Since June 2007, following the Hamas takeover of Gaza, the coastal strip has been thrown in a downward spiral as Israel, and the world, kept the gates locked for the 1.5 million Palestinians.
Numbers may leave us indifferent, but they provide a good measurement for comparisons.In 1,000 days one can get a degree, make a round trip to Mars, or walk from Cape Town to Jerusalem. In the last 1,000 days, a Palestinian in Gaza could not cross to Jerusalem, nor go anywhere else outside the strip.
In 1,000 days, a tree bears its first fruit, as long as it’s not in Beit Hanoun or Rafah – the farming villages decimated by air strikes and incursions in which thousands of trees are uprooted.
In 1,000 days, a child learns to form a sentence, and it does not usually include the words ‘blood’, ‘death’, ‘soldiers’, and ‘martyr’.
For 1,000 days – and much more – Palestinians have said “tomorrow will be better”, and they still say it today. But for Gazans it has been getting progressively worse since the Oslo Agreement was signed in 1994. It got even worse after the 2000 intifada, reached rock bottom with the 2007 blockade, and endured hell in the 2009 war that left 1,400 dead and total destruction.
Thousands of Palestinians who used to have construction jobs in Israel ended up in poverty, with unemployment today reaching a shocking 60 per cent and 80 per cent dependent on humanitarian aid. Out of 3,900 factories, 3,500 have been closed since the blockade, causing 75,000 job losses in the private sector. Of the 24,000 Gazans working in Israel 10 years ago, today there are zero.
It is a totally man-made humanitarian crisis that allows no development but actually turns the clock back for the people trapped here, where donkey carts are a substitute for fuel-strapped cars and kerosene lamps light up houses in daily blackouts. Many families use firewood to cook as cooking gas is scarce because of Israel’s decisions on the transfer of fuel and gas meeting less than 50 per cent of demand of the entire strip.
Figures from Birzeit University in Ramallah shed light on the deteriorating situation over the last decade. Even before the blockade, it is clear there was a policy of isolation of Gaza – where education is highly valued despite the humanitarian situation. In 2000, a total of 350 students from Gaza at the Birzeit campus were deported. By 2005 there were only 35 Gaza students at Birzeit. In a 2006 ruling, the Israeli High Court forbade Palestinians from accessing Bethlehem University, accepting the argument used by the Israeli state that once they were given permits to leave they would ahve become “information carriers”.
The ban applies also to Gaza residents accepted to study at Israeli academic instutions, but there is no hope of studying abroad since the Rafah crossing has also been closed almost completely since June 2007. At the time, 722 Palestinian unversity students studying abroad were trapped in Gaza, together with another 2,000 enrolled in foreign schools. According to Right to Education Campaign, they are part of the 7,500 Gazans who need permission to continue their work, education or medical treatment out of Gaza. This is leading to hundreds of students granted scholarships abroad – including Fulbright scholarships in the US, to lose them.
This collective punishment applies to all aspects of life, and death. It has meant that in 1,000 days, every other day a Gazan died because of no access to health care – 500 according to Palestinian Campaign to Break the Siege on Gaza – as the poor health system could not treat them. Palestinian patients die while waiting for degrading Israel permits to travel for specialised treatment. Out of 1,103 applications submitted for travel to Israel last December, 21per cent had their applications denied or delayed, forcing them to miss their hospital appointments and restart the referral process according to the World Health Organisation.
The blockade is accompanied by the counterproductive boycott and isolation of Hamas – the de facto government that was democratically-elected in the last Palestinian elections.
Why is Hamas boycotted? And what are the results to show this is a good policy? Why do the European Union and the US follow blindly Israel’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist entity? And what are the results to justify it?
The results on the ground are total division of the West Bank and Gaza, the scuttling of the Palestinian democratic process and institutions, the creation of a laboratory-case humanitarian situation, and the strengthening of Hamas in its total control of the Gaza Strip as a de facto government ruling the territory. The vacuum created by the blockade has spurred the Hamas takeover of the institutions that matter.
At the same time, polls show Hamas losing popularity, its Qassam Military Brigades is accusing the political wing of failing to maintain security amid a recent rise in violence, and there is a reported defection of disenchanted activists to the radical Salafist groups. The blockade of Gaza and political boycott of Hamas leaves the movement with no results to show – except rising poverty and injustice – hence the internal disgruntlement leading to further radicalisation. The situation is pitting Hamas against the external enemy and a new internal threat that is much more radical, uncompromising and uninterested in the political process, precisely because Hamas’s willingness to participate in the political process has only yielded punitive results for the entire strip.
If these are the desired results of the blockade and the boycott, then they have to be stated.
Politically, the long-term result of the blockade is that the ‘final status’ issues – refugees and Jerusalem – remain postponed indefinitely. Who talks about the refugees when Gazans can’t find cooking gas to buy?
The new EU foreign policy chief’s visit to Gaza last Thursday sends a signal of hope – being the one of a handful of high-level European politicians to enter the strip. Yet without the action to end the blockade and the Hamas boycott, it will be useless for her to talk of the crippling disunity between the West Bank and Gaza while creating false hopes. How can one foster unity when the EU speaks only to one side, the Palestinian Authority?
On the same day of her visit, a rocket fired by an obscure Islamist group killed a Thai worker in Ashkelon, triggering two successive nights of Israeli air raids on Gaza wounding at least 14 people. At the same time, the US Treasury was imposing new sanctions against Gaza, this time against the Islamic National Bank and Al Aqsa Television, for their ties to the Hamas movement.
After 1,000 days, the world is still enforcing the isolation of Gaza, and Palestinians are still managing to survive.
