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7 Questions for Defenders of Israel's Inhumane Siege of Gaza
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Original Message
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[link to www.alternet.org]
Question #4: Israel attacked Gaza’s main power plant in 2006, and it won’t let the Gazans bring in the parts needed to restore its output to the previous levels. The majority of houses in Gaza experience power outages of at least eight hours per day, but some have no juice for as much as 12 hours a day. So, you know: Is Israel worried about rechargeable weapons of some sort?
Question #5: So, Israel “has not permitted supplies into the Gaza Strip to rebuild the sewage system,” and Amnesty International says that up to 95 percent of the water in Gaza isn’t healthy for human consumption. There isn’t enough power to run the desalination and sewage facilities, so significant amounts of sewage are seeping into Gaza's coastal aquifer, the population’s main source of water. Help me understand what Israel is defending against, here? Some sort of frozen ice-missile technology?
Question #6: How does barring the export of all goods from Gaza keep weapons out of Gaza? Am I not getting what the words “out” and “in” mean? The World Health Organization says, "In the Gaza Strip, private enterprise is practically at a standstill as a consequence of the blockade. 98 percent of industrial operations have been shut down.” Not sure how further impoverishing Gaza’s already poor population makes Israel more secure -- help me understand?
Question #7: If it’s about keeping weapons out of Gaza, then why won’t Israel allow in medical equipment, spare parts and the building materials necessary to rebuild the health-care infrastructure that was devastated in the 2008 war? The World Health Organization says the blockade has "accelerated the degeneration" of Gaza’s health system. Is the idea that keeping the health-care system down will make people too weak and infirm to pick up a weapon?
These questions are unanswerable because the blockade of Gaza is about keeping goods from flowing in and out of Gaza. Push them on their answers. Are they saying it enhances Israel’s security because people who are jobless, hungry, poor and in bad health may have less will to resist? That’s the definition of collective punishment, a serious crime since World War II, when the world reacted with revulsion to the collective punishments meted out by the Axis powers to the populations of the territories they occupied.
The argument that Israel is only keeping weapons out of the hands of terrorists is not a minor distraction. As I wrote last week, the Israeli government is an occupying power that exercises “effective control” over Gaza. Some have argued that Gaza is an independent entity at war with Israel, and the Israeli Supreme Court agreed, ruling that Israel “had no commitment 'to deal with the welfare of the residents of the Gaza Strip or to allow unlimited amounts of goods and merchandise' to pass through, but only vital and humanitarian goods."
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