Many view the recent
exchange of hostility between Israel and Gaza as a border dispute with each exercising
their right to self-defense. But Gaza is not a state; just ask the United
Nations. Most of Gaza’s population is made up of refugees forced out of their
homes in 1948 to allow for the creation of a Jewish state. Gaza today is a
militarily occupied territory under Israel’s control. Israel is a sovereign state
that exercises complete control over the lives of Gaza’s inhabitants. That
control is practiced in part by determining names on identity cards, how much
electricity the people receive and even how much food they are allowed to
consume.
“Consider, for example, the fact that several
years ago Israeli officials prepared a set of fine-tuned calculations
determining exactly how many calories per day would be required to keep Gaza's
1.7 million people hovering at the edge of starvation: neither consuming enough
to prosper, nor actually crossing the line into outright famine. The magic
number they came up with is 2,279 calories per person per day. The Israelis
multiplied this figure by the total population and then broke the result down
into the number of truckloads of calories per day - minus a number allowing for
food produced in Gaza - that they would allow into the territory. Israel even
drafted lists that specify particular kinds of food that are allowed into Gaza
(pasta did not make the list until 2009, for example)".[1]
How real is the threat
Gaza poses to Israel? Aside from the Palestinian Authority’s interest in large
deposits of natural gas off the Gaza coast, the threat that Gaza poses to
Israel is not simply rockets, “but an
abundance of human life itself. For to reduce a people to a "demographic
threat" is to lose sight of them as people in the first place. They then
become merely a living force, like a weed or a cancer (rhetorical terms that,
not coincidentally, flourish in the Israeli political lexicon), whose growth
needs to be kept in check, if not cauterised or eliminated altogether.”[2]
To lose sight of people
as people, to see them as a weed or cancer to be cut out, is for Israel—or any
other state—unpardonable. Israelis, Jews throughout the world, indeed all persons
with any knowledge of history know only too well where such thinking and
behavior leads.
Saree Makdisi sums up his piece, “The people of Gaza are not just a form of self-reproducing protoplasm, however. They are men, women and (mostly) children with - as the great English essayist, William Hazlitt, once put it in not dissimilar circumstances - thoughts and feelings, and interests and passions, and purposes and affections, and a right and a will to be free. These people need far more than a ceasefire: they need a just peace.[3]
[1]
Gaza: People need far more than a ceasefire, by Saree Makdisi, published in Aljazeera
November 30, 2012 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/2012113010429209675.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid
