<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<h1 class="title" id="page-title">Who benefits from billions pledged
for Gaza reconstruction?</h1>
<div class="submitted">
<span property="dc:date dc:created"
content="2014-10-14T13:18:46+00:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime"
rel="sioc:has_creator">Submitted by <span class="username"
xml:lang="" about="/users/maureen-clare-murphy"
typeof="sioc:UserAccount" property="foaf:name" datatype="">Maureen
Clare Murphy</span> on Tue, 10/14/2014 - 13:18<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/who-benefits-billions-pledged-gaza-reconstruction">http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/who-benefits-billions-pledged-gaza-reconstruction</a></small></small></small></b><br>
</span> </div>
<div class="field-body">
<div id="file-29127" class="file file-image file-image-jpeg
media-element file-full" style="width:618px;"><br>
</div>
<p>A donor conference hosted in Cairo on Sunday to raise funds for
the reconstruction of war-devastated Gaza has <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/world/middleeast/us-pledges-212-million-in-new-aid-for-gaza.html?">boasted
$5.4 billion</a> in pledges from various Western and Arab
governments.</p>
<p>Yet Israel is the true beneficiary of this aid money. The
self-declared international community has once again footed the
reconstruction bill as it arms Israel with the weaponry and
ensures it the impunity that only rewards its brutal onslaught
on Gaza and essentially guarantees its repetition.</p>
<p>“This is the third time in less than six years that together
with the people of Gaza, we have been forced to confront a
reconstruction effort,” an exasperated US Secretary of State
John Kerry <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/world/middleeast/us-pledges-212-million-in-new-aid-for-gaza.html?">stated</a>
at the conference, as though this summer’s bloodshed was
something other than inevitable given all those arms Washington
lavished on Israel, along with the monetary aid and diplomatic
cover since the large-scale assaults in November 2012 and winter
2008-09.</p>
<p>Parties involved in the donor conference are making only the
most minimal efforts to pretend that the priority is the
survivors in Gaza, where more than one in every thousand of the
nearly 1.8 million Palestinians there, most of whom are
refugees, were killed.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority, based in the occupied West Bank city
of Ramallah, has already announced that half of the pledges
raised at Sunday’s conference will not even make it to Gaza.</p>
<h2>Gaza pledges diverted to Ramallah</h2>
<p>Instead, those funds will be <a
href="http://maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=732989">diverted</a>
to the Palestinian Authority’s budget for unspecified purposes.</p>
<p>Though the PA did not say how it will spend the money raised at
the Gaza reconstruction conference that it earmarked for itself,
“the security sector has grown faster than any other part of the
Palestinian Authority” in the past decade, as noted by Sabrien
Amrov and <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/people/alaa-tartir">Alaa
Tartir</a> in a recent <a
href="http://al-shabaka.org/policy-brief/politics/after-gaza-what-price-palestines-security-sector?utm_source=Al-Shabaka+announcements&utm_campaign=1809268646-Policy_Brief_Announcement+7_19_2011_PA&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a9ca5175dc-1809268646-407765893">policy
brief</a> published by the Palestinian think-tank <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/al-shabaka">Al-Shabaka</a>.</p>
<p>Last year, 26 percent of the PA’s budget was spent on security
(compared with just 16 percent for education, nine percent for
health and a minuscule one percent on agriculture, historically
the backbone of the Palestinian economy). Forty-four percent of
PA civil servants are employed in the security sector — more
than any other, Amrov and Tartir point out.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority — which has already <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/palestinian-authority-foils-new-gaza-war-crimes-probe">blocked</a>
efforts to bring Israeli war crimes in Gaza this summer before
the International Criminal Court — is led by Mahmoud Abbas, who
recently described collaboration with Israeli occupation forces
in the West Bank as “<a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/mahmoud-abbas-collaboration-israeli-army-secret-police-sacred">sacred</a>.”</p>
<h2>PA seizes opportunity</h2>
<p>More than forty Palestinians have been <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/month-pictures-september-2014/13920">killed</a>
by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far this year;
fourteen were killed during the equivalent period in 2013.
“Security coordination” is obviously not concerned with securing
the preservation of Palestinian lives.</p>
<p>As pointed out by Amrov and Tartir, “the armed resistance that
was once considered an inseparable part of the Palestinian
struggle for self-determination is being dealt with by the PA as
a form of dissent that needs not just policing but eradication
and criminalization.”</p>
<p>The current paradigm of security coordination, state Amrov and
Tartir, is “to criminalize resistance against the occupation and
leave Israel — and its trusted minions — in sole possession of
the use of arms against a defenseless population.”</p>
<p>As the Palestinian Authority which serves as the policing arm
of the Israeli occupation positions itself as the executor of
Gaza’s reconstruction, this will surely be used as an
opportunity for those who seek to dismantle the armed resistance
(which defended Gaza and demonstrated greater discipline and
tactical capability than it did during any prior confrontation
with Israel).</p>
<p>Though the PA has jockeyed for this role to sideline the Hamas
leadership in Gaza, any attempts to rebuild are subject to
Israel’s ultimate authority.</p>
<p>(It is worth noting that the Palestine Liberation Organization
<a href="http://maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=732802">told</a>
the Ma’an News Agency on Sunday that no date has yet been set
for implementing reconstruction projects in Gaza.)</p>
<p>Reminding observers who is really in charge, West Bank-based PA
ministers including Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah were initially
<a href="http://maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=732802">denied</a>
permits by Israel to visit Gaza, which remains under closure and
economic siege imposed by Israel and enforced by donor
conference host Egypt.</p>
<h2>“More than 50 years to rebuild”</h2>
<p>The international aid agency Oxfam <a
href="http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2014-10-10/money-pledged-gaza-donor-conference-could-take-decades-reach">warned
last week</a> that money pledged at the global donor
conference “will languish in bank accounts for decades before it
reaches people, unless long-standing Israeli restrictions on
imports are lifted.”</p>
<p>As the importation of basic construction material into Gaza has
been prohibited with few exceptions since 2007, and the supply
tunnels under the border with Egypt largely destroyed,
Palestinians are unable to rebuild.</p>
<p>Oxfam added that “under current restrictions and rate of
imports it could take more than 50 years to build the 89,000 new
homes, 226 new schools, as well as the health facilities,
factories and water and sanitation infrastructure that people in
Gaza need.”</p>
<p>No matter how much money international donors raise for
reconstruction, Israel determines what gets in and out of Gaza.</p>
<p>Truckloads of construction materials brought in to Gaza last
month were “designated for projects pre-approved by Israeli
authorities and to be implemented by international organizations
in Gaza,” the United Nations Agency for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs <a
href="http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_protection_of_civilians_weekly_report_2014_10_03_english.pdf">notes</a>
in a recent weekly monitoring report.</p>
<p>Israel’s total stranglehold on Gaza’s economy also applies to
exports — only <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/month-pictures-september-2014/13920">two
truckloads</a> of which were permitted through the
Israeli-controlled commercial crossing last month, the first
trucks of exports since June.</p>
<h2>Accountability or complicity</h2>
<p>The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National
Committee (BNC) condemns the failure to bring meaningful
pressure on Israel to end the siege that had brought the economy
to its knees even before the destruction it wrought on Gaza this
summer — during which 419 businesses and workshops were damaged,
with 128 completely destroyed.</p>
<p>“Donor money pledges are no substitute for holding Israel
accountable for its grave violations of international law,
including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and achieving
justice for the Palestinian victims,” the BNC <a
href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/2014/cairo-donor-conference-palestinian-civil-society-calls-for-public-scrutiny-of-aid-and-zero-complicity-with-israeli-violations-of-international-law-12738#.VDuKxZ11ggg.twitter">stated</a>
on Sunday.</p>
<p>“Israel’s blockade and repeated military assaults against the
occupied Gaza Strip are part and parcel of systematic Israeli
efforts to permanently separate the tiny Gaza Strip from the
West Bank and ‘get rid’ of its large Palestinian population,
most of them refugees of the 1948 Nakba with unresolved rights
and claims in Israel,” the statement adds.</p>
<p>The BNC criticizes international agencies including the United
Nations and the <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/icrc">International
Committee of the Red Cross</a> for operating “within the
confines of Israel’s policy of separation and collective
punishment.”</p>
<p>Without also adopting a comprehensive and binding military
embargo on Israel, donor states, international agencies and
nongovernmental organizations are complicit in an unjust and
illegal policy of collective punishment, the BNC makes clear.
And there is no mechanism of accountability to the Palestinian
public.</p>
<h2>Abandoning Gaza</h2>
<p>Given all of these realities, it is tragic but unsurprising
that young Palestinians in Gaza, facing unemployment rates as
high as 60 percent, have lost hope and are putting their lives
in the hands of smugglers in a bid to reach Europe and a future.</p>
<p>“This has never happened before … Even in the worst of times,
people never considered abandoning the Gaza Strip,” Sara Roy,
who has studied Gaza’s economy for three decades, told Bettina
Marx in an <a
href="http://en.qantara.de/content/rebuilding-gaza-the-back-of-the-gazan-economy-has-been-broken">interview</a>
for Deutsche Welle.</p>
<p>“The middle class has largely been wiped out,” Roy said.</p>
<p>Even the deliberate sinking of a ship carrying an estimated 500
passengers — many of them Palestinians from Gaza, the vast
majority of whom are presumed to have drowned — off the coast of
Malta last month <a
href="http://maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=732870">hasn’t
stemmed</a> the mass migration from the Strip via clandestine
tunnels.</p>
<p>In August 2012 the United Nations issued a <a
href="http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/104094048-Gaza-in-2020-A-livable-place.pdf">report</a>
studying whether Gaza would be a livable place in the year 2020.
But Gaza’s unlivable reality is already here.</p>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>