Beyond the worsening shortage of food, mattresses, blankets and clothes for Gaza’s 1.4 million beleaguered residents, Israel’s continued closure of most access points is depriving the United Nations of paper to print out a human rights programme to teach children to eschew violence. “I’m being obstructed in printing out the human rights curriculum that we’re all so proud of having developed here and that is more important now than ever before to get on with the teaching of the responsibilities that go with human rights and to focus on making sure that these kids grow up with the right values,” the Director of Operations in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), John Ging, said today.
I'm a firm believer in addresing the underlying attitudes in this conflict if peace is to be achieved, so this makes me really sad. I'm sure Israel has plenty of reasons they could give for why they aren't letting paper through, but frankly I'm sick of their reasons, especially ones I suspect are really just wrapping for political purposes.
“I don’t want to hear any more from people on the Israeli side the arguments about who might or might not benefit… The ordinary people on the ground are paying the price, not the politicians, and of course the inevitable consequences are entirely predictable: we’re going to have more desperation, more misery, more violence,” he said.
Mr. Ging, who has repeatedly warned that increasing misery in Gaza feeds extremism, cited UNRWA’s food distribution as a prime example of “how impossible it is being made for us.”
Of course, not only Israel is to blame. Shame on Hamas for stealing aid from UNWRA workers. Shame on anyone who is hindering UNRWA relief, especially those who purportedly speak for the people.
Mr. Ging also stressed that this week’s theft of UNRWA aid supplies at gunpoint by Hamas police was another challenge facing the Agency, adding that it was the first time the Islamist organisation had done so, and it must be the last. Hamas said it would give out the aid itself.
“I don’t know what they have done with it. I sincerely hope they have it intact because we want it back, that’s our message to them,” he stressed. “We won’t take seriously any commitments they give us vis-à-vis future action until they first and foremost return the aid that they stole and secondly make public their assurances that it won’t happen again, i.e. stop the nonsense that they’ve been coming out with trying to justify what they did and accept that it was an egregious error on their part.”
While the amount stolen was small, “it’s massive in its significance because they’ve crossed a red line,” he said.
I predicted, as did many others, that all this latest conflict would do is further flame extremism on both sides. And as usual, Gazans are being made to suffer. As Mr. Ging said:
...statements by Israeli opposition politician Binyamin Netanyahu, tipped by public opinion polls to win elections next week, that Israel has not yet finished the job in Gaza and Hamas must be toppled had caused heightened anxiety among a population that had already been at the receiving end of a massive military onslaught.
I don't know, maybe the extremism has been brewing regardless of the conflict, but I would certainly not say it has helped. And what if real efforts at peace had been made, instead of politicspoliticspolitics? But what we have now is definite growing extremism. Take the upcoming elections in Israel.
A THREE-HORSE race for much of the campaign, the Israeli election due on February 10th has a new hopeful. It is now a four-horse affair, with a long trail of also-rans. According to the polls, Yisrael Beitenu, previously a minor right-wing party led by Avigdor Lieberman, has been doing surprisingly well. ...
Mr Lieberman, the dark horse, is branded by the left as racist, even fascist. He wants Israeli Arabs, nearly 20% of the population, to pledge allegiance to the state and be required to do military or national service. “No loyalty—no citizenship” is one of Yisrael Beitenu’s election slogans, along with “Only Lieberman understands Arabic”. He also proposes a repartition of Palestine so that areas of Israel with large Arab populations can be transferred to the Palestinian Authority in return for areas of the West Bank settled by Jews. The Arab communities in question are unanimously and vehemently opposed to the plan.
And in Gaza:
...here in the ruins of El Atatra, perhaps the biggest damage has been to any memory of a shared past and any thought of a shared future.
“We used to tell fighters not to fire from here,” said Nabila Abu Halima, looking over a field through her open window. “Now I’ll invite them to do it from my house.”
To even talk about the conflict is drowned in conflict and polarization. I read a pretty interesting article about the difficulties on reporting about the war. Luckily, I am not a journalist so I am free from the burden of trying to carefully articulate things so as not to offend anyone. Not that I want to offend anyone! But I did notice that by posting a Facebook status tracking the many Palestinian deaths during the war, I was often deemed to somehow support Hamas. Well, no. I can sympathize with both sides, once I try to see what it is they are seeing. But it is quite disproportionately Palestinians who are dying and suffering, and, being an American, I am surrounded by friends and family who only know the Israeli position.
I just found this article today about what, normatively speaking, will be useful dialogue for achieving peace.
In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace.
...
Many of the respondents insisted that the values involved were sacred to them. For example, nearly half the Israeli settlers we surveyed said they would not consider trading any land in the West Bank — territory they believe was granted them by God — in exchange for peace. More than half the Palestinians considered full sovereignty over Jerusalem in the same light, and more than four-fifths felt that the “right of return” was a sacred value, too.
As for sweetening the pot, in general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents. Israelis and Palestinians alike often reacted as though we had asked them to sell their children.
This strongly implies that using the standard approaches of “business-like negotiations” favored by Western diplomats will only backfire.
…
Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.[Politicians on bothsides mirroed these results] Making these sorts of wholly intangible “symbolic” concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn’t compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot.
And another sad, beautiful example of why we should care:
Tears drop on her hands, hands that he had once kissed passionately, on her engagement ring, that ring he chose for her, on her cheeks that oust the redness of burning coals within her. The funeral is over now; his body is away, but the memory of him is as vivid as his own being yesterday. Dreams of a wedding, now written in the history of numerous deaths, is beyond of what reality can bring.
Her name is Hanaa, what means felicity. But, Hanaa shall know no felicity for many years now, overcoming the killing of her lost love, Mohammed, who was killed by IOF whilst at the Abu Middeen police station on December 27th, 2009. Red roses are thrown over Mohammed's tomb as he is carried through the streets of his neighborhood. Hanaa, her head bent towards the ground, stroking the ring on her right hand, nods her head accepting a reality imposed, one of which she had no choice in determining.
This is the case of many here in Gaza, where love has been targeted, where intimacy has been destroyed, where sentiments are victims of slaughtering and massacres. "We are just numbers in the media," says Hanan, a student at the Aqsa University in Gaza. "But, behind the numbers are stories, are loves lost, are childhoods devastated, choked."
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