Prison Break from Gaza, a Global Experiment in Planned Starvation
By Charles E. Carlson
The unheralded news is never without compelling reports from a little place called Gaza. Compelling news because families meet with violent death every day. On January 21st, tens of thousands of Gazans, led by Hamas, staged a mass prison break into more or less friendly Egypt. Now they must return. What does Israel have planned for them, and how can they survive execution by famine?
Gazans for the first time face slow starvation; their elected leaders, Hamas, face selective execution. On January 25, three days after the great prison break in Rafah, Israel attacked the town from the air, without provocation, executing four more Hamas members.
Those few who have visited Gaza, as has this writer, have met a family bonded oriented society, with many factions and two religions, Islam and a small traditional Christian minority. They are held together by their common plight: imprisonment. I know of no other place like it.
Every major presidential candidate has traveled to Israel to pay homage and seek its blessings, but not one of them went inside Gaza. Neither did they go to China, France, or Germany to seek support in the American election; so why to Israel? Israel has more direct political clout and media coverage in Washington than any other nation. Therefore, only Israel can move to starve an entire population while Congress and the press look on. Worst of all, the most powerful sect of American “Christians,” broadly called “evangelicals,” applauds in programmed ignorance as Israel commits genocide in the name of Christian Zionism. It is among these Christians that a breakthrough must, and will come first.
How is it those two competing tribes, Israeli Zionists and Philistines, having a combined population less then one of our middle sized states, cause so much controversy? It is not because our press goes out of its way to dramatize life in Gaza; to the contrary, they ignore it. A recent Zogby poll says the major media hardly mentioned President Bush’s recent trip to Israel, attempting to cool down the public attention toward his visit. Mr. Bush saw little of the Philistines (the Arabic word for Palestinian) except for leader Mahmoud Abbas, who Mr. Bush ignored for the most part. Furthermore, according to the same poll, very few Americans care about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, being more concerned about economy issues more near to them. The Zogby poll seems to tell us the press makes the people of Gaza irrelevant by ignoring events there.*
We can not get away from the news of Gaza in spite of all the efforts of our press and our administration to stifle it. What we see and hear is too human, too real, too dramatic to ignore. Something unprecedented has gone on in this little strip of towns and villages four miles wide and 20 miles long: 300,000 people broke out for a buying spree in Egypt, and the foreign press covered and filmed it. Most returned to Gaza, the gulag that they call home.
Gaza is unique in all the world, for it may be the only walled in society. In places its barriers are as high as the Great Wall of China. But Gaza’s walls and fences were built not to keep intruders out, but to keep the citizens in.
Recent rare news clips have exposed for the first time, the wall that separates southern Gaza from Egypt for about four miles. It is worth noting that neither Egypt nor Gaza built this wall. Israel built it when it took over policing of Gaza’s small south border with Egypt. Israel managed the Rafah Gate when I went there in 2003. Israel devastated a kilometer wide no-man’s land inside the wall where when they saw anyone from overhead approaching it, often killed them. In 2005 Egypt took over managing the no-man’s land by agreement with Israel.
Egypt’s Gaza wall has, according to Hamas, Israeli cameras and computers in place monitoring everyone who comes and goes, identifying and remotely scrutinizing each face. Egypt is compelled to cooperate with Israel, making it more or less a jail keeper.
When the Gazans breached the wall, the USA was quick to tell Egypt that $100 million in US Aid to Egypt would be suspended, pending its forcing the Gazans back inside their bottle. Egypt has even cut off the flow of supplies to its own citizens near the Rafah gate to discourage Gazans from their buying spree. Stores are reported bare.
A certain Arab Christian Gazan, who I know but will not name, told his family member in the USA by cell phone that he went to see the holes in Gaza’s border. There, he said, he saw husbands and wives and reunified families that had not seen each other in years, meeting at the breach in the wall.
Only about five percent of the Gazans broke out into Egypt Monday, January 21, 2008. They did it out of hunger and desperation; they went to buy whatever they could find in the poor Egyptian villages outside the Rafah gate. Most who found food quickly returned to their families. Now Egypt says they must remain inside, like a prisoner whose leave is over, and Egypt is forced to seal them in. If Egypt does not do so, it will face the combined wrath of the USA and the pit bully of the Middle East, nuclear Israel.
This leads to the obvious question: Why do the powers in Washington want to put the Arab genie back in the bottle? What is the USA’s plan for the 1.4 million Gazans? Mr. Bush must have a plan; else what did he, Prime Minister Olmert, and the other Zionists he met with, have to talk about?
Israel’s plan is no secret; it is simply cushioned by our press and politicians. Zionists have no intention of sharing a state with any other race or religion: Period. Political Israel is not a democracy, as we are told, and is firm in demonstrating it never will be. Israel allows no equality for other religions, nor do non-Jews participate, except under its Apartheid-like control, so there will be no shared state unless the world forces a democracy upon Israel.
Israel has also made it clear the Palestinians can have a state of their own, but only if Israel has the power to police it, as they police Gaza and the West Bank now. Therefore, there is no place in Israel’s plan for 4 or 5 million Philistines with dreams of self-determination. Israel’s ambition is for virtual slave labor camps that are pretend states. Prior to its uprisings, Gaza provided thousands of day-laborers for Israel’s fields and factories. This is what Zionists in Israel wants.
Today Israel has complete control over every Philistine, so why would they give this up? To keep the status quo, Israel sees the need to starve the Gazans so that the survivors will become more submissive. Israeli leaders insist two states will never work because the Philistines will remain in revolt as long as they breathe. Former Prime Minister Arial Sharon had offered to conduct an annihilation of every Arab, if political Israel could stand the international pressure from his acts. He was dead serious and he is far from the only Israeli leader who believes this way.
Prime Minister Olmert’s velvet-glove plan calls for hunger and hardship, short of starvation combined with systematic execution of Hamas leaders who were duly elected by the Gazans. How do we know this? He says so.
It is increasingly obvious that the USA has no problem with experimental genocide of the Gazans by starvation and selective execution. The famine is already well underway. We saw many news clips of seemingly healthy and vigorous men, and a few women, crossing the wall, but we did not see the sick nor did we see those with no money to buy or barter for goods. Gazans have had a full year of malnutrition to weaken many. These we do not see on film strips. Starving people tend to stay at home. So do moneyless people. Those who started the dusty foot march into Egypt had money to spend.
The economy of the Gaza society has been systematically destroyed by isolation. Few Gazans have anything with which to buy food, even when it is abundant and cheap. But food is no longer cheap or abundant, even in the US supermarkets. Now it costs $5.00 for a gallon of milk in some US cities. Imagine the prices in Rafah where everyone is desperate? We know the cost of bread is up over 300%.
Gaza is, at present, the only caged society that depends on its jailers for its substance. We published an amazing account of how 100% of Gaza’s wheat for bread is elevated over its north wall and dumped on the ground. If no on the outside brings the wheat, or if the flow is interrupted by Israel, or if there is no fuel to move and grind it into flower, Gazans go hungry. (link)
Both Israel’ Prime Minster Olmert and the Bush Administration have made it clear they will allow the Gazans to starve…a little, just so it’s not too obvious. What other possible reason can there be for such a walled ghetto than to keep the prisoners in and keep observers out? The Philistines are not supposed to come out of their gulag alive! Prime Minister Ehud Olmert discreetly avoided mention of food when he told a Zionist Knesset faction:
“We have no intention of making their lives easier… as far as I am concerned, every resident of Gaza can walk because they have no gasoline for their vehicles, because they have a murderous regime…”
Israel has systematically forced Palestinian attrition for 59 years– attrition by immigration for those able to leave, and attrition by violent death for thousands. Mass starvation is, for the first time, an option. A million missing Philistines will be overlooked by most in the magnitude of a world wide starvation tragedy… a tragedy that may someday be remembered in infamy as “The Famine of the Food Burners.”
