[R-G] The war on Gaza's children

[Anthony Fenton]

The war on Gaza's children

Israel's sanctions are leaving a generation of Palestinian children  
poorly educated and hungry.
By Saree Makdisi
September 22, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe- 
makdisi22sep22,0,2737657.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

An entire generation of Palestinians in Gaza is growing up stunted:  
physically and nutritionally stunted because they are not getting  
enough to eat; emotionally stunted because of the pressures of living  
in a virtual prison and facing the constant threat of destruction and  
displacement; intellectually and academically stunted because they  
cannot concentrate -- or, even if they can, because they are trying  
to study and learn in circumstances that no child should have to endure.

Even before Israel this week declared Gaza "hostile territory" --  
apparently in preparation for cutting off the last remaining supplies  
of fuel and electricity to 1.5 million men, women and children -- the  
situation was dire.

As a result of Israel's blockade on most imports and exports and  
other policies designed to punish the populace, about 70% of Gaza's  
workforce is now unemployed or without pay, according to the United  
Nations, and about 80% of its residents live in grinding poverty.  
About 1.2 million of them are now dependent for their day-to-day  
survival on food handouts from U.N. or international agencies,  
without which, as the World Food Program's Kirstie Campbell put it,  
"they are liable to starve."

An increasing number of Palestinian families in Gaza are unable to  
offer their children more than one meager meal a day, often little  
more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit and vegetables are  
beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken are impossibly  
expensive. Gaza faces the rich waters of the Mediterranean, but fish  
is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has curtailed  
the movements of Gaza's fishermen.

Los Angeles parents who have spent the last few weeks running from  
one back-to-school sale to another could do worse than to spare a few  
minutes to think about their counterparts in the Gaza Strip. As a  
result of the siege, Gaza is not only short of raw textiles and other  
key goods but also paper, ink and vital school supplies. One-third of  
Gaza's children started the school year missing necessary textbooks.  
John Ging, the Gaza director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency,  
whose schools take care of 200,000 children in Gaza, has warned that  
children come to school "hungry and unable to concentrate."

Israel says that its policies in Gaza are designed to put pressure on  
the Palestinian population to in turn put pressure on those who fire  
crude home-made rockets from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot.  
Those rocket attacks are wrong. But it is also wrong to punish an  
entire population for the actions of a few -- actions that the  
schoolchildren of Gaza and their beleagueredparents are in any case  
powerless to stop.

It is a violation of international law to collectively punish more  
than a million people for something they did not do. According to the  
Geneva Convention, to which it is a signatory, Israel actually has  
the obligation to ensure the well-being of the people on whom it has  
chosen to impose a military occupation for more than four decades.

Instead, it has shrugged off the law. It has ignored the repeated  
demands of the U.N. Security Council. It has dismissed the  
International Court of Justice in the Hague. What John Dugard, the  
U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied  
territories, refers to as the "carefully managed" strangulation of  
Gaza -- in full view of an uncaring world -- is explicitly part of  
its strategy. "The idea," said Dov Weisglass, an Israeli government  
advisor, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die  
of hunger."

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at UCLA and the  
author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," forthcoming  
from Norton.