[fse-esf] Once again on Gaza

[Dave Stockton]

Dear comrades,
 
For those who do not believe that the situation in Gaza is not extremely
urgent, that the international antiwar and anticapitalist movement must do
something NOW to force the western governments/Israel and the PNA to lift
the siege of Gaza they should read the article below from the International
Herald Tribune. 
 
Reasons to take action can be solely
 
(a) humanitarian - i.e. sympathy for the suffering of the 1.5 million people
of Gaza or also 
(b) political- a desire not to see the reactionary alliance of the USA and
the EU/Israel/Abbas PNA succeed in their attempt to crush Hamas for daring
to win the last elections and refuse to recognise Israel and the sell out
"peace deal" underway.
 
But in either case it is frankly outrageous to refuse to mobilise the full
coordinating powers of the ESF and its affiliated networks out of fear of
offending forces sympathetic to Abbas and hostile to Hamas.
 
The UK based Palestine Solidarity Campaign has launched a petition which
demands the lifting of the blockade on all Occupied Palestinian Territories
and reinstating funds and aid to Gaza, plus calling for the release all
elected Palestinian parliamentarians, and all other Palestinian political
prisoners.
 
In addition the International Solidarity Movement is planning to send a ship
to Gaza with essential supplies. WE the ESF should be campaigning in all
sections of the working class and progressive movement, especially the trade
unions, to make this issueinto an impossible to ignore, mass campaign. The
IHT article makes it clear that things will reach critical proportion in
Gaza in the coming weeks, not months.
 
We must act now.
 
Dave Stockton
League for the Fifth International



Work towards a just solution based on international law and an end to
Israeli occupation
   
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International Herald Tribune
Monday July 9 2007

Economy in Gaza edges toward crisis
By Steven Erlanger and Isabel Kershner
Monday, July 9, 2007

JERUSALEM: In the month since Hamas took over Gaza, routing Fatah forces
there, the economy of the territory is slipping again toward crisis. With
the main commercial crossing into Israel closed since June 12, only
essential items of food and medicine are entering Gaza, and what is left of
the commercial sector is shutting down.

On Monday, the UN agency responsible for caring for the nearly 70 percent of
Gazans who are refugees or their descendants announced that it had halted
all its building projects in the territory because it had run out of basic
construction supplies, like cement.

The halt, to about $93 million of projects employing 121,000 people,
includes new schools, water works, health centers and sewage-treatment
plants, a major issue in Gaza, where the old temporary sewage reservoirs
have already once broken their banks, said the agency, the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA.

Agency officials say they are rapidly running down their reserves of food
and other supplies.

Regular Gaza factories and businesses, already hit hard by intra-Palestinian
violence, are running out of materials they need to operate - and to provide
jobs.

A report last week by Gisha, an Israeli advocacy group, said that up to 75
percent of the 3,900 factories operating in Gaza on the eve of the closure
of the Karni crossing have had to cease production, according to the
Palestinian Federation of Industry.

Unable to import raw materials or export finished products, the factory
closures are forcing as many as 30,000 more families to rely on aid to
survive.

Ali al-Hayak, director of the Palestinian Federation of Industry, said,
"Israel is not punishing the government; instead it is punishing the
people."

At the heart of the issue is Hamas, the militant Islamic group classified as
a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European
Union. They do not want to work with Hamas or see Hamas succeed in Gaza, and
they are not in any hurry to reopen the Karni crossing to anything but
emergency supplies.

That is also true of the Fatah leadership in Ramallah, where the Palestinian
president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose Presidential Guards used to control the
Karni checkpoint, is not eager to ease Hamas's problems.

It appears to some Israeli officials and Western diplomats that Fatah is
continuing its efforts to squeeze Hamas by keeping Karni shut - just as
Egypt has agreed with Israel to keep the Rafah crossing closed to limit the
movement of individuals and money in and out of Gaza.

Some think that Abbas would rather see Karni stay shut for now.

"That is my understanding," said Representative Steven Israel, Democrat of
New York, who recently spent time with Palestinian leaders in Ramallah,
including the new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, and with Israeli leaders
like Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He quoted one senior Israeli official who
told him, "Let's see how Hamas feeds its children now."

So the anti-Hamas camp is grappling with a problem: opening Karni and Rafah,
which could help revive the expiring economy of Gaza, could also help to
strengthen Hamas and its chances of succeeding in Gaza.

All say they do not want ordinary Gazans to be punished for their leaders,
but only Hamas seems eager to reopen Karni. Israel says it will work with
the Palestinians once they organize themselves and come up with an internal
solution. But there are those both in Israel and in Fatah who prefer to see
Hamas try to cope with the pressures of its victory without helping a group
that sees itself at war with both of them.

At the height of the fighting, Israel closed down Karni, the main cargo
crossing on the Gaza-Israel border and the only one equipped for commercial
imports and exports. The Palestinian Authority's Presidential Guards, who
had previously secured the Palestinian side of the crossing and who are
loyal to Hamas's rival, Fatah, fled their posts.

With them vanished the Israeli-Palestinian agreements for running the
crossing, which had been designed to address Israel's deep-seated security
concerns.

"We woke up one morning and found Hamas gunmen in ski masks on the other
side," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Abbas has ordered his forces in Gaza, including the police, to stay at home,
and what is left of Gaza's tiny industrial base is on the verge of collapse.
Of the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in the impoverished Gaza enclave,
1.1 million already rely on food handouts, according to international aid
officials, and they are concerned that the numbers will grow.

"It was the dynamic of poverty that took us to where we are in the first
place," said John Ging, director of operations of UNRWA.

Both Ging and Regev say they are waiting for the Palestinians to come up
with some kind of internal agreement on how to administer the Palestinian
side of the crossings in a way that will meet Israeli security requirements.

"There has been no decision in Israel to keep the crossings closed on
political grounds," Regev said.

Yet when it comes to Karni, there seems to be a general ambivalence and
little sense of urgency in either Jerusalem or Ramallah, the administrative
capital of the West Bank, where Abbas has appointed an emergency government
with no Hamas ministers.

"We need to differentiate between punishing the people of Gaza and weakening
Hamas," said Nimr Hamad, an Abbas political adviser. "We don't want the
people to suffer."

But when it comes to practical solutions for reopening Karni, Hamad refers
the problem back to Israel. "The moment Israel is ready to discuss the issue
we will see what solutions are possible," he said.

In a statement on Monday about the crossings, Hamas said: "The leadership of
the Palestinian Authority tries to take advantage of the people's suffering
to achieve political goals."

There are people in Israel who oppose reopening Karni, according to Shlomo
Dror, spokesman for the Coordinator of Activities in the Territories, the
Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civil affairs. "We are
now discussing what constitutes humanitarian assistance," he said. "Some
people feel we should be allowing in water, electricity, and that's it."

As for the mood of the U.S. Congress, which had earlier been asked to
provide millions to help the Presidential Guard with training and to rebuild
the Palestinian side of Karni, Steven Israel, the U.S. representative, said,
"There is no appetite to fund Karni, no interest there."

Congress does support helping Abbas and Fayyad in the West Bank, he said,
adding, "Everyone agrees that Fayyad is our last, best hope."

The Israeli military moved quickly in conjunction with international aid
organizations to allow the passage of medicines and staples into Gaza,
mostly through smaller, secondary crossings like Sufa and Kerem Shalom, in
order to stave off a looming crisis of hunger and public health.

A UN report covering the week of June 25 to July 1 found that the emergency
imports into Gaza had met 70 percent of the minimum food needs of the
population there.

But Ging warns that at current levels, the assistance is a stopgap solution.

Since Karni is the only crossing equipped to handle containers, the process
of bringing in tons of products through smaller crossings, where everything
has to be transferred from Israeli trucks to Palestinian trucks, is
painstakingly slow and expensive.

So far, Ging's organization has been drawing on its large reserves in Gaza
to supplement the aid. But in less than six weeks, he says, "the stocks will
be running out and we will start getting into big trouble."