Gaza, more than 60 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing
The Gaza Strip is a territory of 360 km2, where 1.5 million Palestinians live nowadays. Gaza received a big portion of the Palestinian refugees that were expelled of their own lands from November 1947. This completely modified its demographic structure, and today it is one of the more densely populated territories in the world. With the armistice of 1949 Gaza remained under Egyptian military control. The possibilities of work for the population were very poor and the conditions in the refugee camps were extremely hard. Thus, it is not surprising that the first resistance movements emerged in the refugee camps of this territory. The movements linked to the Muslim Brotherhood found from the beginning support in the despair of Gaza’s population, which saw in the movement a way for anticolonial struggle and a path for subsistence. Additionally other resistance movements e.g. Marxists, Panarabists and nationalists, also took form in the 50’s and the 60’s.
After the Six Day War in 1967 Gaza, as well as the rest of the occupied territories, remained under Israeli occupation, in what they called “territories under custody”. The first policies after the war were directed to give continuation to the expulsion of Palestinians initiated in 1947. The 590.000 Palestinians that were living in the West Bank and the 380.000 that were living in the Gaza Strip, proves the dimensions and the difficulty of this policy. Palestinian uprisings in the Jabbalya camps in 1971 partially stopped the expulsion processes in Gaza. In that same moment the Israeli government was initiating a policy of settlements in the occupied territories and imposed a military regime that repressed harshly any type of opposition to the occupation.
The economy of the Gaza Strip started depending, from 1967, exclusively on Israel and on the international community support. Israel imposed in the occupied territories a free market capitalist system that allowed itself to establish a neo-colonial relation through which it could acquire cheap work force and trade consumption goods in the territories, without carrying any type of inversion, nor creation of infrastructures that would allow an improvement in the life conditions of the Palestinians. In 1971, 50 % of the workers of Gaza had to cross at a daily basis the military controls of Israel, overcoming the so-called “market of slaves” for being able to carry a working day without any type of security or labour right, under miserable salaries; nonetheless, better ones than those in the neighbouring territories. The repressive policies, the difficulties to work and the highly dense demography continued being decisive factors in the future of Gaza.
In 1987, there were 850.000 refugees in the Strip with a median age of 27 years. In this context we can situate the outbreak of the first Intifada in its refugee camps and its extension to the rest of the occupied territories. A non-violent civil uprising in resistance to the occupation, to which Israel responded with the use of the military force provoking numerous deaths and wounded among the Palestinian population, especially in the Gaza Strip. Curfews, orders of closure of public buildings, the house (and other goods) demolitions, had strong consequences in the life conditions of the population, especially in the field of education, health, and social services. Likewise it can be explained in that moment the growth and the formation of groups under the influence of political Islam or the Islamic Jihad, and its policy of resistance to the occupation.
The beginning of the peace process, the creation of the PNA and the international aid created some hope in the harsh living conditions of the Palestinian population. Nevertheless, aid and the peace process, were conditioned by the rhetoric of Israel’s security, and invested in police forces, and established control mechanisms rather than improving the living conditions of the Palestinian population, still living under harsh conditions and by the violence imposed by the occupation.
Despite the peace agreements, that explicitly banned any action able to modify the reality in the occupied territories, in Gaza, for example, the settler population in 1996 had increased by 62%. And between 1967 and 2005, Jewish settlers stole the land and water at the expense of the local population. At the same time, during the peace process, Israel was depending less and less on Palestinian workers and began to isolate Gaza territory under the pretext of controlling the armed resistance, which often included suicide bombings by Islamic groups, constructed in the mid-nineties a wall of electrified wire and guard towers that turn Gaza into a prison camp.
After the peace process failure in 2000, repression policy in the occupied territories increased. In the Gaza Strip, the difficulty of maintaining the settlements, their hostility toward the Palestinians and their protection in a densely populated area, explains the “disconnection” plan led by Ariel Sharon, held in 2005 with the evacuation of approximately 9,000 settlers from the strip. Colonization and the “disconnection” were accompanied by the destruction of farmlands and trees. It is estimated that only between June 2006 and May 2007, Israeli forces destroyed about 12.900 dunums of agricultural land, as well as pulling up 2.775 trees in West Bank Gaza remains under the Israeli occupation, because all its frontiers (by land, sea and air) are directly or indirectly controlled by the Israeli forces, including the Rafah crossing which connects with Egypt. This situation violates the IV Geneva Convention and many other international treaties. At the same time Israel has imposed hard restrictions to the sea access of the Palestinian fishermen, making almost impossible the development of their daily work (nowadays they can only go as far as three nautical miles from the coast line). This, of course, increases the unemployment, creating a big crisis in this economic sector and cutting an important flood of food supplies to the population of Gaza.
In response to the victory of Hamas in the legislative elections held in 2006, Israel and the international community started a blockade to the Palestinian region of Gaza, in opposition to the popular will. The struggle between the Palestinian political parties ended with the control of the West Bank by Al-Fatah, while Hamas held its power in Gaza, that it’s the reason why Israel cut all its access to the region, letting them without supplying. Since the 12th of June of 2007 the access of any kind of raw material it’s forbidden, including non humanitarian trade objects and essential equipment for the sewer maintenance and the water supply network. In November of 2007, a total of 3500 jobs had been lost due to the closure of 438 construction enterprises.
In December of 2008 and January of 2009, Israel attacked Gaza in a military operation where 1400 Palestinians died (most of them civilians) and many infrastructures, homes and public buildings of the Palestinian towns and villages where destroyed. The report of the investigation commission created by the United Nations says that during the attack, war crimes and crimes against the humanity had taken place, and that it violated many treaties of the Public International Laws. The report recommendations and the investigations for war crimes and crimes against the humanity had been forgotten by diplomatic and politicians, and the different countries and international organizations haven’t developed a strong response, resulting de facto in the impunity of the Israel authorities. The total closure of the Gazan borders prevents, until today, the chances of the rebuilding, the supplying and the development of the palestinian territory. The United Nations spokesman, referring to the human rights in the occupied territory, has showed how the siege blocks the entry of building material required for the rebuilt. He has denounced the restrictions in the electrical supply and the serious economical consequences that fact implies. And he has also denounced the politics in the construction of an underground wall, in order to destroy the net of tunnels that works as a lifeguard in this situation. That happens in Gaza Strip, meanwhile the West Bank continues under occupation, his inhabitants separated by a wall from their land and relatives, and completely divided in several military control points and colonies. By now, there are more than 4.5 million of palestinian refugees. And the palestinian population living in Israel suffers for social discrimination.
The civil initiatives to break the siege in Gaza Strip have been violently resist by Israel, as happens with the Freedom Flotilla. The weak answer of the international community leaves the civil society with no option but to push their governments and the international organizations to put an end in the more than sixty years of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
As Ilan Pappe said, in the past the free world faced difficult situations like the one in South Africa and Serbia, making decisions and using strong resolute sanctions. Only a permanent and serious pressure from the occidental governments to Israel would give it the message that the strategy of the force and the politic of oppression are neither morally nor politically accepted by the world where Israel wants to belong. He affirms that the initiatives of peace have been focused in the territorial aspect of the conflict, and have completely forgotten basic issues like guilt, rights restitution and justice.
International solidarity to Gaza
In August 2008, 44 people from 13 different countries, embarked on two fishing boats and broke for the first time in 41 years the naval blockade of Gaza Strip. Those 44 people were able to show the world that regular people with strong wills, deep faith in human rights and equipped with well planned strategies can overcome an illegal blockade imposed by one of the strongest armies in the world. In 4 more trips, boats of Free Gaza Movement (FGM) were able to successfully break the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The success of the mission of FGM inspired others, like the Viva Palestine, to break Gaza´s blockade.
After the 2008 Israeli invasion in the Gaza Strip in December, the missions of FGM were confronted with military attacks by Israeli forces. The state of Israel is acting as Pirates of the Mediterranean, ignoring all international and sea laws. Israel hit a ship against the Dignity in December 2008, threatened to sink the ship Arion in January 2009, to kidnapit later in June. In December 2009, and with the collaboration of the state of Israel, the Egyptian authorities did not allow 1400 international activists from the Gaza Freedom March aiming to enter Gaza through the Rafah border and to march with the Palestinians of Gaza to the Erez border in another attempt to broke the blockade of Gaza.
It is during May 2010 when around 750 people from more than 40 countries around the world get to organize in a direct action with the goal of breaking one more time the ongoing blockade imposed on Gaza Strip: that international cooperation leads to the Freedom Flotilla. Six ships carrying more than ten thousand tones of humanitarian aid and a big group of activists set sail aiming to meet in international waters and sail all together towards Gaza. At dawn on 31st May the Freedom Flotilla was attacked by Israel naval forces resulting in 9 deaths and more than 50 injured. That raid triggered a global condemnation of the State of Israel and the evidence in front of the whole world of the necessity for continuing taking actions against Israel’s impunity in solidarity with the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.
As a result of the participation of several Spanish citizens in the Flotilla, the project Rumbo a Gaza is born pretending to become a solidarity platform which, together with the other international organizations, may become a model for the work to break the blockade on the Gaza Strip, to alleviate the humanitarian crisis of its population and to condemn the genocidal polices of the State of Israel.
