 |
| Shuja’iyeh, an area close to the border zone between Gaza and Israel, which was destroyed during Protective Edge. ©Mark McGuinness |
"Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told a summit in Egypt that cash was ´insufficient´ without a
politicial solution. Israel, which has been fighting Gaza militants, refuses to allow building materials into Gaza for reconstruction. [...] Hamas [...] was not invited to attend the one-day conference. [...] All but essential supplies are still subject to Israeli blockades at the crossing points into Gaza. Building and raw materials deemed by Israel to be useful to militants as well civilians have been banned." BBC News
This statement seemingly many of the
reasons why Gaza has been forced to remain in a state of destruction and
devastation since Operation Protective Edge which took place in summer 2014. In
reality, the above was written in 2009, after Operation Cast Lead. Sadly, I
could have started this text with a similar quote from 2006, 2011, or 2014. In
all of these years Israel launched devastating
operations against Gaza and its people, leaving death and destruction.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of
Health, Operation Protective Edge left 1,914 killed and 9,861 injured Palestinians
in its wake, among them 549 dead and almost 3,000 injured children.
Israel bombed Gaza’s largest food factories, bulldozed cultivated land, and
destroyed more than 250 economic facilities,
turning the Strip into a completely dependent
market. Additionally, Gaza’s power plant stopped due to the destruction of
300,000 litres of industrial fuel, rendering the supply of water and
electricity almost impossible. Also large numbers of Gaza’s administrational
and governmental institutions, religious endowments and mosques were destroyed.
With reconstruction focused on restoring the 8,800 fully and 7,900 partly
destroyed buildings, leaving about 475,000 people homeless, rebuilding
infrastructure and the economy remains a low priority. The almost biannual military operations
have wrecked so much havoc on Gaza, that Oxfam stated
it would take “more than a 100 years” to meet all of
Gaza’s needs if reconstruction proceeds at the current pace.
After each war it becomes harder to rebuild, as most of the damage
from previous wars remains in place. Subsequent reconstruction efforts have
divided Palestinians, rendered Palestinians utterly reliant on external actors,
depoliticized their claims, and made their own institutions complicit in the
occupation – these developments have become institutionalized with the Oslo
Accords in 1993.
Why does it seem impossible to break this
cyclical destruction and reconstruction, manifested in almost biannual Israeli
atrocities in Gaza and subsequent international assistance? This is precisely
what I explore in this article: by looking at the destructive
aspects of reconstruction attempts in Gaza, I demonstrate how they are part of
much deeper, structural problems in international aid and emblematic of the overall
approach of international actors to the Palestinian struggle for justice and
liberation. To do so, I highlight several manifestations of these structural
problems surrounding the Oslo Accords and its subsequent arrangements: the
fragmentation of Palestinians, the increasing dependence of Palestinians on
Israel, the externalisation of the cost of the occupation, alleviating Israel,
and, finally, the depoliticised approach to the Palestinian struggle. The
cumulative effect of these manifestations has made reconstruction efforts and
international assistance – intentionally or not – facilitator of the
Israeli occupation.
 |
| “There were four houses here. Now there's a hole and one less member of their family.” ©Mark McGuinness |
Division
The Oslo peace
process was initially celebrated as the beginning of Palestinian statehood.
Instead it became “an interminable process, without peace and without end.”
Oslo allowed Israel to further the construction of settlements while pretending
to negotiate a settlement. It shifted Palestinian debates from liberation to
state-building, and, most devastatingly, Oslo shattered the unifying claim of a
return to historic Palestine by reducing this claim to a state in the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip, silencing the rightful claims of Palestinian refugees and
Palestinians living inside Israel for justice. Instead of unifying Palestinians
within one state, Oslo divided them. Israel drove a barrier between
Palestinians under jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and
Palestinians living in Israel, in the surrounding countries or the Diaspora,
but it also actively separated Palestinians in the West Bank from Gazans,
Jerusalemites and other Palestinians, as well as reinforced divisions between
the PA and other Palestinian organisations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and
leftist groups. It did so by establishing a separation wall around the West
Bank, a wall around Gaza, and a ring of settlements around Palestinian enclaves
in Jerusalem and, helped by the international community, it undermined
Palestinian efforts at unification and reconciliation.
Israel, in short, regards Palestinian
unity, and specifically the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, as a threat.
Since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israeli sanctions, international
boycotts and the threat to cut Western funding have served to further deepen
division between Hamas and Fatah. After they signed a reconciliation agreement
in April 2014, Israel increased its efforts to divide Palestinians.
International actors tacitly supported reconciliation, only to undermine it
with reconstruction plans: Operation Protective Edge ended with the promise to
ease the siege, but also the condition of having to allow Fatah back into Gaza
in order to turn it into the receiving party of international reconstruction
money (international donors are prevented from transferring money to Hamas due
to its status as terrorist organisation).
But the situation for Gazans has not
improved an inch: electricity is still out, the border to Egypt is closed,
Israel still blocks the import of construction materials, salaries remain
unpaid, and relations between Fatah and Hamas are hostile with both parties
blaming each other for the reconstruction failure. Even worse, Hamas’ status as
a terrorist organization causes international – more specifically Western – donors
to reject dealing with Hamas until they agree to nonviolence, accept previous
agreements, and recognise Israel. Since 2006 these principles served as a tool
to further divide Fatah and Hamas, as well as to undermine the latter. After
Operation Protective Edge, this implicit division and exclusion of Hamas intensified,
shutting Hamas out of reconstruction efforts, even though Protective Edge
renewed its legitimacy.
Also other Gaza-based representatives were excluded, despite their requisite
knowledge of what Gaza needs. Then again this is nothing new, already in 2009
the official plan for reconstructing Gaza was published first in English and
only months later in Arabic, proving that the needs of donors matter more than
Gaza’s. These dividing factors not only add to the plight of Palestinians, they
also increase their dependence on Israel and external actors.
 |
| Picture of the Apartheid Wall taken in Bethlehem in 2014 |
Creating Economic Dependence
"The Palestinian economy remains captive to the Israeli market."
Sansour and Tartir
In the past, stateless Palestinian
organisations had been dependent on their host countries, their funders and
groups in international solidarity, but the dependence of Palestinians created
by Oslo is qualitatively different, as they were now directly dependent on
their occupier and the US, Israel’s biggest ally.
The PA’s economic
dependence on – or integration into – Israeli economy was laid
down in the Paris Protocol, which obligates the PA to implement the Israeli
trade and tariff policy without being able to influence it. It regulates trade
policy, taxation and stipulated that foreign aid had to go through Israel.
Furthermore, Israel is in charge of Palestinian water resources, energy
supplies, air space, and external borders. It confiscated large areas of land
for the construction of settlements and gave settlers control over 87% of the
irrigated land in the entire West Bank. Furthermore, the agreement rendered the
Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) thoroughly dependent on imported goods
(70 to 80 per cent of GDP), paid for by either indirect taxes – collected by
Israel and then transferred to the PA – or external aid.
In light of this dependence on Israeli goodwill,
the ability to engage in economic activities came with the price of
surrendering to the occupation says Ismail
Hanieh. He further delineates how the economic set-up
under Oslo succeeded in aligning the interests of the Palestinian business
elite, the PA bureaucracy and parts of the PLO with those of the occupation. Hanieh
states,
"The two-state strategy embodied in Oslo has produced a social class that draws significant benefits from its position atop the negotiation process and its linkages with the structures of occupation. This is the ultimate reason for the PA’s supine political stance."
This process further divided Palestinian society,
not only along regional lines but also along class differences. When it comes
to the Palestinians’ dependence on external aid, the OPT have become the highest per capita recipients
of aid worldwide. Without foreign assistance
they would not be able to sustain the extensive public sector, which employs
about a quarter of the workforce.
This development has been especially drastic
in the field of agriculture where sustainable independent agriculture is
gradually replaced by service industry, exemplified by John
Kerry’s Palestine Economic Initiative (PEI), which envisions special economic
zones (SEZs) in order to create industrial parks. To make space for the
industrial parks, the PA removes farmers from their land by buying the land at
enforced low prices or simply confiscating it – an
absurd situation in which Palestinians are displaced not only by Israel but
also their own representatives. The farmers are mostly supposed to work
in the industrial parks, turning them from productive self-sustaining farmers
into labourers. Especially, in the Jordan Valley, the most fertile part of the
West Bank over which Israel wants permanent control, farmers
fear the envisioned industrial park will become a packaging facility for the
produce coming from the agribusiness of the settlements.
The zones rely on Israel for transfer, movement, and access of tax revenues and
threaten to put Palestinian companies out of business. They produce nothing,
while the OPT are in turn forced to buy more agricultural products from Israeli
settlements. The initiative brings benefits for Israeli companies, especially
in illegal settlements, but makes Palestinians more dependent
on Israel, as the zones depend on Israel for transfer, movement and access of
tax revenues and threatens to put Palestinian companies out of
business. The PEI thus benefits Israeli companies,
especially in illegal settlements, but undermines Palestinian aspirations for
independence and sovereignty, as it erodes their ties to the land, one of their
few remaining sources of power and autonomy. Sansour and
Tartir argue,
"In the context of a brutal military occupation whose primary aim is to colonise the land and appropriate the resources that are integral to the growth that this model guarantees, the PEI not only makes no sense, it undercuts the very foundations of Palestinian survival and resistance."
Profits will go to the business elite close
to the PA and Israeli settlers. This way the PEI ensures the complicity of
large sections of the Palestinian economic elite as their financial success
becomes ever more dependent on Israeli good will and cooperation.
A much more complete dependence has been
created in Gaza by Israel and through reconstruction efforts. While the West
Bank is becoming economically more dependent on Israel, Gaza has already been
entirely reliant on Israel. Sara
Roy argues that,
decades of “expropriation and deinstitutionalization had long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for development.”
In addition during
the almost biannual military operations in Gaza Israel destroys the barely
existing infrastructure, only increasing Gaza’s dependence. Gaza depends on
Israel for food, electricity, water, construction material, medicine and every
thing else. This is the biggest obstacle for reconstruction: import of any of
the necessary goods is prevented by the illegally imposed Israeli siege of
Gaza, worsened
now by the closure of Rafah and the destruction of tunnels into Sinai.
Reconstruction efforts only focus on rebuilding houses – arguably the most dire
and urgent need – but in doing so, the allocation of funds helps Gazans survive
but ignores the deeper problem at hand: dependence on Israeli benevolence.
Worse, Israel even stands to profit
financially from the reconstruction, as it is free to tax the money pledged to
rebuild Gaza and by forcing the international community and Palestinians to buy
cement from Israeli companies.
To conclude, international efforts to
rebuild and develop Palestine create more dependency on Israel and make
Palestinians reliant on money flowing in from the outside to sustain this
current model. The PA therefore puts the needs of the international community
ahead of its own people. With the international community to closely
involved, it carries much of the cost for reconstructing Gaza, aid eventually
pays part of the cost of the occupation – an issue I
will explore in the third article of this series.
 |
| “This community centre was built and destroyed with funding from the American people.” ©Mark McGuinness |
Funding the occupation
"[I]nternational aid has rendered the occupation cost-free. It has even enriched Israel's economy."
The cost of and the responsibility for
occupying the Palestinian territories is increasingly carried by other actors
than Israel. The beginning of this development is the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East in 1949 with the purpose of providing emergency
response to the Palestinians displaced during the war surrounding the
foundation of Israel. With the signing of the Oslo
Accords this logic was further extended to incorporate the PA itself and today
even the politics of reconstructing and rebuilding Gaza are subject to it.
The Oslo Accords were supposed to be the
beginning of an independent Palestinian state. A semi-autonomous Palestinian
authority, intended to become a full-fledged state, replaced the Israeli
occupation in (parts of) the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Instead
this interim setup became permanent, with the PA standing between the vision of
achieving independence and the reality of cooperating with Israel. For Israel,
Oslo symbolized the possibility to portray itself as generous partner in
negotiations, granting Palestinians self-administration, to benefit from the
loosened boycotts from Arab neighbours, all the while Israel managed to
consolidate and deepen its control of Palestinian lives by ‘subcontracting’
the occupation to the PA. This is most clearly visible in the way Palestinian
armed resistance forces – created under Oslo out of the existing armed groups
and envisioned to protect Palestinians (as they did during the second Intifada)
– have become security
forces focused on policing and eradicating internal resistance against the
occupation.
Regarded as collaborating with Israel and enforcing
the occupation by many Palestinians, Abbas referred to security cooperation
with Israel as “sacred.”
This statement, as contradictory it might seem, makes sense from Abbas’
perspective. Security forces have become essential for the PA, nowadays “a
lucrative industry and a comfortable hub for the political-economic elite […], increasingly
detached from the circumstances of the population” to protect their interests,
safety and wealth (Dana
2014).
PA security forces have tortured prisoners, arrested protestors, activists, and
journalists, and assisted the Israeli military in arrests – all funded and supervised by Europe and
America.
With more than a quarter of the PA budget allocated to security and
with about 45% of its employees in the security sector, the PA depends on the
US and the EU funds to continue the program. In 2013
the US provided $70 million specifically for this end and the EU directly
funded the authority with $227 million and further $406 million for economic
and security related purposes. This money directly subsidizes the PA’s
continued security cooperation and the oppression of their own people and it
also directly reduces the price Israel should have to pay for its continued
illegal occupation.
 |
| ©Mark McGuinness |
The same happens with money raised for the
reconstruction of Gaza: external actors carry the cost of reconstruction, while
Israel profits, and Palestinians become more dependent. Take for example the
way the UN has become part of a system of control and information gathering in
Gaza. To control the import of bricks, cement and steel reinforcing – dubbed as
“dual-use”
materials because they can also be used to build tunnels instead of houses –
Israel has managed to persuade the UN to set up a broad system of oversight
where every item of dual-use material will be monitored all the way from the
factory to the building it is intended for. To this end a database of suppliers
– few factories are chosen and most are Israeli – and consumers – information
about the damage done to a building, ID numbers of the family living there, GPS
coordinates and further personal information – is planned. But for materials to
reach either a family rebuilding their house or the PA an official building,
Israel needs to give its approval.
The UN would be heavily involved in monitoring and inspecting the entire
process and provide all the gathered information
to the PA, which in turn shares it with Israel.
In the end, Palestinians are under more
surveillance and control than ever, with the UN
as integral enabling part of the occupation. An attendee at the presentation of
this envisioned system of oversight and reconstruction, referred to
it as, “the next stage of Israel’s
blockade of Gaza […] now, the international actors are being embedded and made
complicit in the siege.” In its attempt to ‘help’ Palestinians, the
UN is willing to accommodate Israeli demands to such an extent that is becoming
part of the occupation’s infrastructure, rendering it ‘better’ and easier for
Israel to sustain. Israel also stands to profit directly from this way of doing
reconstruction: Palestinians are forced to buy most cement from Israeli
companies, such as Nesher
Israel Cement Enterprises, which is itself making profits from the
construction of illegal settlements and the Separation wall in the West Bank.
Israel also profits indirectly by taxing the money intended for reconstruction.
 |
| Spotted at a supermarket in Gaza where residents sell UNRWA donations to buy other more urgent necessities. ©Mark McGuinness |
With the international community paying for
reconstruction, while allowing Israel to benefit financially and entrench its
control and surveillance of the lives of Palestinians, the failure to hold
Israel accountable for its actions renders the international community
complicit in the injustice inflicted upon Palestinians. In order to avoid this
absurdity, it is high time to hold Israel accountable
for its actions, otherwise the circle of destruction and reconstruction will
continue with international funds paying for the damages and Israel receiving
up to one third of all funds raised for reconstruction and aid.
Donors and the international community are well aware of this problem: the UN
Conference on Trade and Development found that 45 cents
for every dollar produced in the OPT, flow back to Israel. In the final article
of this series I will examine the international community’s wider approach to
Palestine: I analyse how the international community imposes
its model of development on Palestinians, an approach skirting the political
aspect of the Israeli occupation at the heart of the Palestinian struggle.
Depoliticizing the Palestinian struggle
"Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is man-made, the result of deliberate political choices."
Ignoring the underlying structural political
inequalities is generally one of the fundamental flaws in development aid. In
the case of Palestine, the international community spends billions of dollars
on state building, institution building and economic development in the hope, as Wildeman
and Tartir argue, that Palestinians’
economic wellbeing will make them more likely to accept painful compromises
during negotiations. Best example are the aforementioned Special Economic Zones,
which are supposed to boost the economy but ultimately cannot do so because
their success depends on the cooperation of the occupier who is not interested
in flourishing Palestinian businesses. This approach favours economic olutions
for political problems.
Without addressing the occupation as one of
the reason behind most economic, social and developmental problems of
Palestinians, every attempt to impact Palestinian lives for the better is
doomed from the onset. To address Palestinian grievances is to address the
injustice inflicted on them by Israel. Ignoring the political aspect will again
and again lead to situations in which Israel destroys what has been build with
aid money. Sara Roy
aptly summarizes this situation where,
"the most important factor in Palestine’s economic decline is not reduced aid levels but movement and access restrictions and the suspension of revenue transfers. In [...] the continued absence of a political settlement [...], international aid can only help Palestinians survive and nothing else."
The occupation is obviously not the only
challenge for Palestinians, but this issue prevents the solution of any other
problem. This holds true for the OPT in general but even more so for Gaza where
the biggest problem is the Israeli occupation and siege, condemning the small
land strip to destitution.
But the international community treats Gaza
as if it was struck by natural disaster and spends large sums of money (though
still not enough) on rebuilding houses, delivering medical supplies, and food.
At the same time Israel’s culpability and responsibility is politely ignored.
Gaza is no humanitarian crisis. Framing Gaza’s persisting oppression as mainly
a humanitarian problem, strips Palestinians of their political rights and turns
them into “beggars who have no political identity and therefore
can have no political claims,” states Sara Roy.
Failure to hold Israel accountable for its actions has dire consequences:
firstly, international aid, especially when it aspires to go beyond helping
Gazans to survive, cannot achieve its goals while the occupation
remains in place; secondly, it renders the
international assistance to Gaza a substitute
for Israeli accountability.
 |
| Gaza after Operation Protective Edge in 2014. ©Mark McGuinness |
Conclusion
"[A]id is being used to sustain a failed peace process as well as the Israeli occupation itself."
These quotes epitomize the arguments I have made in
this series of articles, in which I have delineated the attitudes and
approaches leading to a situation where the UN has become part of the
occupation of Palestine. This situation is the direct result of shutting out
Hamas and Gazans, of promoting policies leaving Palestinians more dependent on
the goodwill of their occupier, of treating Palestine as apolitical
humanitarian catastrophe, and of not holding Israel accountable. Consequently,
international assistance can only help Palestinians to survive. Rather than
actually improving the situation, aid divides Palestinians, renders them more
dependent, depoliticizes the conflict and exempts Israel from all
responsibility.
Worldwide acceptance of this despicable process of
continued destruction of Palestinian lives and homes is decreasing rapidly. Several Latin American countries recognized Palestine as a state and
parliaments in EU
member states passed resolutions
calling for the recognition of an independent sovereign Palestinian state. The Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement
(BDS) is gaining ground, especially in the field of academia. This is exactly
the site of agency from which change and pressure on Israel can and will be
expected.
This begs the question of what can be done on
the part of international actors. International actors – states, international
organisations, and international civil society organisations – need to stop
undermining Palestinian unity at every step of the way. This also makes sense
in light of the fact that no agreement on the future of Palestine can be made
without including Hamas. The political nature underlying developmental, social,
and economic challenges – meaning the occupation – in Palestine needs to be
addressed by international actors and not ignored: instead of working with the
occupier, the occupation itself needs to be challenged. Finally, it is
paramount for international actors to hold Israel accountable for its actions.
--------------------------------------------------------------
*Stefanie Felsberger ist Forscherin am Access to Knowledge for Development Center an der Amerikanischen Universität in Kairo, Redakteurin bei shabka. Nebenbei versucht sie in einem Buchklub zu beweisen, dass Leute immer noch viel und gerne lesen, und zwar ganze Bücher.
** Dieser Artikel ist zuerst auf shabka.org als Artikelserie erschienen.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen