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 Here once again is Uri Avnery at his very finest. What would we do
without him?

Uri Avnery
14.10.06

           The Great Experiment

IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation
by starving it?

That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed,
that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close
cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific
experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.

The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs
are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there.


IN ORDER to meet the required scientific standards, it was necessary
first of all to prepare the laboratory.

That was done in the following way: First, Ariel Sharon uprooted the
Israeli settlements that were stuck there. After all, you can't conduct
a proper experiment with pets roaming around the laboratory. It was done
with "determination and sensitivity", tears flowed like water, the
soldiers kissed and embraced the evicted settlers, and again it was
shown that the Israeli army is the most-most in the world.

With the laboratory cleaned, the next phase could begin: all entrances
and exits were hermetically sealed, in order to eliminate disturbing
influences from the world outside. That was done without difficulty.
Successive Israeli governments have prevented the building of a harbor
in Gaza, and the Israeli navy sees to it that no ship approaches the
shore. The splendid international airport, built during the Oslo days,
was bombed and shut down. The entire Strip was closed off by a highly
effective fence, and only a few crossings remained, all but one
controlled by the Israeli army.

There remained a sole connection with the outside world: the Rafah
border crossing to Egypt. It could not just be sealed off, because that
would have exposed the Egyptian regime as a collaborator with Israel. A
sophisticated solution was found: to all appearances the Israeli army
left the crossing and turned it over to an international supervision
team. Its members are nice guys, full of good intentions, but in
practice they are totally dependent on the Israeli army, which oversees
the crossing from a nearby control room. The international supervisors
live in an Israeli kibbutz and can reach the crossing only with Israeli
consent.

So everything was ready for the experiment.


THE SIGNAL for its beginning was given after the Palestinians had held
spotlessly democratic elections, under the supervision of former
President Jimmy Carter. George Bush was enthusiastic: his vision of
bringing democracy to the Middle East was coming true.

But the Palestinians flunked the test. Instead of electing "good Arabs",
devotees of the United States, they voted for very bad Arabs, devotees
of Allah. Bush felt insulted. But the Israeli government was ecstatic:
after the Hamas victory, the Americans and Europeans were ready to take
part in the experiment. It could start:

The United States and the European Union announced the stoppage of all
donations to the Palestinian Authority, since it was "controlled by
terrorists". Simultaneously, the Israeli government cut off the flow of
money.

To understand the significance of this: according to the "Paris
Protocol" (the economic annex of the Oslo agreement) the Palestinian
economy is part of the Israeli customs system. This means that Israel
collects the duties for all the goods that pass through Israel to the
Palestinian territories - actually, there is no other route. After
deducting a fat commission, Israel is obligated to turn the money over
to the Palestinian Authority.

When the Israeli government refuses to pass on this money, which belongs
to the Palestinians, it is, simply put, robbery in broad daylight. But
when one robs "terrorists", who is going to complain?

The Palestinian Authority - both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip -
needs this money like air for breathing. This fact also requires some
explanation: in the 19 years when Jordan occupied the West Bank and
Egypt the Gaza Strip, from 1948 to 1967, not a single important factory
was built there. The Jordanians wanted all economic activity to take
place in Jordan proper, east of the river, and the Egyptians neglected
the strip altogether.

Then came the Israeli occupation, and the situation became even worse.
The occupied territories became a captive market for Israeli industry,
and the military government prevented the establishment of any
enterprise that could conceivably compete with an Israeli one.

The Palestinian workers were compelled to work in Israel for hunger
wages (by Israeli standards). From these, the Israeli government
deducted all the social payments levied on Israeli workers, without the
Palestinian workers enjoying any social benefits. This way the
government robbed these exploited workers of tens of billions of
dollars, which disappeared somehow in the bottomless barrel of the
government.

When the intifada broke out, the Israeli captains of industry and
agriculture discovered that it was possible to get along without the
Palestinian workers. Indeed, it was even more profitable. Workers
brought in from Thailand, Romania and other poor countries were ready to
work for even lower wages and in conditions bordering on slavery. The
Palestinian workers lost their jobs.

That was the situation at the beginning of the experiment: the
Palestinian infrastructure destroyed, practically no means of
production, no work for the workers. All in all, an ideal setting for
the great "experiment in hunger".


THE IMPLEMENTATION started, as mentioned, with the stoppage of payments.

The passage between Gaza and Egypt was closed in practice. Once every
few days or weeks it was opened for some hours, for appearances' sake,
so that some of the sick and dead or dying could get home or reach
Egyptian hospitals.

The crossings between the Strip and Israel were closed "for urgent
security reasons". Always, at the right moment, "warnings of an imminent
terrorist attack" appeared. Palestinian agricultural products destined
for export rot at the crossing. Medicines and foodstuffs cannot get in,
except for short periods from time to time, also for appearances,
whenever somebody important abroad voices some protest. Then comes
another "urgent security warning" and the situation is back to normal.

To round off the picture, the Israeli Air Force bombed the only power
station in the Strip, so that for a part of the day there is no
electricity, and the water supply (which depends on electric pumps)
stops also. Even on the hottest days, with temperatures of over 30
degrees centigrade in the shade, there is no electricity for
refrigerators, air conditioning, the water supply or other needs.

In the West Bank, a territory much larger than the Gaza Strip (which
makes up only 6% of the occupied Palestinian territories but holds 40%
of the inhabitants), the situation is not quite so desperate. But in the
Strip, more than half of the population lives beneath the Palestinian
"poverty line", which lies of course very, very far below the Israeli
"poverty line". Many Gaza residents can only dream of being considered
poor in the nearby Israeli town of Sderot.

What are the governments of Israel and the US trying to tell the
Palestinians? The message is clear: You will reach the brink of hunger,
and even beyond, if you do not surrender. You must remove the Hamas
government and elect candidates approved by Israel and the US. And, most
importantly: you must be satisfied with a Palestinian state consisting
of several enclaves, each of which will be utterly dependent on the
tender mercies of Israel.


AT THE moment, the directors of the scientific experiment are pondering
a puzzling question: how on earth do the Palestinians still hold out, in
spite of everything? According to all the rules, they should have been
broken long ago!

Indeed, there are some encouraging signs. The general atmosphere of
frustration and desperation creates tension between Hamas and Fatah.
Here and there clashes have broken out, people were killed and wounded,
but in each case the deterioration was halted before it became a civil
war. The thousands of hidden Israeli collaborators are also helping to
stir things up. But contrary to all expectations, the resistance did not
evaporate. Even the captured Israeli soldier has not been released.

One of the explanations has to do with the structure of Palestinian
society. The Hamulah (extended family) plays a central role there. As
long as one person in the family is working, the relatives, too, do not
die of hunger, even if there is widespread malnutrition. Everyone who
has any income shares it with all his brothers and sisters, parents,
grandparents, cousins and their children. That is a primitive system,
but quite effective in such circumstances. It seems that the planners of
the experiment did not take this into account.

In order to quicken the process, the whole might of the Israeli army is
now being used again, as from this week. For three months the army was
busy with the Second Lebanon War. It became apparent that the army,
which for the last 39 years has been employed mainly as a colonial
police force, does not function very well when suddenly confronted with
a trained and armed opponent that can fight back. Hizbullah used deadly
anti-tank weapons against the armored forces, and rockets rained down on
Northern Israel. The army has long ago forgotten how to deal with such
an enemy. And the campaign did not end well.

Now the army returns to the war it knows. The Palestinians in the Strip
do not (yet) have effective anti-tank weapons, and the Qassam rockets
cause only limited damage. The army can again use tanks against the
population without hindrance. The Air Force, which in Lebanon was afraid
to send in helicopters to remove the wounded, can now fire missiles at
the houses of "wanted persons", their families and neighbors, at
leisure. If in the last three months "only" 100 Palestinians were killed
per month, we are now witnessing a dramatic rise in the number of
Palestinians killed and wounded.

How can a population that is hit by hunger, lacking medicaments and
equipment for its primitive hospitals and exposed to attacks on land,
from sea and from the air, hold out? Will it break? Will it go down on
its knees and beg for mercy? Or will it find inhuman strength and stand
the test?

In short: What and how much is needed to get a population to surrender?

All the scientists taking part in the experiment - Ehud Olmert and
Condoleezza Rice, Amir Peretz and Angela Merkel, Dan Halutz and George
Bush, not to mention Nobel Peace Price laureate Shimon Peres - are bent
over the microscopes and waiting for an answer, which undoubtedly will
be an important contribution to political science.

I hope the Nobel Committee is watching.