THE report on life in Gaza just issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross six months after the brutal Israeli attacks which killed between 1,100 and 1,400 people makes bitter reading.

According to the ICRC, there has been almost no improvement since the Israelis stopped their brutal onslaught. The daily round of killing may have stopped but Gazans are still condemned to living in a war zone. It remains a bombsite. Even if they had the money to rebuild their shattered homes and lives, they cannot get hold of the equipment. The reopening of the Rafah checkpoint on the border with Egypt has slightly improved matters — some trucks with medical aid have got through but it is a tiny fraction of what is needed. Israel’s blockade of the strip remains devastatingly effective. Gaza is, as the ICRC report so horrifyingly points out, a state of despair. Imprisoned by the Israelis, still mourning the deaths of family and friends (there is hardly a family that did not lose someone), with woefully insufficient medical care, a destroyed economy, no hope of a job and living in what looks like an earthquake zone (the reports’ own words), there is a hopelessness that shocks.

A state of despair... facing, on the other side of the prison wires, a state of arrogance. For over 60 years now, the Israelis have treated the Palestinians with contempt and hatred. Time after time, the latter’s human rights are trampled over, their political aspirations crushed, UN resolutions ignored, international outrage scorned and efforts to mediate peace spurned.

It is not merely a state of arrogance, it is a state of insanity. The despair sown by the Israelis in Gaza breeds militancy and hatred. It breeds, too, a counter arrogance which displays itself in a refusal to countenance Palestinian-Israeli cohabitation, indeed to countenance anything other than Israel’s complete destruction.

The Israelis blockade Gaza to punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas and to force its supporters from firing rockets at Israeli towns and settlement; it does the exact opposite. It fuels hatred of Israel. It ensures the rockets continue. It pushes the Gazans into the rejectionists’ embrace and creates a breeding ground for a fresh generations of suicide bombers. Only a lunatic would claim that it is in Israel’s interests. The cycle of oppression and misery has to be broken if Israel is to have the security it claims it wants. As a first step, it has to lift the restrictions and allow Gaza to start working and living again. Israel can never live in peace while it grinds the Gazans into the dust, while it keeps the territory as one giant prison whose inmates are forced to live in misery and squalor and humiliated daily. Nor should it.

The only way forward is the two-state solution proposed by the then Crown Prince and now Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and adopted by Arab states in 2002 and again revived at the Riyadh summit two years ago in which, in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from all lands occupied in 1967, Arab states would recognize it. The whole world understands that, including the US; only the Israeli government baulks at the idea and consistently finds reasons to block it — which calls into question its claims it wants peace. It seems far more interested in wanting mastery — brutal mastery if necessary — over the Palestinians.

Gaza seems proof of that.

The financial crisis

EXCERPTS from an editorial in The Guardian yesterday:

Last October, Gordon Brown was furious with bankers. “I’m angry at irresponsible behavior,” he told GMTV, as he unveiled a £500bn plan to rescue a banking system near collapse. “Where there is excessive and irresponsible risk-taking, that has got to be punished. The day of big bonuses is over.”

Last week, the angry man of politics nodded through a huge bonus package for the boss of one of the worst-hit British banks. RBS is 70 percent owned by the government, which makes its chief executive Stephen Hester a civil servant in all but name — yet if he plays his cards right he will pocket nearly £10 million. So much for Brown’s righteous anger. Just a few months ago, the prime minister flew to Washington and called on Congress to “outlaw shadow banking systems and offshore tax havens”. Today, the Treasury will publish a new voluntary code of conduct for banks, to dissuade them from constructing intricate tax-avoidance schemes. Again, Brown’s fine words translate into too-little action. This is not the general anti-avoidance principle tax campaigners have been demanding. Banks that duck out of the new gentlemen’s agreement will face no sanction more severe than a bit of closer attention from Her Majesty’s tax inspectors. As a government tax source told this paper a few months ago, “There are less than 100 inspectors actually tackling avoidance, against thousands of professionals advising companies on how to do it.” Barclays — which has a huge structured-capital markets arm devoted to helping customers with tax — or any other bank may well decide that these are odds worth taking.

As the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, puts it in an essay for this week’s New Statesman: “The bankers can’t believe their luck.” After plunging the world into recession, and having had to be rescued by the taxpayer, the financiers are being asked for little more onerous than a commitment to do better next time. Cable suggests that MPs’ expenses have derailed the reform process, by distracting Brown’s government and by stripping Westminster of its authority to tackle banker excesses. But it is easier too for an enfeebled government not to make any more enemies by taking on the City.

Certainly, next week’s Treasury white paper on financial regulation looks as if it will be a modest document; a policy package better suited to 2003, say, rather than 2009. Brown’s pre-election gambit is clear: Hold out for those fabled green shoots, float a stake in Northern Rock or another state-owned bank and claim the credit as firefighter-in-chief. Were they in power, the Tories would not do much better. George Osborne may sound tough about overly large banks being broken up, but the rhetoric is not matched by policy. Nor is it likely to be, going by yesterday’s story in the Sunday Telegraph about bumper City donations to Conservative Central Office.

Wall Street has also returned to business-as-usual.