Major news outlets reported earlier this week that, on account of the ever more tightened blockade, a severe shortage of electricity and diesel fuel has led to the shutdown of the only power plant in Gaza, which in turn has resulted in raw sewage flooding the streets, threatening a health disaster. If your impatient reaction to that is “So what?” you don’t live in Gaza and you don’t have a Gazan frame of reference.
Gaza is a narrow strip of land that has chalked up many a superlative over the years — the most confined, the most impoverished, the most densely populated and the most, well, fill in the blank here for any lamentable condition imaginable, and the 1.7 million souls living there have endured it. So, given all this, who in his right mind could conceive of how life there could get worse? Surely, worse than worst defies not only grammatical rules but human logic. But when dealing with the purgatory of Gaza, leave your semantic fashions of expression at the door. In recent months, the unspeakable suffering there has indeed gotten worse.
When people are denied access to, say, bread, we can always blithely tell them to follow Marie Antoinette’s advice to eat cake. But when they are denied fuel, which powers their electrical utilities, they cannot run their bakeries, their factories, their schools, their hospitals, their sewage plants, their transportation system and the rest of it. Heaven knows Hamas has tried to find a way to deal with many problems in that little smidgen of land — already known as the biggest open-air prison in the world — but dealing with the potential breakout of communicable diseases, which are an inevitable outcome of a malfunctioning sanitation system, is not one of them.
But no one, sadly, is paying attention. When a typhoon or a tsunami or an earthquake, or some other kind of natural disaster hits a people anywhere in the world, the international community rushes to help. However, it seems as if Gaza has morphed into some kind of mythical entity that time has forgotten. Or perhaps an entity whose incessant plaints people have gotten tired of, preferring to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to its most basic human needs.
Here’s the picture as portrayed by these major news outlets earlier this week, a picture not allowed, as it were, to be seen by children unless accompanied by adults. At least three sewage stations in Gaza City, and 10 others elsewhere in the Strip, are close to overflowing, and 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage is seeping into the Mediterranean daily. The sanitation department is finding it increasingly difficult to pump potable water to Gaza homes. In addition, Gazans have learned to endure blackouts as a norm.
Consider a case or two of what that translates into: Businesses cutting down on production, hospitals struggling to keep dialysis and cardiac support systems running, and students denied access to Internet research at school and forced to study by candlelight at home. And then, to compound the problem, raw sewage flooding the streets.
Jody Rudoren, the New York Times correspondent in Palestine, filing from Gaza last Thursday, reported on the travails of one neighborhood there. “In the Sabra neigborhood, near the Zeitoun pumping station, which has flooded three times since Sunday, the stench of sewage hung over the pools of standing water in the streets,” she wrote. “Mosquitoes abounded, and residents said their children were vomiting and had diarrhea.”
Why is it, you ask, that victims of natural disasters, such as, say, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, switched on our altruism button (and the donations poured in), whereas the suffering in Gaza has left us, and continues to leave us, cold? Search me! But perhaps one reason is that we perceive victims of natural disasters as less to blame for their circumstances than victims of war, even though these victims are impartial civilians not involved in, or who have not triggered, the fighting. This echoes the so-called Just World Belief hypothesis in psychology, a notion referring to people’s tendency to believe that the world is “just” and that a warring community gets what it deserves. You may wish, as I do, to dismiss this as wanton psychologizing, but whatever the reason is that accounts for the indifference evinced by the outside world to the plight of Gazans, it is this same outside world that is responsible for not giving these people a chance to live decent lives.
When the New York Times’s Jody Rudoren, in her report, asked the mayor of Gaza, Rafik Mekki, that same question, he said: “You’re asking me why? Ask the world why instead. We are under siege, so ask the world, which is besieging us this question. We’ve called on all international organizations to intervene, but no one cares so far.”
