Dinner with Condi & the Fate of Gaza

By Conn Hallinan

There is a moment in Jeffery Goldberg’s New Yorker
profile of Brent Scowcroft, George Bush Senior’s former
National Security Advisor, when the current
Administration’s combination of arrogance and
cluelessness crystallize. Over dinner, Secretary of
State Condoleeza Rice tells Scowcroft that the ’good
news’ from the Middle East is that Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon is pulling out of Gaza, the first
step toward resolving the issue of a Palestinian state.

According to Scowcroft, he replied, ’That’s terrible
news. For Sharon this is not the first move, this is
the last move ... when he is out, he will have an
Israel that he can control and a Palestinian state
atomized enough that it can’t be a problem.’

Rice bristled and, says Scowcroft, ’We had a terrible
fight on that.’

It is difficult to find oneself on common ground with a
man like Scowcroft, a protégé of serial killer
extraordinaire, Henry Kissinger. He was part of the
team that green lighted Indonesia’s occupation of East
Timor, which, according to the UN, killed over 200,000
people. There is a cold whiff of death about the man.

But he gets Ariel Sharon.

Maybe it is because, like Sharon, he is an ex-general,
and understands the centrality of deception in the
business of war. And the key to understanding the
Israeli Prime Minister, says Knesset member Yossi
Sarid, is to remember, ’Sharon is a deceiver.’

A close-and chilling-examination of the Gaza
Disengagement Plan by Sara Roy in the London Review of
Books makes that abundantly clear. ’Whatever else it
claims to be,’ writes Roy, ’the Gaza Disengagement plan
is, at heart, an instrument of Israel’s continued
annexation of West Bank land and the physical
integration of that land into Israel.’

Roy, a Harvard economist, has worked in Gaza since 1985
and is the author of numerous books and studies. Her
current work is funded by the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation.

Almost three decades of occupation has turned Gaza into
one of the poorest and most desperate regions in the
world. Unemployment is upwards of 70 percent, and
somewhere between 65 percent and 75 percent of its
residents live under the poverty line. Places like the
Jabalya refugee camp have three times the density per
square mile as Manhattan.

Gaza has long been a poor place, but it has become
measurably worse in the last five years. According to
the World Bank, the poverty rate has more than doubled
since 2000. A Harvard study projects that, by 2010,
Gaza will need to create 250,000 jobs a year just to
keep pace with its population growth. It is also
desperately short of classrooms, teachers and health
clinics.

The World Food Program found that 42 percent of Gazins
are ’food insecure,’ defined as a ’lack [of] access to
safe and nutritious food essential for normal growth
and development.’ An additional 30 percent are ’food
vulnerable.’ Some 13.2 of Gaza’s children suffer from
’body wasting,’ and one in five have moderate anemia.

The Disengagement Plan will make all of this worse,
because a major goal, according to the plan, is ’to
reduce the number of Palestinian workers entering
Israel to the point it ceases completely.’

Keep in mind that Israel began integrating Gaza and the
West Bank into its economy right after the 1967 war.
Both areas-especially Gaza-became pools of low wage,
skilled labor for everything from construction to
agriculture. Palestinian lands were confiscated for
settlements and roads, and the native economy was ’de-
developed,’ a classic strategy of colonial powers from
Ireland to Indonesia.

’Decades of expropriation and deinstitutionalization
had long ago robbed Palestine of its potential for
development, ensuring that no viable economic (or
political) structure could emerge,’ says Roy.

Added to that is the destruction waged by the
occupation forces in Gaza and the territories.
According to the UN Conference on Trade and
Development, the Israeli Army has inflicted $3.5
billion worth of damage since 2000. ’The Occupied
Palestinian Territory has lost at least one fifth of
its economic base over the last four years as a
consequence of war and occupation’ the UN report
concludes.

When Rice told Scowcroft that the Gaza disengagement
was the first step in the creation of a Palestinian
state, she was either being disingenuous or hadn’t
bothered to read the Plan. ’It is clear that in the
West Bank,’ the document reads, ’there are areas which
will be part of the state of Israel, including major
Israeli population centers, cities, towns and villages,
security areas and other places of special interest to
Israel.’

That plan is already well underway. The ’security’ wall
has already isolated 242,000 Palestinians (10 percent
of the population) in a closed military zone between
Israel’s border and the western side of the wall.
Another 12 percent are separated from their lands by
settlements or settlement roads. When the 425-mile wall
is completed, Palestinians will have access to 54
percent of the West Bank.

While the Israelis argue that the wall is only a
security measure, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni told a
conference in Caesarea that ’One does not have to be a
genius to see that the fence will have implications for
the future border.’

Within the wall, the network of settler roads and
tunnels that give freedom of passage to 400,000
settlers, effectively imprison three million
Palestinians. A Palestinian can no longer drive from
the West Bank to Jordan. The two roads running through
Jericho in the south and Nablus and Tubas in the north
have been designated ’settlers only.’

The Sharon government recently announced a plan to
double the number of settlers in the Jordan Valley, an
act that would effectively split the West Bank down the
middle. He also told Reuters that the Valley was a
’security zone’ that Israel would not relinquish.

According to former Knesset member and Gush Shalom
leader Uri Avnery, ’Sharon does not make a secret of
his real intentions: to annex to Israel 58 percent of
the West Bank.’ Avnery adds that since no Palestinian
leader would be a partner to such a ’solution,’ Sharon
plans to unilaterally implement all this, ’backed by
force, without any dialogue with the Palestinians.

Indeed, Sharon’s Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz, claims
’there is no one to talk to’ about peace, and that
Israel will have to wait ’for the next generation’ of
Palestinian leaders to conclude a peace agreement. What
Mofaz’s statement means, chief Palestinian negotiator
Saeb Erekat says, is that Israel intends ’to perpetuate
its occupation of Palestinian territory indefinitely.’

The roadblocks, land seizures, and daily humiliations
Palestinians go through are all part of a design. Its
aim is to make life so unbearable for the Palestinians
that they will leave, in what Sharon’s former Tourism
Minister, Benny Elon, calls a ’voluntary transfer.’

’Transfer isn’t necessarily a dramatic moment, with
buses and trucks loaded with people,’ human rights
activist Gadi Algazi told the daily Ha’aretz, but a
continuing ’strangulation under closures and sieges
that prevent people from getting to work or school,
receiving medical services, and from allowing the
passages of water trucks and ambulances, which send the
Palestinians back to the age of the donkey and the
cart.’

While Rice and the European Union successfully
pressured Israel to open Gaza’s border with Egypt,
exports from Gaza to Israel have been cut in half.

Israelis pay a heavy price for the settlements as well.
According to Peace Now, the occupation costs $1.4
billion a year. ’The settlements,’ says Amir Peretz,
the new leader of the Labor Party, ’have emptied out
the budgets of education and welfare of the social
periphery and increased the social gap in Israel.’

Since 1988, child poverty in Israel has increased 50
percent, according to government’s National Insurance
Institute. One third of Israeli children live below the
poverty line, and Israel has the dubious distinction of
having the second largest gap between rich and poor in
the developed world (the U.S/ is number one). It also
has the highest poverty rate among 65 year olds in the
Western world.

Henry Siegman, former executive head of the American
Jewish Congress, points out that the Israelis have a
partner’ if they want one. According to a recent survey
by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey, the
majority of Palestinians want a ceasefire, the militias
disarmed, and they place ’improving their lives’ over
’ending the occupation.’

Yet for the most part, the gates to Gaza remain locked.
The Israeli government is planning to add 6500 homes to
West Bank settlements, and while it did move 8,500
settlers out of Gaza, it also built accommodations for
30,000 more in the West Bank. The roads and the wall
devour Palestinian lands, and targeted assassinations
and raids continue. All of this, argues Siegman,
invites a terrible retribution.

’Measures that collectively punish the Palestinian
public and undermine efforts to revive Gaza, if not
reversed, will lead Palestinians to the conclusion that
their optimism was misplaced,’ he writes. ’If that
should happen, no one should be surprised if the
intifada returns with unprecedented fury.’

[Conn Hallinan is a journalist and an analyst for
Foreign Policy in Focus.]