ETHNIC CLEANSING BY STARVATION
By Rania Awwad
Palestine Chronicle, Opinion
(Palestine)
August 30 2002
A US-financed assessment of the
overall malnutrition level among Palestinian children, released this month by
the US Agency for International Development (USAID), found that one in five
Palestinian children under the age of five now suffers from chronic or acute
malnutrition.
This astonishing statistic is on par with impoverished
nations such as Chad and Nigeria, and actually surpasses rates of child
malnutrition in Somalia and Bangladesh. Such figures, the report noted, are
"considered an emergency by most humanitarians and public health officials." The
report points to Israeli-imposed closures and sieges of major civilian centers
as the direct and primary cause.
We typically think of famines as being
caused by natural disasters (droughts, overgrazing) or by crises that result in
the displacement of large populations from their lands (wars, ethnic strife).
The situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, however, is a startling
aberration since it is clearly a man-made disaster intended to specifically
target whole civilian populations. Most importantly, it can easily and
immediately be reversed.
Today, Israeli military sieges are literally
imprisoning families within their homes for days at a time, meaning that people
cannot leave their homes to work, buy food, go to the doctor, or send their
children to school. Military checkpoints and roadblocks are restricting commerce
and the transport of food supplies. Workers cannot travel between Palestinian
towns, while farmers and manufacturers are unable to deliver their goods to
shops and markets. People have exhausted the money they can draw on from
relatives and connections on the outside.
The USAID report also revealed
that about one quarter of West Bank Palestinians have had to sell personal
possessions to put food on the table. The World Bank recently determined that as
many as 62 percent of Palestinian families are now living on less than two
dollars a day. As a result of these obstacles, increasing numbers of families
are skipping meals or reducing their food intake because eventually they run out
of money and assets to sell.
Even before the current Israeli
re-occupation which began on June 20, many Palestinians relied on aid from the
Palestinian Authority and the UN World Food Program (UNWFP). With its ministries
and institutions flattened, the PA can no longer serve in this role, and the
UNWFP has recently announced an emergency operation to cope with what they call
"dramatically deteriorating living conditions in the Palestinian
Territories."
But how can the slow starvation of a whole population be
stopped when that very starvation is being altogether denied by the Israeli
government and ignored by the US Administration? Major General Amos Gilad,
Israel's coordinator of government affairs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was
hardly ruffled by the USAID findings. In fact, he asserted that "hunger is when
people have swollen bellies and fall over dead. There is no hunger
yet."
Discovering that dismissive denial of facts is not working, the
Israeli authorities are now moving to soften criticism with much-hyped symbolic
gestures. Israel recently announced its intention to release about seven percent
of the 600 million dollars in Palestinian tax revenue it has seized since the
start of the Intifada, as well as its intention to reissue work permits for
Palestinians to cross from the West Bank and Gaza to their jobs inside Israel.
These measures, however, are hardly sufficient. Much more needs to be
done.
It is important to understand that the collective punishment
policies pursued by Ariel Sharon's government against the Palestinians are not
reactive but deliberate, and are intended to serve a specific and well- defined
political purpose. Sharon is the head of the Likud Party, which to this day vows
never to permit the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan
River. Sharon's solution is to depopulate as much as possible the Occupied
Palestinian Territories by making life for its citizens unbearable. And what
could be more unbearable than watching your children cry themselves to sleep
from hunger, night after night?
What is most alarming is that Sharon may
very well be having his way. As recently reported in the Jerusalem Post (an
English-language Israeli daily), 80,000 Palestinians have allegedly left the
Occupied Palestinian Territories for Jordan and other nations to seek economic
relief for their families. In parallel, private Israeli efforts have been
pursuing their missions of "helping" any Palestinian who wishes to leave the
West Bank or Gaza. As the president of one organization which seeks to assist
Palestinians to "permanently emigrate" put it: "Our aim is to empty the state of
Arabs". Another group, Gamla, founded by former Israeli military officers and
colonists, has published similar recommendations on its website in a
nine-thousand-word manifesto titled "The Logistics of Transfer." It argues that
the mass expulsion of every Palestinian is "the only possible solution" to the
Palestinian- Israeli conflict and further makes the claim that this is
"substantiated by the Torah"
The starvation of captive Palestinians is
nothing less than the muffled ethnic cleansing of a whole people. As always,
these matters should be of serious concern to US citizens given that our
diplomatic, military, and financial support have long allowed Israel to pursue
with impunity such policies which contradict our own cherished political values
and commitment to human rights. It is time for us to speak up. We must not be
complicit in the decimation of a whole people.
Rania Awwad, a
Palestinian-American, is a doctoral student at The George Washington University
and the Washington, and the DC Regional Coordinator for Palestine Media
Watch.