[News] Freedom Flotilla exposes international community's failure

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Freedom Flotilla exposes international community's failure
Allegra Pacheco, The Electronic Intifada, 28 May 2010

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11301.shtml

The Freedom Flotilla of nine vessels sailing to the Gaza Strip is 
exposing the partisan nature of the response of the United Nations 
and the international community to Israel's three-year siege on Gaza. 
The siege -- enforced by land, air and sea -- has blocked the import 
and export of supplies, goods and persons in and out of the Gaza 
Strip for 35 months, punishing 1.4 million Palestinians in the tiny 
territory. More than half of Gaza's population are children and 
nearly 80 percent of the population lives in poverty. Ninety percent 
of the natural sources of water are undrinkable, and school and 
health services continue to deteriorate, 17 months since Israel's 
military invasion of Gaza in 2008-09.

UN and international aid agencies have sent in limited food and 
humanitarian supplies to Gaza which managed to prevent starvation and 
the spread of disease. In an effort to cause the fall of the Hamas 
authorities in Gaza, Israel has prohibited the UN and humanitarian 
organizations from sending in the amounts and the type goods that 
they deemed essential for redevelopment. Therefore, the aid has never 
been enough to stop the deterioration of livelihoods and critical 
services like water and sanitation, education and health.

Key principles of humanitarian action include that the aid be 
delivered with neutrality and impartiality, it should "do no harm" to 
the people and that it not be used to advance political objectives. 
These principles have been severely lacking in the international 
humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip.

Throughout the blockade, it was well-known by the humanitarian and 
relief actors, including the most senior UN humanitarian officials, 
that their aid was failing to meet the critical needs of the 
population, especially the reconstruction needs which emerged after 
the extensive destruction from Israel's military invasion. The United 
Nations Development Program has just issued a report to this effect 
stating that:

"[W]hile some recovery is taking place, the realities on the ground 
show that the international community is, by and large, rendered 
ineffective in addressing the needs of people in Gaza, whether by 
default or by design. In fact, in view of the scale of the needs, 
international assistance in Gaza is tantamount to tinkering at the 
edges. ... Depriving people from their right to pursue a dignified 
life should raise an issue of conscience."

Indeed, in the last two years of the blockade, the weekly average for 
humanitarian supplies going into Gaza hardly ever reached more than 
20 percent of the total goods Israel allowed to be imported. Israel 
benefited from the limited aid since it made the siege tolerable and 
reduced the urgent need to "break" it.

Despite this, in the three years of the blockade, the UN and 
Western-backed relief organizations continued to collaborate and 
comply with Israel's prohibitive blockade guidelines for the import 
of goods and maintain their limited aid amounts. They never took any 
real steps to break the siege nor to send in the prohibited but 
critical goods through other routes like the sea, air, the Rafah 
crossing on the Egyptian border, or even through the hundreds of 
smuggling tunnels which the World Bank reports constitute the main 
import route for most of Gaza's goods. Each one of these alternative 
routes would have entailed challenging the two main political 
positions of the Quartet (the US, EU, Russia and UN) and other 
Western donors on Gaza -- supporting Israel and Egypt and the 
non-recognition, no-contact policy with the Hamas authorities. Even 
the London-based international humanitarian nongovernmental 
organization coalition, InterAction, comprised of 150 humanitarian 
organizations including Oxfam and Save the Children UK, rejected 
calling for goods to be sent via the sea as part of their large 
campaign against the siege last winter.

Not that nothing was attempted. Aside from the limited aid, the UN 
and international aid community held many private meetings with the 
Israelis and issued statements, and more statements, each one 
half-heartedly calling for Israel to "open the crossings" and warning 
of the disaster to come. They also spent almost half a year and 
dozens of hours debating and drafting a three-page document called 
the "Minimum Framework for the Delivery of Humanitarian Assistance to 
Gaza," which did not focus on how to ensure that enough aid would 
reach the people of Gaza, but ironically, on the minimum necessary to 
ensure neutral and impartial humanitarian operations. Describing 
itself as providing a modus operandi for the provision of assistance 
to Gaza, the framework offered no concrete plan of action on how to 
meet the humanitarian needs of Palestinians in Gaza (i.e. by delivery 
through alternative routes), and made no call, let alone suggestion 
that the siege must end.

The great heavily-funded halls of these enormous relief operations 
continue to buzz with talk, rumblings of new strategies, monitoring 
frameworks and expensive but limited assistance operations. However, 
the bona fide humanitarian leadership and inspiration to break the 
siege and end the suffering in Gaza, is not emanating from these 
halls today, but rather from the deep waters of the Mediterranean Sea 
aboard the Freedom Flotilla.

History will be the final judge.

Allegra Pacheco is an attorney and worked for an international 
humanitarian organization in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for 
seven years.



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