in terms of their objectives: getting rid of the government and replacing a belligerent government with a friendlier one, more amenable to American/Israeli diktat. Another crucial difference? In the case of Gaza the world resisted and resists. Boats went in to try and break the siege insistently, and that insistent pressure perhaps prevented the very worst from taking place in Gaza. Gaza is not Iraq from 1991-2003 and that is very good. But it could have been, and since there will inevitably be more resistance from Gaza, it could yet be.
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