RAMALLAH: Another week of violence between Gazan militants and Israel is a glimpse into an inevitably grimmer future for its 1.6 million residents. An estimated 86 “projectiles" were fired into southern Israel from Gaza, while at least four Hamas fighters were killed by Israeli forces in targeted assassinations. Roughly a dozen Israelis were injured; at least seven Gazans have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since Monday, and another eight have been injured. An Egyptian-brokered truce was brief; an armed Gazan militia took credit for several rockets fired into southern Israel well after the indirect agreement to postpone fighting had taken effect. At the time of writing, Egyptian negotiators are attempting to renegotiate a truce. Israel “under attack" Corporate media outlets almost uniformly present the recent uptick in violence as the sole fault of Hamas. Doing so, however, ignores the daily realities of Israel's suffocating siege of Gaza, which ignites—not curbs—rises in militancy. In a colorblind editorial published by the Huffington Post, an Israeli human rights lawyer argues that publications such as the New York Times are steeped in anti-Israel bias, ignoring the fact his editorial is being published by a profit-driven media outlet that bears almost no visible differences from the NYT, especially in respect to coverage of Israeli-Palestinian issues. “I'm angry that there are those who call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the Jewish state, but are silent in the face of Palestinian terror," the author writes, displaying his own resounding silence to the weekly carpet bombing campaigns to which Palestinian civilians are exposed by Israeli forces. Indeed, the “terror" of which he speaks is one of the most covered topics in the Western media establishment, in which Palestinians specifically and Arabs in general are ubiquitously presented as rag-tag bands of terrorists foaming at the mouth and craving the destruction of the Jewish state and Western civilization in its entirety. The effects of Israel's siege on Gaza Gaza's 1.6 million inhabitants, already impoverished from dispossession and almost 40 years of direct military occupation, are suffocating under the airtight Israeli siege. Over 1.1 million registered refugees live in eight camps across Gaza. Bombing campaigns do not just damage buildings and take lives; they interrupt economic life in sector from commerce to production. A United Nations report released in August concluded that Gaza will be “unlivable" by 2020: unemployment hovers around 45 percent; the population is expected to increase by half a million in the next eight years; the government operates on 80 percent aid dependency; and over 90 percent of water is unsafe for consumption. Furthermore, the report projects a 60 percent increase in water needs. According the CIA World Fact Book, Gaza's fertility rate is the highest in Middle East and North Africa and the 29 highest in the world (out of 229 countries). Hamas has done little to ease these crushing burdens, but Israel is undeniably the immediate source of this astounding poverty. Last week, Israel's horrifying policy of calorie counting was made public. Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, conducted a three and a half year legal struggle that resulted in the Israeli government having to release a document in which it planned in diligent detail how many calories each Gazan needed to float just above malnutrition. A total of 2,279 calories, Israel decided, was enough for the average person. From this total, the number of truck deliveries per aid was calculated, after which an additional nearly ten percent was deducted for “culture and experience." Israeli statesmen boldly proclaim that the only thanks they received for disengagement from the narrow coastal strip was rockets, but the institutions of occupation in fact continue to control almost every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza—from preventing innumerable hospital visits to blocking Gazans from studying in the occupied West Bank; from deciding who can travel in Gaza's waters to limiting how much food each person can consume. The Israeli government's attitude towards Gaza was aptly summarized by a former adviser to Ehud Barak in 2006, who crudely said of the need for an economic siege on Gaza: “It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die." But if the siege is not enough to kill them, the bombs are. Gaza's peaceful fighters held hostage Nonviolence simply doesn't sell to a Western readership, it seems. Gaza has produced innumerable voices who demand freedom through peaceful expressions, but few seem to notice or care. As far as Israel or Western governments are concerned, Gaza is all Hamas. Over two years ago, Gaza Youth Breaks Out published a much overlooked manifesto in which young activists declared that they would no longer be held prisoner by both Israel and Hamas. After two years of a virtual media blackout that enabled hardliners to muffle GYBO's voice, one activist expressed his frustration: Since 2006, the ongoing siege punishes us daily—we could mention all the UN conventions it violates, as if that wasn't mentioned enough already. Collective punishment for all of us, for having elected the wrong party, for having held one Israeli soldier who is now free, while thousands of our prisoners languish in Israeli jails. Collective punishments for being Palestinians, for being born in Gaza. In the eyes of the Israeli government and the Western press, this young Gazan, arrested several times by Hamas for organizing peaceful rallies and protests, is no different than violent Islamist factions. The Gaza policy is not about security The endless violence against an entire population penned in a strip that has effectively become an overcrowded prison is about hegemony more than security. Israeli warplanes shower Gaza densely populated refugee camps so frequently that it is hardly noticed when news of civilian deaths breaks. These saturation bombing campaigns are always justified as the only means by which Israel can defend itself against Hamas rockets. The entire siege, it is argued, is vindicated on these grounds alone. Indeed, when solidarity flotillas attempt to deliver harmless goods such as medicine and food, the unarmed activists are attacked by Israeli commandoes. Last week, Israeli warships, a helicopter, and highly trained commandoes armed with automatic weapons boarded the Estelle flotilla in international waters and towed it to the nearby port of Ashdod. How medicine and food present a threat to Israel's existence, however, has yet to be explained. Israeli elections offer no hope The coming elections offer no hope for Palestinians, least of which those suffering in Gaza. It seems there is no one able to challenge right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Even if there were a genuine threat to Netanyahu's office, there is not a single mainstream Israeli politician who has proposed to lift the siege on Gaza. If one did decide to propose an alternative to the present Gaza policy, it is unlikely he or she would be able to garner support in the Knesset for a measure undoubtedly considered “extreme" in the Israeli political landscape. Even Hadash—a coalition that includes communist, leftwing non-communist, and Arab nationalist parties—has decided to join forces with Meretz, a leftwing Zionist party, in the upcoming elections. This week, it was announced that PM Netanyahu's Likud party will merge parties with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Beitenu, an ultraconservative party that calls for the popular transfers of Arab citizens of Israel to the Palestinian Authority and the complete, ostensibly permanent isolation of Gaza It includes appalling figures such as Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Considering recent threats by Israeli military officials to renew the direct occupation of the Gaza Strip and start going “house to house," and the likelihood that a staunch, uncompromising ultranationalist, inherently anti-Arab Netanyahu-Lieberman coalition is Israel's immediate political future, there is no relief in sight for the 365 square km strip that has been transformed into something much worse than an “open-air prison."
