[News] Why is UN pushing for Gaza's surrender?
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Jul 20 17:53:53 EDT 2017
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/why-un-pushing-gazas-surrender
Why is UN pushing for Gaza's surrender?
Maureen Clare Murphy
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/maureen-clare-murphy> 20 July 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The new report on Gaza
<https://unsco.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/gaza_10_years_later_-_11_july_2017.pdf>
by a team led by Robert Piper, the United Nations’ chief humanitarian
coordinator in Palestine, makes for disturbing reading.
That’s not only because of the alarming statistics or “indicators” about
the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, of which there is no shortage in
the report.
That the situation in Gaza is untenable, its population living in a
pressure cooker that gets worse by the day, is clear to anyone who pays
attention.
The UN has previously predicted
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-gaza-un-idUSBRE87Q0OE20120827>
that Gaza would become “unlivable” by the year 2020.
Piper’s report “tries to look past the polemic and review – as we
approach 2020 – the socioeconomic, humanitarian and human rights
disaster that is unfolding in Gaza and to advocate on behalf of the two
million people trapped in this sad reality.”
Pushing for Gaza’s surrender
Yet what the report actually does is reveal how the UN has apparently
aligned with Israel and its international backers in pushing for Gaza’s
total surrender to its tormentors.
This is made evident with the background context provided in the report
which frames Israel’s economic blockade on Gaza as the response to
Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, which Piper’s report
perversely describes as a “coup.”
Hamas was the unexpected winner in the 2006 Palestinian legislative
elections held in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) and the Gaza
Strip.
Investigative reporting by David Rose in /Vanity Fair/ and a trove of
leaked documents revealed by Al Frazer
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-papers-and-gaza-coup/9200>
describe a 2007 coup attempt in Gaza, but not by Hamas.
Following Hamas’ victory at the ballot box, Israel and its allies,
principally the United States, spared no effort in undermining the new
Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government with the goal of restoring
power exclusively to Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based PA president
whose Fatah party lost the election.
After months of street fighting, Hamas and Fatah formed a “national
unity government” headed by a Hamas prime minister. The US then enlisted
Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/muhammad-dahlan> to rout Hamas
militarily in Gaza. This plot ultimately failed, and Dahlan’s US-backed
militias were run out of the territory.
According to the anodyne language used in the Piper report, Hamas’
subsequent administration of Gaza is deemed illegitimate because of its
refusal “to recognize the Middle East Quartet’s (EU, Russian Federation,
UN and US) demands to accept all previous agreements, recognize Israel’s
right to exist and renounce violence.”
In other words, the preference of Palestinian voters living under
Israeli occupation is null and void because Hamas does not subscribe to
the normalization program – including the requirement for active
cooperation <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/security-coordination>
with Israeli occupation forces – imposed by Israel and its international
allies, in contrast to the subservient role played by Abbas’ Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank.
This is the fundamental, irreconcilable political difference between the
American and European-backed Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The
impasse has compounded the socioeconomic deterioration in Gaza resulting
from Israel’s decade-long siege and half-century of military occupation.
“Right to exist”
The Piper report’s insistence on Hamas’ recognition of Israel’s “right
to exist” and the demand that it “renounce violence” should be further
scrutinized.
Why should Palestinians be forced to submit to demands that Israel
itself rejects <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29abunimah.html>?
Only on planet Peace Process would a resistance faction be demanded to
recognize an occupying state’s “right to exist,”
<https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/reclaiming-self-determination/> while
that same occupier has historically violated the Palestinian people’s
very right to life, wiping out families by the dozens
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/video-gazas-gaping-wound>
and killing more than one out of every thousand of Gaza’s residents
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-many-bombs-has-israel-dropped-gaza>
during its onslaught in the summer of 2014.
Israel violates Palestinians’ right to life so routinely that the weekly
extrajudicial executions
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/year-atrocities-palestine>
perpetrated by its forces go largely unreported by the mainstream
corporate media. Israel is not held accountable for its systematic and
daily violations of Palestinians’ most basic rights.
When Palestinians do use violent resistance against Israeli occupation
forces, as is their right under international law
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-uns-ban-ki-moon-and-oxfam-undermine-palestinian-right-resist>,
it has been characterized as “terror,” even by UN officials
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/police-assailants-killed-jerusalem-attack-youth-slain-raid>.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has in the past
bizarrely called on
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-un-telling-palestinians-protect-their-occupiers>
“Palestinian authorities to take all feasible measures to prevent
attacks on Israelis,” lumping in attacks on civilians with those against
occupation forces and suggesting that Palestinians have no right to
defend themselves against Israel’s threats to their very existence.
In the Piper report, Hamas’ military capacities are blamed for impeding
access and movement of people and goods to and from Gaza, particularly
“the development, stockpiling and firing of rockets capable of reaching
deep into Israel and the construction of sophisticated tunnels used for
kidnappings and terrorist attacks in Israel.”
In the report’s timeline of the siege, the first phase is portrayed as a
response to the capture (misconstrued
<http://www.aljazeera.com/focus/2010/06/2010628132553801841.html> as a
“kidnapping”) of an Israeli soldier by Hamas in 2006.
Israel’s winter 2008-2009 military onslaught in Gaza is not mentioned in
the timeline, and the 2012 and 2014 assaults only in passing. But the
number of rockets fired from Gaza is given with precise figures during
each phase of the siege, while regular Israeli airstrikes, shelling and
gunfire on the territory are not mentioned in the timeline.
Nor does the timeline mention Israel’s habitual
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-kanwisher/reigniting-violence-how-d_b_155611.html>
violations
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ben-white/numbers-speak-themselves>
of negotiated ceasefires
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/infographic-who-violates-ceasefires-more-israelis-or-palestinians>
that had drastically reduced levels of violence.
The omission of Israel’s regular strikes on Gaza, and the inclusion of
the number of mortars fired from Gaza, reinforces the lie that each of
Israel’s massive military assaults in 2008
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-fabricated-rocket-crisis/7927>,
2012
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/how-israel-shattered-gaza-truce-leading-escalating-death-and-tragedy-timeline>
and 2014
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/max-blumenthals-unflinching-book-gaza-war-must-not-be-ignored/14615>
were justified responses to rocket fire, rather than Israeli violations
of truces followed in good faith by Hamas.
“Terror”
And as for those tunnels, Piper’s report describes them as being used
for “terror.” Yet the UN’s own independent inquiry into the 2014 war on
Gaza states explicitly
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/balance-un-gaza-report-cant-hide-massive-israeli-war-crimes>
that tunnels were used by Palestinian groups to conduct attacks only on
“legitimate military targets.”
The Piper report is one of many from international agencies and human
rights groups expressing concern over and demanding unspecified
international action to improve the current situation in Gaza.
Like every other report before, it will be ignored by world powers that
view Palestinians in Gaza – most of them refugees from the lands on
which Israel declared its state, and nearly half of them under the age
of 15 – as surplus and expendable.
What is significant about the Piper report is that it demonstrates that
the UN – which brokered a secretive and illegal system that gives Israel
ultimate control
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/un-database-gaza-aid-may-give-israel-targets-attack-secret-memo>
over the rebuilding of homes and other civilian infrastructure it
destroyed in Gaza, allowing it to profit
<https://www.euractiv.com/section/development-policy/news/eu-source-gaza-reconstruction-aid-is-made-in-israel/>
from the reconstruction paid for
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/who-benefits-billions-pledged-gaza-reconstruction>
by third-party states – has totally capitulated to Gaza’s oppressors.
Reading between the lines of Piper’s report, one understands that Israel
controls everything that gets into Gaza, and everything that gets out.
It has a total chokehold on Gaza’s economy, whatever remains of it after
Israel destroyed or damaged 250 factories and 300 businesses in the
summer of 2014 alone <https://unispal.un.org/pdfs/QuarRep_GazaEconRpt.pdf>.
Genocidal aims
The Piper report obscures the reality that the devastating siege on Gaza
is a willful strategy to bring its population to their knees. It makes
no mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal aims to “send Gaza back to the
Middle Ages,”
<http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/israel-s-minister-of-incitement-1.479125>
their claims that “there are no innocents in Gaza … mow them down,”
<http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/michael-ben-ari-bugbear-of-the-left.premium-1.493375>
their calls to “concentrate” and “exterminate”
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/concentrate-and-exterminate-israel-parliament-deputy-speakers-gaza-genocide-plan>
Palestinians, or their demands to slaughter Palestinian mothers who give
birth to “little snakes.”
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-lawmakers-call-genocide-palestinians-gets-thousands-facebook-likes>
In Gaza, Israel aims to snuff out the last bastion of Palestinian
resistance against its settler-colonial project, an endeavor that
requires massive, genocidal violence to be maintained
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/gaza-massacre-price-jewish-state>.
Detached from this reality, the outcomes of Israel’s calculated policy
are treated by the Piper report as technical problems to be dealt with
by international development groups – groups that would not be needed if
there was real pressure to end the siege, to end the occupation, to
secure Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
In many instances in the report, damage to civilian infrastructure such
as schools and medical facilities is passively described as having been
incurred “during successive rounds of hostilities,” obscuring the fact
that they were systematically targeted by Israel’s sophisticated air force.
Meanwhile, a false parity between the Israeli military, massively
subsidized by the US and supported by EU members, and Hamas’ guerrilla
fighters is reinforced throughout the report, including in the
discussion of war crimes in Gaza.
The Piper report even says that “The State of Palestine is also
responsible for implementing its human rights obligations in the
entirety of the oPt, including Gaza,” using the insufferable jargon
employed by international agencies for the occupied West Bank and Gaza
Strip.
There is no State of Palestine – a reality the report concedes elsewhere
when it refers to “the future state of Palestine.”
There is only a quisling Palestinian Authority government in the West
Bank with extremely limited autonomy and which doesn’t even have the
authority to build a school in the 60 percent of the West Bank under
full Israeli military control
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israeli-home-demolitions-break-records-shatter-lives-2016>.
It is only there to serve as an enforcement arm of Israel’s occupation
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/mahmoud-abbas-collaboration-israeli-army-secret-police-sacred>
and to try to break Palestinian resistance
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-mahmoud-abbas-letting-children-die-gaza>.
Yet the Piper report laments that “the Strip remains beyond the reach of
the legitimate Palestinian Authorities and under Hamas control.”
The catastrophe in Gaza is not caused by acts of nature, it is one of
careful design and control. The situation born of Israel’s experiment in
human despair in Gaza
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-experiment-human-despair/6071>
will never improve so long as the genocidal state behind it is
whitewashed and appeased by the very institutions that are supposed to
hold it accountable.
--
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