[Marxism] How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe

["Nasir Khan" <naskha3@xxxxxxxxx>]

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the
Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its
merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions

Avi Shlaim, | The Guardian, UK,  January 7, 2009

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is
through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state
of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the
Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American
partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John
Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the
Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed
by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this
judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of
Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have
reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the
mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of
Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the
Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation
of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967
war had very little to do with security and everything to do with
territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel
through permanent political, economic and military control over the
Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most
prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy
of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed
into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural
resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not
simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case
of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel
turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of
water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli
goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to
make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to
Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real
political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial
era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal
and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the
instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In
Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with
1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the
territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce
water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the
majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and
unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less
than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to
civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile
breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a
unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers
and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the
Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive
the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the
Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal
from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution.
But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West
Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state.
Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a
choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the
borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs
on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus
not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a
prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a
unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my
view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental
rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from
Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any
independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to
control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was
converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the
Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make
sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to
terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Full article:
http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-israel-brought-gaza-to-brink-of.html

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