Is it possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it? An interesting question. So interesting 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.
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. 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. 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: The Israeli Army left the crossing and turned it over to an international supervision team. In practice they are totally dependent on the Israeli Army, which oversees the crossing from a nearby control room. 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.
But the Palestinians flunked the test. Instead of electing “good Arabs”, devotees of the United States, they voted for very bad Arabs, the Hamas. 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. 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. After the Israeli occupation, 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.
When the intifada broke out, the Israeli captains of industry and agriculture discovered that it was possible to get along without the Palestinian workers. 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. 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.
In the West Bank, a territory much larger than the Gaza Strip (which makes up only 6 percent of the occupied Palestinian territories but holds 40 percent 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”.
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.
So to quicken the process, the whole might of the Israeli army is now being used again, as from this week. Now the army returns to the war it knows unlike in Lebanon. 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? 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.
