“It’s like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won’t die,” the Israeli prime minister’s top advisor told several leading Israeli officials following the Palestinian elections in January. Among those who reportedly “rolled with laughter” at this grotesque “joke” were Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the army chief of staff and the head of the secret police. (Ha’aretz, Feb. 14, 2006)
 The U.S. and Israeli governments use food as a weapon against Palestinians. Photo: George Azar/2006 |
The advisor, Dov Weissglass, was outlining plans to block funds to the Palestinian National Authority and seal off the impoverished Gaza Strip. Those plans were quickly implemented and are today causing widespread suffering. Countless bakeries that daily provide bread—the diet staple—have had to shut down due to lack of flour.
The Israeli government also stopped turning over approximately $55 million per month in Palestinian tax and custom duty revenues to the PNA. The fact that Israel collects Palestinian taxes and has the power to decide whether or not to turn them over to the PNA makes the colonial nature of the relationship between the two entities crystal clear.
This has been the Israeli government’s reaction to the victory of the Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) Party in the Jan. 25 election: moving aggressively to starve a people already suffering from widespread malnutrition and poverty.
But it is not only the Israeli government that is trying to punish the Palestinian people for the election. Both the United States and the European Union (EU) began withholding more than $1 billion in vital annual aid to the PNA since Hamas formed the new government in late March.
As a result of the cutoff in aid and tax revenues, the PNA is now practically bankrupt. It is unable to pay the salaries of its 145,000 employees, whose incomes support an estimated one-third of the nearly four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Deliberate destruction
The necessity for outside aid to sustain the Palestinian population is due to the fact that the economy of the West Bank and Gaza is in ruins. Its destruction is not a by-product of conflict, but instead has been one of the key objectives of the U.S.-backed Israeli war on the Palestinian people.
 Palestinians protest EU aid cut. Gaza, April 10, 2006. Photo: Reuters/Suhaib Salem |
Since the beginning of the latest Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in September 2000, a central element of the Israeli strategy has been economic disruption. The disruption has taken many forms. Military and police checkpoints have been the key factor.
Today there are more than 400 Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, an area of only 2,270 square miles—just slightly longer than Delaware. The checkpoints are everywhere, imposing an almost unbearable and often fatal burden on daily life. Many emergency patients have died enduring interminable delays by Israeli occupying troops.
Soldiers act in a seemingly arbitrary and routinely racist manner toward the Palestinians who are forced to submit to their dictates. Nearly every trip of any distance—whether to work, school or market or for a medical appointment—requires passing through one or more Israeli military checkpoints. Delays can last hours, days or indefinitely.
The impact on production and trade has been catastrophic. Goods often cannot be moved in a timely fashion. Huge quantities of agricultural commodities have rotted at checkpoints or due to the sealing off of entire areas.
The present sealing of Gaza has resulted in enormous losses in one of the area’s few exports, tomatoes and peppers. The Israelis sharply restrict or altogether prevent fishing in the Mediterranean by Gaza Palestinians, reserving the area for exploitation by Israeli fishing interests.
According to a March 2006 World Bank report, per capita income in the West Bank and Gaza in 2005 was 31 percent lower than in 1999. The report predicts that the cutoff in assistance would lead to an additional decline of as much as 30 percent this year.
The percentage of those below the poverty level could jump from 44 percent to a record 74 percent, the report said. The unemployment rate in Palestinian territories would also increase from some 23.4 percent in 2005 to as high as 47 percent in 2008.
Destruction of the Palestinian economy, along with routine violence and harassment, is the deliberate policy of the Israeli government. Its intent is to drive out the indigenous Palestinian population in the West Bank and clear the way for Israeli annexation.
But despite all the imposed and prolonged suffering, the Palestinians have determinedly resisted “expulsion in slow motion.”
Food as a weapon
 Israeli checkpoints are designed to choke the Palestinian economy. Photo: Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa |
The use of food as a weapon demolishes any pretense of Israeli or U.S. “democracy,” and illuminates the real and vicious character of imperialism.
Both the Republican Bush administration and the Democratic Party leadership rhetorically posture as great champions of “democracy.” Both pushed for the PNA to hold elections on Jan. 25, 2006. Now, both are fighting to outdo each other in demanding that the Palestinian people be punished for having voted in a manner displeasing to Washington. So much for democracy.
The United States, the European Union and Israel have adopted a unified set of official demands that the Palestinian government must meet before aid will be restored, taxes turned over and the economic blockade lifted. These include Hamas’s official recognition of the state of Israel, acceptance of all earlier agreements by the PNA with Israel and the U.S. government and renunciation of violence.
No similar demands are made on the Israeli government, which receives billions of dollars of aid every year from Washington, along with the latest in military technology. Israel continues to be by far the largest recipient of U.S. aid, despite the fact that it today has a per capita income of about $18,000. Israel’s relentless military assaults on the Palestinians are never referred to as “violence” by the corporate media. The fact that four times as many Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the last five years is routinely ignored.
The continuation of lavish U.S. aid to Israel has never been contingent on its recognition of the right of the dispossessed Palestinian people to return to their homeland, or the release of the 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israel, or an end to the daily abuse of the population by the Israeli occupying forces.
The reason for the U.S. ruling class’s unparalleled economic, military and political support for Israel has nothing to do with sympathy for Jewish people and everything to do with Israel’s role as a vital cog in the U.S. imperial machine.
At the same time that Israel and the western imperialist powers are seeking to crush the Palestinians economically, the Israeli military has sharply escalated military operations in the West Bank and Gaza. Between April 6 and April 9, 16 Palestinians were killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes, and many more wounded. The Israeli Navy heavily shelled northern Gaza, and the Israeli army circulated reports in the media that it was preparing to reoccupy the area.
In response, a Palestinian spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said, “The Israeli escalation means no Palestinian resistance faction has to remain patient against continued assassinations and massacres.”
Beyond the borders of Palestine, the use of food and medicine as weapons is stirring deepening anger, especially in Arab and Muslim countries. It immediately invokes in the popular consciousness the 13-year blockade of Iraq that preceded the March 2003 invasion. Those U.S.-UN sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis, taking an especially heavy toll on children under the age of five.
Real aim: Accept a colonial ‘peace’
The real aim of the U.S.-E.U.-Israeli campaign is to force the new Palestinian leadership to accept a colonial-style “peace agreement.” Under the proposed settlement, Israel would annex much of the West Bank, including the entire Jordan Valley, east Jerusalem and the areas where the main settlement blocs are located. There are now more than 350,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the new Israeli government led by Ehud Olmert has announced plans to greatly expand the settlements.
Olmert has threatened to impose this “final status” whether or not the PNA agrees.
In fact, Olmert has declared that the PNA is a “hostile entity,” and announced that he will not negotiate with it at all. U.S. officials including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have expressed support for the Olmert plan.
The “state” that would be forced on the Palestinians under this plan, with the full support of Washington, would be unlike any other state in the world. There would be no contiguous territory, but instead it would be composed of broken up pieces of land. Israeli settlements, soldiers and tanks would be positioned in between.
Israel would control the borders, the airspace, and water and subsoil rights of the Palestinian entity. There would be no right of return for the more than 5 million Palestinians living in exile. The Palestinian “state” would have only a police force and no national army, while living next to the world’s fifth most powerful military state. The Israeli apartheid wall, currently under construction, would surround the settlements and steal even more Palestinian land.
Settlements in, and annexation of, occupied territory is a clear violation of international law.
What Washington, Tel Aviv and their European partners envision might be called a “state” for diplomatic purposes, but it would in no way represent the self-determination that the Palestinian people have so long struggled to achieve.
All Palestinian parties and officials, including Hamas, Fateh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and PNA president Mahmoud Abbas, have declared Olmert’s plan to be completely unacceptable, predicting that the struggle against its imposition will intensify and continue for many years to come.
Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.
