Jimmy Carter claims that Israel is starving the Palestinians in Gaza to death, saying that Gazans are receiving fewer calories per day than the poorest people in Africa. Right wing commentators and Israeli newspapers, of course, quickly rush to condemn Carter. Which brings up two questions:
1) Is Carter right about the calorie count in Gaza? Are Gazans really receiving only 2/3rds of the daily caloric requirements for life? Well, first of all, let's go to that notorious terrorist-sympathizing organization, U.S. Agency for International Development. In 2003, prior to Hamas taking over in Gaza, USAID found that four out of five children in Gaza and the West Bank have inadequate iron and zinc intake, deficiencies that cause anaemia and weaken the immune system. Over half the children in each territory have inadequate caloric and vitamin A intake. And that was in 2003, before Israeli gunboats cut off Gaza's food imports from the sea and sank Gaza's fishing boats. Now the UNWRA says Palestinian children are receiving only 61% of the calories they need from U.N. relief supplies and have a 77.5% anemia ratio.
2) Is Carter right to blame Israel for the problem? Once again, quoting AFP: "Gaza has been under strict economic sanctions since the Islamist Hamas movement seized power in June 2007, with Israel cutting off food and fuel supplies." But the question is, has this made a difference in the number of calories that Gazans receive? It appears so. In 2002, 19% of Gaza's children had anaemia. In 2008, it is 77.5%. The only difference in that time period has been the blockade of Gaza starting in June 2007.
3) But did the Gazans bring this on themselves by electing Hamas? Hmm, well, that's a good question. First, Hamas only won a plurality in Parliament, not a majority. In other words, the majority of Gazans did not support Hamas. Hamas built a coalition government by enlisting other parties in their coalition. Secondly, all Gazans are being punished for something that a minority of Gazans voted for in hopes that this will convince the minority that voting for Hamas was a mistake. In other words, pretty much the Lidice Solution to the problem of partisan activity in Czechoslovakia except in slow motion. The morality of imposing a Lidice Solution is unclear only if you're a right-wing Likkudnik or an American neo-conservative. Otherwise, the Nuremberg Trials pretty much answered that question for eternity: No, collective punishment of an entire population for the actions of a few is not a moral activity no matter who does it or for what reason.
In short, Jimmy Carter appears to have made that most drastic of mistakes: He spoke truth. And of course we cannot have that. Why, if people made a habit of speaking truth every day, what would this world become? Why, it might even become peaceful and free, which would interfere with profits, yessiree!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Three points: 1. You don't need Jimmy Carter to know Gaza is under siege. It has been since June 2006, after the kidnapping of a soldier and the killing of three.
ReplyDelete2. Gaza has never actually received food by sea (except for those fishing boats, which from personal experience do a much brisker trade in drugs than in fish), since the Gazan port was never actually built. You may recall one of the reasons put for the settlements there was that they will "make it easier to watch over the port" - but there never was any port).
3. There is the nasty issue of them rockets hitting towns and kibbutzim at regular intervals. This is the main reason for the siege (and for assorted air strikes, whose victims nobody bothers counting; the Israeli mob keeps howling "they're killing us and we're doing nothing", when we've killed something along the ratio of 20 Gazans to one Israeli, possibly more).
Hmm, AFP seems to imply that the current blockade of food and fuel dates to June 2007, not June 2006. Did they get the date wrong?
ReplyDeleteAm I correct in my understanding that the UN food aid is all that's being allowed in? Because the UN says that their food aid only provides 61% of the daily required calories, which undoubtedly is the figure that Jimmy Carter was quoting.
The thing that baffles me is that all the likudniks and neo-cons are up in arms about Jimmy Carter being anti-semitic for stating a fact that is, well, a fact, as far as I can verify thus far. When did facts become anti-semitic?
One of these days I'll finish my essay on what's necessary to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The main problem is that I look at what I've written thus far -- a collection of facts -- and throw my hands up at the hopelessness of it all. Any solution has to both acknowledge that the two-state solution is a failure due to, well, simple lack of real estate (I think we've demonstrated well enough that a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank presents much too serious a security hazard), but the one-state solution is unacceptable to the majority of the people of Israel because it means that Israel becomes a multicultural nation -- something which is not acceptable to those who want Hebrew to be the only state language and Judaism to be the only state religion and their view of Judaic law as the law of the land. It is like the immovable object meets the irresistable force, we just end up going smack into those pesky little fact thingies that nobody wants to acknowledge because, well, they want to believe that the way things were when they were a kid can be the way things will be forever. But short of a massive act of genocide that finishes the job of ethnically cleansing the former Arab population Srebrenica-style, that simply cannot happen. But folks just cling to ideology rather than facing reality. A sad, sad thing that, alas, afflicts the United States too, which is why the U.S. is currently in a state of free-fall economic collapse and shortly will not be able to support its own armed forces, much less Israel's, at which point... well. Reality will prevail. But it would have been much cleaner and less bloody to face reality earlier...
- Badtux the Reality-Based Penguin
The one state idea is unacceptable to the vast majority of Jews or former Jews in Israel. It's not about language (Arabic is one of Israel's two official languages, the other of course being Hebrew), or Judaic law (the majority of seculars, like myself, vehemently oppose Judaic law *and* a one-state solution).
ReplyDeleteThe reason is simple: since Jews and Palestinians have been killing each - with some relish - for a century, the idea that a one-state will create anything but a civil war is untenable. Furthermore, Israel's culture is primarily Western; an influx of several million Muslim citizens will change that radically.
Should any Israeli government be stupid enough to agree to a one-state solution, it will either be lynched in a military coup (despite the legends of Israeli democracy, the army is much, much more popular than the government - *any* government, and it has the power to boot), or the middle class will head for the helicopters. (Naturally, our oligarchs will be out of the place ahead of time.)
Already, it's become commonplace for middle class families to get a second passport, preferably European. Ironically, such passports are often granted due to the fact that a grandfather was murdered during the Holocaust in such a European country.
As for the Arab Jews, who are becoming a majority, and are still the majority of the poor - they will be left to fend for themselves, and deal with the consequences of a European-Jewish dream turned to nightmare.
juan cole recommends that anyone who wants to help kids in the gaza use
ReplyDeletesave the children
he says they are very effective in using the money and are careful about how and to whom the money goes.
I believe the word you were searching for, Yossi, was European, not Western. European culture has this fear of the "other" that leads it to relegating the "other" to second class status, and places inordinate emphasis upon "blood". You can have lived in France for three generations, and still not be French in the eyes of either the law or the people of France because you don't have French "blood". And they are always whining about preserving the purity of French "culture". The notion of a multi-cultural society is as alien to them as it would be to, say, the Japanese (a very NON-western society, I might add, but that's a topic for another story). Compare/contrast to the Canadian solution, where Vancouver B.C. is the largest Chinese city outside of China, or the U.S. solution, where San Diego is the largest Mexican city outside of Mexico -- and where most of those Chinese and Mexicans are full citizens of their adoptive country. There have been frictions and grumblings, but no war, and no real chance of war, because the Chinese and Mexicans aren't going to jeopardize their full citizenship over something stupid like being snubbed by an Anglo, and because they have full rights under the law the Anglos aren't going to risk prison by taking up arms against the "spics and chinks". So everybody has pretty much figured out how to live with each other in a multicultural society, with much grumbling (before the recent influx of immigrants, Canada was one of the whitest, most European nations on the planet, with a very conservative culture, so this deal of Vancouver becoming a majority-Asian city and Toronto becoming a significantly-Indian city has been some decided culture shock for them) but no gunplay. In short, what you call "Western" culture isn't -- it's Western European culture. Outside of Europe, the base Western European culture has evolved into something similar, but more tolerant of "other".
ReplyDeleteIn any event, the main problem with the Palestinians is what to do with the poor sods. They're always going to be a pain in the ass to somebody unless they have a real state that they are a full first-class citizen of -- and it's already quite clear that making them citizens of a second-class South Africa style apartheid state that does not even control its own borders is not going to suffice for that purpose, and Israel cannot give them full control of their own borders of their own little statelet because we already see the security implications of doing that. So the two-state solution on the land of the Palestine Mandate is not working, and will not and cannot work. That's just a fact.
So what to do with the wogs. I would not suggest that Israel give them all Israeli citizenship in the first place. For one thing, there simply isn't room for all those people in Israel while retaining any sort of modern lifestyle. Rather, I would suggest the 14th Amendment Solution -- that they be given full citizenship in whatever state they were born in, whether that be Israel (or Israel-controlled areas), or Lebanon, or Jordan, or whatever. That would end up with half the "Palestinians" having Jordanian or Lebanese citizenship, and the other half would be a more digestible lump. But of course this would not be acceptable to the Jordanians or Lebanese either, not to mention offending the effete European sensibilities of the average Israeli who would, as you mention, mutiny over the notion of a multi-cultural society in the Middle East just as his peers in France and Germany and Italy and etc. would mutiny over the notion that the Algerians and Turks and Albanians who've lived in their nation for generations be granted full citizenship in their respective nations, so we run up against those "fact" thingies again where we all know what must happen for there to be peace, but nobody is willing to do it because it would offend their respective sensibilities.
Finally, regarding your "100 years of killing each other", it's more like 80 years. Violence between Jewish and Arab populations really did not occur until after the British gained the Mandate from the Ottomans. Prior to that, the trans-Jordan province of the Ottoman Empire was, while not paradise on Earth (nothing governed by the Ottomans could ever be paradise on earth, they were as bureaucratic and incompetent as any empire ever was), a relatively peaceful province of the Empire. It seems odd that violence corresponds with European rule over the Mandate, but not really, not if you know your history (hint: Crusades). Europeans coming in and "taking their land" was always going to be a sensitive subject for any native of the area. The snotty European attitude that treats any non-European as a wog, to be treated as sub-human, certainly could not have helped either.
So it goes. I'm just counting down the days until Israel truly embarks upon the "Final Solution" to the Palestinian problem. When Germany could not find any nation willing to take its unwanted Jews, we know what happened then. It was what always happens whenever any nation has a problem ethnicity within its borders that cannot be deported elsewhere because no other state will take them. Or as Stalin put it, "No people, no problem." The only question Gazans have right now, I suspect, is whether this is the start of Israel's "Final Solution" to the Gaza problem. We shall see...