The BBC has reported that aid agencies, especially Oxfam, have ‘strongly criticised the international community’ for not bringing pressure on Israel to end Israel’s ‘blockade’ of Gaza.
This notion that there is a ‘blockade’ is typical of the loose, inaccurate and often deliberately misleading use of language which is often evident where Israel is concerned. It is, essentially, a lie; and a lie intended to damage and demonise Israel. It is language which totally ignores the fact of Hamas and its genocidal hatred of Israel. It is language which denies the reality of Hamas’s ongoing war against Israel and the Jewish people; not a war to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, but a war to destroy Israel utterly.
In a war, much of which is fought on the international stage, loose use of language is a tool of that aggression: ‘blockade, ghetto’, ‘genocide’, ‘war crime’ and ‘collective punishment’ are all emotive terms which are associated with evil regimes, especially the Nazis, and have precise meaning. When they are bandied about by ‘aid agencies’ such as Oxfam, that agency reveals itself as biased because it uses the language of hate.
‘Blockade’ : this is how my Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it:
Shutting-up, total or on land or sea side, of a place by hostile forces in order to starve it into surrender or prevent egress and ingress
(my emphasis)
Yet Oxfam knows full well that there is an endless stream of food into Gaza. No-one is starving in Gaza and there is no intention by the Israelis to cause starvation. Ingress and egress are restricted and difficult but shouldn’t they be given the history of suicide attacks emanating from Gaza in the past and the ongoing hostilities?
But the BBC goes along with this use of language: “Israel imposed a tightened blockade after the Islamist Hamas movement seized power two-and-a-half years ago”. No, it’s not a blockade, it is a restriction on certain goods and materials which can be used against Israel.
What Oxfam is saying is that Israel should no longer prevent any goods coming into Gaza for the purpose of building even though these materials have been used in the past not to rebuild but to make weaponry.
Israel is still providing food, medicine, and electricity into Gaza. This does not sound like a ‘blockade’ to me.
The situation in Gaza is not good, but then its government is still in a state of belligerence with Israel. A government its people voted to power. And this leads to the second and even worse use of loose language; Oxfam accuses Israel of ‘collective punishment’, a term associated with the indiscriminate punishment of a civilian population for the actions of its army or combatants.
Let’s look at the legal definition.
The term ‘collective punishment’ derives from the 1949 Geneva Convention.
By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and World War II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to “intimidatory measures to terrorize the population” in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices “strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice.”
I admit to using a Wikipedia article for this description.
If the UNWRA or other international bodies could guarantee that certain materials entering the Gaza strip would not fall into the hands of Hamas to be used as weapons against Israel, then Israel would relax the sanctions. In fact, this is already taking place, for example, this article in Ha’aretz on 29th July 2009 which informs us that for the first time since Operation Cast Lead:
Israel plans to transfer several hundred tons of cement and other construction materials, including metal pipes, into the Gaza Strip to facilitate reconstruction…
The transfer of materials is part of the implementation of a United Nations plan devised by UN envoy to the Middle East, Robert Serry, who has submitted to Israel a list of 10 UN-sponsored construction projects in Gaza.
Amos Gilad, the coordinator of Israeli activity in the Gaza Strip, authorized the UN construction plan several weeks ago. The cement will be transferred for use solely in the approved projects and will not be handed over to Hamas, the rulers of the Gaza Strip.
Among the construction projects are the reconstruction of Gaza’s largest flour mill and the refurbishing of a sewage treatment plant.
So ‘collective punishment’? ‘Collective inconvenience’, perhaps. How would you go about limiting the damage a neighbour could inflict on you? Hamas is embedded within the fabric of Gaza. how can you limit Hamas without there being a price to pay for the population; a population which supported and voted in Hamas. How much sympathy did the world have for the German people in the 1940′s because they voted in and supported the policies of the Nazis? If I recall Britain and the United States flattened Dresden deliberately to kill and intimidate – a war crime by 1949.
It is perfectly acceptable for Oxfam and anyone else to criticise Israel for specifics where it could do more without risking its own population, but to colour the argument with blanket terms that only demonise and not to mention the actual truth on the ground is biased. If you set out with an agenda then you will easily find hardship in Gaza – they just fought a war. And what about Egypt which is currently building a deep, metal barrier at Rafah. The aid agencies have nothing to say about the restrictions the Egyptians place on Gaza even though they control one third of the border.
The BBC are as inaccurate as ever. In the cited article there is a map of the crossing points into Gaza and below it three links with the text:
That word ‘blockade’ and very negative connotations in these headlines. But of the three articles two are from November 2008, over a year ago, and the third from June 2009.
But let me just report what the EU’s Middle East envoy said in the European parliament on November 24th 2009:
- There is no shortage of equipment or cement for construction in Gaza, and Hamas is controlling the resources.
- Hamas dismissed employees of the systems and appointed its own people, and that is the reason that there is no construction in Gaza.
- The prevailing economy in Gaza is not an official economy but rather an economy of tunnels; there are no shortages in Gaza, but there is a problem of unemployment, primarily for civilians who are not close to Hamas and have no buying power.
(my emphasis)
This from the EU!
We don’t hear this from Oxfam! who just fall for the political propaganda handed to them by Hamas. They see but they do not investigate. They draw conclusion based on their own prejudices.
Tags: blocakde, collective punishment, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Oxfam
Hey, I’ll give you an insider information:
No one is starving in Gaza, because people had to dig in tunnels to get basic life supplies.
Another insider info (don’t tell anyone): If there was no blockade on Gaza, how come Israel keeps blocking Western countries delegates and officials from entering Gaza?
You’re a good spinner, but not that bright.
Actually, no-one is starving because most food is allowed in. Only building materials are restricted and not in all cases as I stated in my post. Research the facts not the propaganda. Even during Cast Lead tonnes of food came through crossings and was often hijacked and sold by Hamas-controlled shops.
As to restrictions on officials entering Gaza, I don’t agree with them as they are usually politically motivated.
But show me a picture of a starving Gazan. How much aid would you give to someone who has stated over and over that they want to kill you and destroy your country.
Not that bright? Sure, insult me, but rebut my argument and the facts first.
Happy holidays.
White wash from the ADL bucket of whitewash.
The victims have now become the tormentors.
How quick they forget the atrocities commited against them and incorporate the very same ones against their opponents.
Torture to the death – documented over and over again.
Reporters who are documenting the Israeli brutality with actual photos are shot by the Israeli soldiers – again documented.
This is justice? Apostate is the word.
The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons.
— Alan John Percival Taylor, British historian
When discussing the Arab-Israel conflict — notably one that involves the helpless Palestinians — with friends including foreigners, I always stress this point: the irony of this long ongoing struggle is how a race (particularly Jews who support the Tel Aviv Zionist regime) that endured so much pain and wants the world to remember the Holocaust annually continues to inflict unimaginable suffering on another race.
Perhaps, Taylor is right and in this perspective, the Zionist-led Israeli government did not learn anything from the atrocities committed by the Nazis on the Jews during World War II.
The latest Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip, which has already killed more than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, is not about neutralising the ability of Hamas to fire “primitive rockets” into Israel. Rather, it is part of a much bigger 60-year-old conflict that the US and Europe refuse to solve even though they are capable of doing it. This hostility will continue as long as the US and Europe, which helped create Israel after World War II, do not pressure Israel into making peace with its Arab neighbours.
The crisis in Bosnia and Kosovo was not allowed to prolong because it happened in the backyard of Europe, which was why the Western powers decided to intervene directly. Why can’t they do the same for Palestine? Are we to believe that powerful American presidents, including Barack Obama, are powerless tools of the Jewish lobbyists in Washington to the extent that the US has to veto every effort of the UN to solve the crisis? And even if it means fuelling more hatred in the Muslim and Arab world that will affect American interests more than Israel’s?
Had these problems been solved after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — with the US and Europe pressuring Israel to accept the various resolutions passed by the UN — there would not be Hamas, Islamic jihad, Al-Aqsa martyrs or Hezbollah today. Instead, there would be economic development and prosperity in Gaza and the West Bank, no refugee camps in Lebanon and no suicide bombers and rockets on the streets of Israel.
But the US and Europe turned a blind eye and let the conflict and Israeli oppression continue. And like in many wars, the oppressed will fight back, especially when the future seems bleak. In the case of the Palestinians, notably those who remain in Gaza and the West Bank and have suffered for three generations, many would be proud to let their children become freedom fighters and die as martyrs.
What are Gaza and the West Bank today — deprived of basic amenities and surrounded by walls and checkpoints — if not ghettos? Gaza and the West Bank are the Palestinian version of the Jews’ Warsaw ghettos. History books on the Warsaw ghettos provide a lot of similarities (which is emphasised in italics) between the Warsaw ghettos and those in Gaza and the West Bank.
“When Germany conquered Poland at the beginning of the Second World War, it issued a decree that required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which it then sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. The ghetto was enclosed by a wall that was over 10-feet high and topped with barbed wire and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
“Unemployment was a major problem in the ghetto. Illegal workshops were set up to manufacture goods to be sold illegally on the outside and raw goods were smuggled in often by children. Smuggling was often the only source of subsistence for the ghetto inhabitants. Food allotments rationed were not sufficient to sustain life. Despite the grave hardships, life in the Warsaw ghetto was rich with educational and cultural activities conducted by its underground organisations… resisting deportation, some of them used small arms smuggled into the ghetto. They offered organised resistance in the first days of the operation, inflicting casualties on the well armed and equipped SS and police units.”
Another description of life in Gaza and the West Bank was offered by former US president Jimmy Carter who brokered the Israel-Eygpt peace deal in 1978. Carter, considered the last US president who had some success in solving the problem and had established contact with Hamas — who won the election in Gaza — uses the word “apartheid” to describe the plight of the Palestinians today.
He was heavily criticised in the US by Jewish lobbyists but he maintained his stand. He said: “I knew that’s an accurate description on what’s going on in Palestine. The confiscation of their land… they being suppressed completely against voicing their disapproval of what’s happening, the building of the wall that intrudes deep into their territory, the complete separation of Israelis from Palestinians — all those things in many ways are worse than some of the aspects of apartheid in South Africa. There is no doubt about it and no one can go there and visit different cities without agreeing with what I have said.”
The solutions to the conflict are all there in the form of resolutions passed by the UN and Saudi Arabia’s Middle East “peace for land deal” or otherwise known as the 2007 Beirut Declaration.
UN Resolution 242 calls for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from all territories occupied in 1967 — Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
UN Resolution 194 reaffirms the right of Palestinian refugees (who were driven out of their land in 1948) to return, including to
areas in what is Israel today. Additionally, the Beirut Declaration called for Israel’s acceptance of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. While the return of refugees is no longer attainable and unaccepatable to Israel as this will mean turning Israel into an Arab-majority country, financial compensation could be acceptable to Palestinian refugees, just as the Jews were compensated by the German government for the Holocaust. In return, all Arab states will establish normal relations with Israel and consider the conflict “ended”.
The main obstacles to peace — the status of Jerusalem, final borders and issue of Jewish settlements, the return of or financial compensation for refugees and a dispute over water — cannot be solved by Israel and Palestine alone but needs the direct involvement of the US and Europe. To establish a strong foundation for peace, there is also a need to set up an international peacekeeping force.
Despite having to overcome a severe economic crisis back home, Obama must invest in peace in the Middle East from day one of his presidency. If he lets the conflict continue unresolved, then expect more of the same — extremism, not pragmatism, will continue to rear its ugly head. Peace will help bring economic development and counter extremism, but continued Israeli oppression will likely provide Hamas with more recruits and support among Palestinians.
The Western world and the likes of Bush and Blair can call Hamas and those who fight Israel terrorists but in the eyes of the Palestinians and many in the Islamic world, they are freedom fighters trying to liberate their homeland. Just like the Jews in the Warsaw ghettos, expect the Palestinians to fight until the last man is standing.
Gaza damage ‘not being addressed’
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said more must be done to repair damage done in the Gaza Strip by Israeli military action one year ago.
Mr Ban said Gazans were being denied “basic human rights” and urged Israel to end its “unacceptable and counterproductive blockade”.
He said Israeli well-being depended on conditions improving in the enclave.
Rallies are being held across Gaza to mark a year since the conflict, in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed.
In comments posted on the UN’s website, Mr Ban said he was “deeply concerned that neither the issues that led to this conflict nor its worrying aftermath are being addressed”.
He said that while levels of violence had been low in the past year, there was still no durable ceasefire after Operation Cast Lead and Gazans were “denied basic human rights”.
“The quality and quantity of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza is insufficient, broader economic and reconstruction activity is paralysed,” said Mr Ban.
‘Hopelessness’
Under Israel’s blockade of Gaza, only basic humanitarian supplies are allowed in, meaning Gazans have not been able to obtain materials to repair damaged homes, buildings and infrastructure.
The UN Relief and Works agency (UNRWA) in Gaza told the BBC that public health was suffering as a result of inadequate and unsanitary water supplies, and there had been a rise in infant mortality.
GAZA CONFLICT CASUALTIES
• Total Palestinian deaths: 1,409 (PCHR) 1,387 (B’Tselem) 1,166 (Israeli military)
• Palestinian children killed: 326 (under 17, PCHR) 252 (under 16, B’tselem) 89 (under 16, Israeli military)
• Palestinian civilians killed: 916* (PCHR) 773* (B’tselem) 295 plus 162 unknown (Israeli military)
• Israelis killed: 3 civilians 10 security forces (includes 4 by friendly fire) *Figs exclude about 250 Hamas police officers PCHR=Palestinian Human Rights Centre, B’Tselem=Israeli human rights group
UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness said thousands of tonnes of sewage were being pumped into the sea every day, because material for rebuilding treatment plants and other facilities was so scarce.
An international humanitarian aid convoy of some 200 vehicles is hoping to mark the anniversary by delivering supplies to Gaza.
The convoy is currently in Jordan, awaiting permission to cross the Red Sea and proceed to Egypt.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, is holding 22 days of rallies to mark the anniversary.
Senior leader Ahmed Bahar said Gazans remained “steadfast” after the conflict
“The resistance, which defended its land with honour, was not broken,” the AFP news agency quoted him as saying.
Mr Ban called on Israel to end its blockade, uphold international law and make it possible for economic activity and civilian reconstruction to take place. He also urged Hamas to respect the law and bring an end to violence, and for all Palestinians to “work for unity”.
He said there was “a sense of hopelessness in Gaza today for 1.5 million Palestinians, half of whom are under 18″ and that “a fundamentally different approach to Gaza is urgently required”.
“Their fate and the well-being of Israelis are intimately connected.”
The BBC’s Katya Adler in Gaza City said the mood on the anniversary of Operation Cast Lead was relatively quiet, but uneasy.
Both Israel and Palestinians in Gaza believe 2010 is bound to bring further violence, our correspondent adds.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr.....431652.stm
Published: 2009/12/27 13:26:14 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Israel is basically holding hostage the entire population of Gaza for the acts of a few rulers. How come babies, feminists, secular intellectuals, anti Hamas militants are also held hostage by Israel if the goal of the blockade is to hold Hamas responsible ? This does constitute a collective punishment, and is a gross violation of international law. I wonder whether you realize how catastrophic the blockade and operation Cast Lead have been for Israel’s image all over the world. People now think Israel is the agressor and torments civilians. In the past ten years, the image of Israel in the West has drowned, to the point that most people now question whether it is a democracy. That some people such as Lieberman hold power did not help.