The Truth About Gaza

Just How Hungry is Gaza?

In the splenetic outpouring of opinion over the failed attempt to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, extreme positions have been taken by both sides. On the one hand there were those voices portraying Gazans as living in a national concentration camp, in a situation akin to that faced by refugees in Darfur. On the other hand, some were claiming that Gaza is a holiday camp, well stocked with provisions on every side.

The truth, as often is the case, appears to lie somewhere in the middle. Adrian Blomfeld, writing from Gaza for the Daily Telegraph, sums up the actual situation this way:

Despite its blockade, Israel insists Gazans are not starving and there is no humanitarian crisis. The enclave's poverty is not as bad as the worst parts of Africa but a people struggle to cope amid the rubble left by cross-border strikes.

The reality is that Gaza is oppressed by the blockade. The deliberate objective of Israel is to prod Gazans into rejecting Hamas--which, we recall, was legitimately elected by the people of Gaza. We always get the government we deserve, as they say, and no government can long survive without the consent of the governed. So, the policy of Israel is designed to get the people of Gaza to face up to the inevitable consequences of choosing Hamas to govern them.

Now we have been widely told that Hamas was more favoured than Fatah because the latter was (and is) venal and corrupt and Hamas went about its activities underpinned with basic ethical integrity and an apparent incorruptibility. But Hamas also is committed to the extermination and obliteration of Israel--so to elect Hamas to govern has meant the acceptance of a state-of-war with Israel, like it or not. Israel's objective is to help Gazans come to a position where they do not like being in a state of war with Israel.

Gaza is not eastern Congo, nor is its suffering comparable. Yet by the standards of the Middle East, the poverty is palpable. In a territory the size of the Isle of Wight, 1.5 million people -- 1.1 million of them refugees from previous conflicts with Israel -- often live in conditions close to squalor.

A landscape of ruined buildings, destroyed by Israeli forces, greets the rare visitor who crosses into Northern Gaza through Israel's Erez Checkpoint. Small groups of men toil in the heat to load salvaged bits of masonry, a precious commodity after Israel banned all construction material entering Gaza, onto donkey-drawn carts.

Further south, dilapidated, ramshackle buildings separated by narrow and often fetid alleyways stretch all the way to Rafah, on the border with Egypt. The stench of rotten rubbish, and sometimes sewage, regularly assaults the nostrils.

Occasionally, the monotony is broken by groups of makeshift tents, inhabited by those made homeless by an Israeli military offensive 17 months ago that destroyed or damaged 5,000 houses. The UN's Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) would like to rebuild those houses but Israel has largely prevented cement from entering Gaza, saying it could be used by Hamas to make homemade Qassam rockets.

Mr Netanyahu's government says the persistent launching of those rockets and Hamas's creed of violent resistance has left it with little choice but to adopt such drastic measures.

Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, but imposed its blockade two years later when Hamas violently wrested control of the territory in a civil war with the more moderate Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas, the pro-American leader of the West Bank.

Unlike Fatah, Hamas refuses formally to recognise Israel's right to exist or to negotiate with it, and has fired thousands of rockets towards Israeli towns, causing about 30 deaths. Israel retaliated with a massive counter-offensive in December, 2008, killing over 1,200 people, many of them civilians.

Although it insists it is not engaged in "collective punishment", Israel's blockade bans both material that could be used to make rockets and all but the most basic humanitarian supplies. Its aim, it says, is to create an austerity regime in Gaza while using the West Bank, with its comparative prosperity, as "a shop window" in the hope of convincing its people to throw off their Islamist masters and choose the moderation of Fatah.

So, whilst it is true there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, neither is it a picnic.

Hamas officials concede that the blockade has not caused a humanitarian crisis in its classic sense.

"There is no starvation in Gaza," said Khalil Hamada, a senior official at Hamas's ministry of justice. "No-one has died of hunger.

Even so, People have been forced to subsist rather than to live. There is no development.

"It is an inhumane siege by any standards, even a brutal one, for it imposes collective punishment on an entire people, whether they support Hamas or not."

So, is Hamas as popular as it once was in Gaza? Is Israel's policy of dividing the Palestinian electorate from a terrorist organization as their government working?

Yet there is no sign that the blockade is substantially weakening the position of Hamas as Israel had hoped.

Talk to Gazans in private and many will say the movement, once praised for bringing law and order to their territory, is less popular than it used to be -- in part because it is now seen as corrupt but also because it is indeed blamed, in part for the blockade.

Yet at the same time Hamas is perceived as more invulnerable. Its spies are everywhere; its rule is often ruthless -- it recently hanged two Israeli "collaborators" -- and few dare publicly oppose it.

But even those disenchanted with Hamas see Israel as the greater transgressor when it comes to the blockade and regard arguments that suggest otherwise as disingenuous.

"It's like trying to convince a child to take a half-shekel coin instead of a one-shekel coin because the half-shekel coin is bigger," the entrepreneur said. "Israel can try to get us to blame Hamas, but it is a conceit most will not fall for."

In many ways, Hamas has actually grown stronger since, unlike many Gazans, it profits from the smuggling tunnels under Gaza's border with Egypt that were built to circumvent the blockade.

The tunnels, which bring in a huge array of consumer goods, are the reason Mr Hasuna can sell creme eggs -- but they are also the reason fewer people can afford to buy them.

Wares that come through the tunnels are expensive, often double their true market rate and Gazans must therefore be selective in what they purchase. Gaza's shops may be full, but for many of its people the shelves are out of reach.

Hamas, on the other hand, makes a tidy sum by charging each smuggler who opens a tunnel GBP 1,900 for the privilege and exacting a levy thereafter.

A key question is this: is Hamas more committed to the peace and prosperity of its subjects, or to the destruction of Israel? Which has a higher priority? If the latter, then Hamas will likely desire the blockade and the current situation to continue, at least for the foreseeable future, for it enables them to get wealthy through exacting exorbitant tariffs. This, in turn, can be used to secure armaments and weapons and maintain control over the population.

Critics in Israel also point out that although Hamas has largely stopped firing rockets onto Jewish territory, the blockade has not stopped it using the tunnels to smuggle in large quantities of weapons. By some reckoning, the movement's arsenal is as strong as it ever has been.

"The blockade has been a failure even if you measure it by the narrow question of whether Hamas has fewer rockets," a leading Israeli columnist, who asked not to be identified so he could speak frankly, argued.

As is usually the case, the actual real-life situation in Gaza and Israel is complex and murky. But it is also true that it could be changed overnight if Hamas were to relinquish its intent to destroy the state of Israel. Unless we keep focused upon that as the all-critical issue things become very confused and murky indeed.

Whilst it is easy to be an armchair general--and no doubt arguably fatuous--we continue to believe that Israel constantly confuses itself and its neighbours by not making this point about Hamas constantly.  We wonder if Israel is truly focused upon the issue, or whether it has become distracted by political games.  Israel should be saying to Hamas, to Gazans, to the world: renounce violence and armed aggression against Israel and the blockade could end tomorrow.  It should be saying it repeatedly.