By Haidar Eid – Gaza
“We were just obeying orders!”
“There is no defence in obeying illegal orders. Remember Nuremberg?!”
— Fictional dialogue with an Israeli officer
In mid-May, The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned of the imminent collapse of the Gaza Strip saying, in a grim statement, that: “The scarcity of energy and the severe shortage of fuel in Gaza have damaged all aspects of life in the Strip…” The statement warned of “looming crisis” in the public health and environment sectors due to lack of energy.
And back in September 2015, the UN warned that Gaza could be “uninhabitable” by 2020. At the time, the report made it clear that Gaza’s GDP had dropped by 15% in 2014, and unemployment had reached a record high of 44%, with 72% of households being food insecure! The report concluded that Gaza’s de-development had been accelerated by the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014.
Some years earlier, Israeli media had revealed that the IOF had calculated the number of calories that Gaza’s residents would need to consume to just survive and avoid malnutrition.
And even years before that, Dov Weissglass, adviser to the Israeli PM, had summed up Israeli policy towards the most densely populated area on earth: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Decades of demonizing Palestinians, in general, and Gazans, in particular, have led to their dehumanization and to the proliferation of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations about them such as: “they are weak, sick, dangerous, fundamentalists, terrorists, ugly, black, backward, poor, uncivilized…etc. The decades-long slow genocide inflicted on them and their incremental death, therefore, is NOT registered by the world’s conscience!
As much as Apartheid Israel tries to normalize this “incremental genocide” and takes every possible measure to justify it, the world must stand up against it by heeding the BDS call made by Palestinian Civil Society. We fully understand that the deliberate withholding of food or the means to grow food or the access to food in whatever form is yet another strategy of Israel’s occupation, colonization, and apartheid in Palestine and, therefore, should be viewed as an abnormality, even a pogrom!
But, what we in Gaza, cannot fathom is: Why it is allowed to happen?!
– Dr. Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. He is also a one-state activist and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He contributed this article this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
