NOVANEWS
Israeli Nitwits come up with aquaculture plan for Gaza
This is too much. These five students are “concerned with resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Their method? Aquaculture. They want to use “creativity” to “resolve international tension” to “make the world better.” This is a beautiful sort of woolly commitment. Here is the thinking behind this project:
However, in recent years this industry has suffered tremendously due to high smuggling threats. Palestinian fishermen are very limited in fishing areas, directly affecting the quality and quantity of fish.
As a consequence, the average price of seafood has more than doubled in the past few years, thus, far fewer families can afford this important source of protein. With fish species being taken from the seas faster than they can regenerate, there is no alternative but fish farming. Fish farms, therefore, present an opportunity and fulfill a global need.
And sometimes a tremendous segment of the conflict appears in a picayune, surreal bit of well-meaning idiocy. The industry has not suffered due to “high smuggling threats.” If the Israeli navy wished to prevent boats from entering Gazan territorial waters from international waters–illegally–they could do so easily, as when they commandeer and ram Free Gaza ships.
The “limited” fishing areas are due to the desire to secure oil fields off the Gazan coast as well as due to the overall framework and thinking behind Israeli policy: tighten the blockade, destroy livelihoods, destroy independent economic development, and push the people living in Gaza into despondency and hopelessness, resulting, they hope, in atomization, paralysis, and abject dependency, the transformation of ~1.5 million people into beggars reliant on “essential” humanitarianism for survival.
The notion that this has a whit to do with “smuggling” is the type of non-sense that only idealistic idiots who think “creativity” is the appropriate solution to illegal blockade and siege could come up with.
Every night, I hear the explosive rat-tat of navy ships firing near Gazan fishing boats, the sounds echoing and bouncing off the Mediterranean, sometimes from miles up and down the coast, the sound waves eventually ricocheting into and through my thick windows. Sometimes these crackles are so loud they sound like small bombs. What is going on?
The Israeli navy is peppering Palestinian fishermen with bullets, sometimes shooting them in the head for daring to try to fish in their own water, riddling their boats with holes–destroying them. A friend just told me that often the Israeli navy waits until the fishermen have a small catch, then douses them with a water cannon laced with a chemical compound that mimics the smell of excrement, spoiling the catch too, and forcing the fishermen to dispose of whatever they’ve gotten from their efforts, usually under-sized immature fish because the couple kilometers off the coast in which the Israeli navy ostensibly refrains from property destruction, assault, and murder are over-fished. This is sadistic.
Instead of combating this, the University students engage in normalization: “there is no alternative” to illegality, so lets lubricate the illegality and thereby through a “well thought-out economic development plan” em-better the lives of “both Palestinian and Israeli citizens, and with time, resolve the regional tension.” Which stems from economics and not occupation. Neo-liberal business students end up being Stalinist, economic determinist Marxists with values perfectly reversed, anthropologically fascinating if totally despicable. You have to be wildly smart to come up with ideas that dumb.
Technorati Tags: blockade, buffer zone, closure, fisherman, Gaza, Navy, Palestine, Sea, Zionism
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