People of Faith CT

by Stan Hellar
Middle East Crisis Committee
New Haven Register
Thursday, November 20, 2008

"She was forced to carry the body of her dead baby because the Israeli authorities had refused to let an ambulance drive her through the crossing."

This was a shocking detail in a "Letter from Gaza" that was published on the Web site of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

"Letter from Gaza" is a series of occasional letters written by Najwa Sheikh who lives in a Gaza refugee camp. She was describing walking across a checkpoint and seeing another woman returning to Gaza holding only one small bundle in a piece of cloth. The woman had been allowed to give birth in an Israeli hospital, but her baby died and she had to carry it home.

This is just one of the endless cruelties inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza by the Israeli government.

The United Nations aids 750,000 refugees in Gaza. Since Nov. 4, Israel has decided that the United Nations will not be allowed to bring in food to Gaza. Due to lack of supplies UNWRA has had to stop distributing supplies to Gazans.

Every three months, the needy get a new package of rice, flour, sugar and oil. On Saturday, it would have been the turn of about 20,000 Gazans to pick up food supplies.

They received nothing. The U.N. World Food Program, which feeds 130,000 Gazans who are not refugees, says it has enough food to distribute for four weeks.

Also, Israel cut off fuel deliveries to Gaza so the only Palestinian power plant shut down and one third of the people lost all their electricity.

It’s all designed to force the Gazans to overthrow their Hamas leadership or to get Hamas to agree to Israel’s terms. Where did we hear this logic before?

This was tried out in the 1990s in Iraq where U.N. sanctions were used in an effort to get Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. In Iraq the sanctions killed hundreds of thousands.

No one expects the Israelis to take it that far. They’ll bring it to the point of widespread hunger and utter destitution, but they’ll eventually "ease" the siege and allow just enough food to be allowed in to avoid outright starvation.

There had been a fairly well observed truce between Hamas and the Israeli government for five months, but on the night of our presidential election the Israeli army killed six men they said were digging a tunnel which they claim was being built to capture Israeli soldiers.

The Israelis could have contacted Hamas and demanded they do something, but no, they mounted an attack. After the killings, some 140 rockets have been shot from Gaza into Israel. One Israeli has been injured. Another seven or so Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in answer to the rocket fire.

In the midst of all this on Nov. 9, a boat called "The Dignity" was allowed by the Israeli Navy into the Gaza port.

Along with medical supplies, it carried 11 European parliamentarians and Amira Hass, the award-wining journalist for the Israeli paper Ha’aretz.

They met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh who told them that Hamas would be willing to accept a state with the 1967 borders.

Though Israel in theory wants a "two-state" solution, this statement had no effect on the Israeli government.

As it turns out, Ha’aretz a week later published an article saying that Haniyeh had made a similar offer in 2006 to the U.S. government via a letter hand-delivered by a Jewish American professor to the State Department. Neither the Bush administration nor Israel responded.

The American public has been content to allow Congress and the Bush administration to give total support to all Israeli measures against Palestinians.

Even in the midst of U.S. economic problems, our government decided this summer to raise Israel’s military aid to $30 billion over the next 10 years. However, the presidential election has shown that most Americans have rejected the path of the last eight years.

Will they also demand termination of the strategy of unending cruelty against Palestinians?

Stanley Heller is chairman of the Middle East Crisis Committee, a 26-year-old Connecticut human rights group. He can be reached atMECC, P.O. Box 3626, Woodbridge 06525.