The Great Experiment

[ken hanly <northsunm@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Great Experiment

By Uri Avnery

10/14/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- IS IT
possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign
occupation by starving it?

That is, certainly, an interesting question. So
interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel
and the United States, in close cooperation with
Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific
experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.

The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip,
and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter
Palestinians living there.

IN ORDER to meet the required scientific standards, it
was necessary first of all to prepare the laboratory.

That was done in the following way: First, Ariel
Sharon uprooted the Israeli settlements that were
stuck there.

After all, you can't conduct a proper experiment with
pets roaming around the laboratory. It was done with
"determination and sensitivity", tears flowed like
water, the soldiers kissed and embraced the evicted
settlers, and again it was shown that the Israeli army
is the most-most in the world.

With the laboratory cleaned, the next phase could
begin: all entrances and exits were hermetically
sealed, in order to eliminate disturbing influences
from the world outside.

That was done without difficulty. Successive Israeli
governments have prevented the building of a harbor in
Gaza, and the Israeli navy sees to it that no ship
approaches the shore. The splendid international
airport, built during the Oslo days, was bombed and
shut down. The entire Strip was closed off by a highly
effective fence, and only a few crossings remained,
all but one controlled by the Israeli army.

There remained a sole connection with the outside
world:

the Rafah border crossing to Egypt. It could not just
be sealed off, because that would have exposed the
Egyptian regime as a collaborator with Israel. A
sophisticated solution was found: to all appearances
the Israeli army left the crossing and turned it over
to an international supervision team. Its members are
nice guys, full of good intentions, but in practice
they are totally dependent on the Israeli army, which
oversees the crossing from a nearby control room. The
international supervisors live in an Israeli kibbutz
and can reach the crossing only with Israeli consent.
So everything was ready for the experiment.

THE SIGNAL for its beginning was given after the
Palestinians had held spotlessly democratic elections,
under the supervision of former President Jimmy
Carter.

George Bush was enthusiastic: his vision of bringing
democracy to the Middle East was coming true.

But the Palestinians flunked the test. Instead of
electing "good Arabs", devotees of the United States,
they voted for very bad Arabs, devotees of Allah. Bush
felt insulted. But the Israeli government was
ecstatic: after the Hamas victory, the Americans and
Europeans were ready to take part in the experiment.
It could start:

The United States and the European Union announced the
stoppage of all donations to the Palestinian
Authority, since it was "controlled by terrorists".
Simultaneously, the Israeli government cut off the
flow of money.

To understand the significance of this: according to
the "Paris Protocol" (the economic annex of the Oslo
agreement) the Palestinian economy is part of the
Israeli customs system. This means that Israel
collects the duties for all the goods that pass
through Israel to the Palestinian territories -
actually, there is no other route. After deducting a
fat commission, Israel is obligated to turn the money
over to the Palestinian Authority.

When the Israeli government refuses to pass on this
money, which belongs to the Palestinians, it is,
simply put, robbery in broad daylight. But when one
robs "terrorists", who is going to complain?

The Palestinian Authority - both in the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip - needs this money like air for
breathing. This fact also requires some explanation:
in the 19 years when Jordan occupied the West Bank and
Egypt the Gaza Strip, from 1948 to 1967, not a single
important factory was built there. The Jordanians
wanted all economic activity to take place in Jordan
proper, east of the river, and the Egyptians neglected
the strip altogether.

Then came the Israeli occupation, and the situation
became even worse. The occupied territories became a
captive market for Israeli industry, and the military
government prevented the establishment of any
enterprise that could conceivably compete with an
Israeli one.

The Palestinian workers were compelled to work in
Israel for hunger wages (by Israeli standards). From
these, the Israeli government deducted all the social
payments levied on Israeli workers, without the
Palestinian workers enjoying any social benefits. This
way the government robbed these exploited workers of
tens of billions of dollars, which disappeared somehow
in the bottomless barrel of the government.

When the intifada broke out, the Israeli captains of
industry and agriculture discovered that it was
possible to get along without the Palestinian workers.
Indeed, it was even more profitable. Workers brought
in from Thailand, Romania and other poor countries
were ready to work for even lower wages and in
conditions bordering on slavery.

The Palestinian workers lost their jobs.

That was the situation at the beginning of the
experiment:

the Palestinian infrastructure destroyed, practically
no means of production, no work for the workers. All
in all, an ideal setting for the great "experiment in
hunger".

THE IMPLEMENTATION started, as mentioned, with the
stoppage of payments.

The passage between Gaza and Egypt was closed in
practice.

Once every few days or weeks it was opened for some
hours, for appearances' sake, so that some of the sick
and dead or dying could get home or reach Egyptian
hospitals.

The crossings between the Strip and Israel were closed
"for urgent security reasons". Always, at the right
moment, "warnings of an imminent terrorist attack"
appeared.

Palestinian agricultural products destined for export
rot at the crossing. Medicines and foodstuffs cannot
get in, except for short periods from time to time,
also for appearances, whenever somebody important
abroad voices some protest. Then comes another "urgent
security warning" and the situation is back to normal.


To round off the picture, the Israeli Air Force bombed
the only power station in the Strip, so that for a
part of the day there is no electricity, and the water
supply (which depends on electric pumps) stops also.
Even on the hottest days, with temperatures of over 30
degrees centigrade in the shade, there is no
electricity for refrigerators, air conditioning, the
water supply or other needs.

In the West Bank, a territory much larger than the
Gaza Strip (which makes up only 6% of the occupied
Palestinian territories but holds 40% of the
inhabitants), the situation is not quite so desperate.
But in the Strip, more than half of the population
lives beneath the Palestinian "poverty line", which
lies of course very, very far below the Israeli
"poverty line". Many Gaza residents can only dream of
being considered poor in the nearby Israeli town of
Sderot.

What are the governments of Israel and the US trying
to tell the Palestinians? The message is clear: You
will reach the brink of hunger, and even beyond, if
you do not surrender. You must remove the Hamas
government and elect candidates approved by Israel and
the US. And, most

importantly: you must be satisfied with a Palestinian
state consisting of several enclaves, each of which
will be utterly dependent on the tender mercies of
Israel.

AT THE moment, the directors of the scientific
experiment are pondering a puzzling question: how on
earth do the Palestinians still hold out, in spite of
everything?

According to all the rules, they should have been
broken long ago!

Indeed, there are some encouraging signs. The general
atmosphere of frustration and desperation creates
tension between Hamas and Fatah. Here and there
clashes have broken out, people were killed and
wounded, but in each case the deterioration was halted
before it became a civil war. The thousands of hidden
Israeli collaborators are also helping to stir things
up. But contrary to all expectations, the resistance
did not evaporate. Even the captured Israeli soldier
has not been released.

One of the explanations has to do with the structure
of Palestinian society. The Hamulah (extended family)
plays a central role there. As long as one person in
the family is working, the relatives, too, do not die
of hunger, even if there is widespread malnutrition.
Everyone who has any income shares it with all his
brothers and sisters, parents, grandparents, cousins
and their children. That is a primitive system, but
quite effective in such circumstances. It seems that
the planners of the experiment did not take this into
account.

In order to quicken the process, the whole might of
the Israeli army is now being used again, as from this
week.

For three months the army was busy with the Second
Lebanon War. It became apparent that the army, which
for the last

39 years has been employed mainly as a colonial police
force, does not function very well when suddenly
confronted with a trained and armed opponent that can
fight back.

Hizbullah used deadly anti-tank weapons against the
armored forces, and rockets rained down on Northern
Israel. The army has long ago forgotten how to deal
with such an enemy.

And the campaign did not end well.

Now the army returns to the war it knows. The
Palestinians in the Strip do not (yet) have effective
anti-tank weapons, and the Qassam rockets cause only
limited damage. The army can again use tanks against
the population without hindrance. The Air Force, which
in Lebanon was afraid to send in helicopters to remove
the wounded, can now fire missiles at the houses of
"wanted persons", their families and neighbors, at
leisure. If in the last three months "only" 100
Palestinians were killed per month, we are now
witnessing a dramatic rise in the number of
Palestinians killed and wounded.

How can a population that is hit by hunger, lacking
medicaments and equipment for its primitive hospitals
and exposed to attacks on land, from sea and from the
air, hold out? Will it break? Will it go down on its
knees and beg for mercy? Or will it find inhuman
strength and stand the test?

In short: What and how much is needed to get a
population to surrender?

All the scientists taking part in the experiment -
Ehud Olmert and Condoleezza Rice, Amir Peretz and
Angela Merkel, Dan Halutz and George Bush, not to
mention Nobel Peace Price laureate Shimon Peres - are
bent over the microscopes and waiting for an answer,
which undoubtedly will be an important contribution to
political science.

I hope the Nobel Committee is watching.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli author and activist. He is
the head of the Israeli peace movement, "Gush Shalom".