Israel must halt the crisis among the Palestinians {edit}

[Englander]

Israel must halt the crisis among the Palestinians - for its own sake

If Israelis won't deal with Hamas, they could end up facing a more radical alternative: Islamic Jihad or even al-Qaida

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday May 24, 2006
The Guardian

From this distance, the Palestinians look to be in dire straits - even by their wretched standards. A people who have plunged the depths of misery seem set to sink even lower. Denied financial aid by an international community that turned off the cash after Hamas won its unexpected majority in January, the Palestinians are collectively going broke. Gaza is especially badly hit. Women are selling off their jewellery just to feed their children. A gang of men were caught digging up the ground: they wanted to pull out municipal water pipes and sell them for scrap. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, Gaza's medical system is in "crisis" thanks to "grave shortages" of supplies.

Nor can Palestinians trade their way out of poverty. The main crossing out of Gaza, at Karni, is closed more than it's open - preventing farmers from getting their perishable produce to market: their strawberries just lie rotting, denying the growers their livelihood. The nights bring no respite. Gazans are living with round-the-clock artillery shelling, which Israel says is retaliation for the Qassam rockets fired by Palestinians over the border. The West Bank has experienced multiple Israeli raids, leaving civilians, including children, dead.

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... But even the coolest heads worry where things are heading. There's only so long a people dependent on foreign help can be starved of cash. Up to one in four of the Palestinian population are employees of the Palestinian Authority, and yet it has no money to pay anyone - even the prime minister, Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh, has not received a penny since taking office.

There are glimmers of hope. This week, Israel released about £5m of Palestinian tax revenues it had collected but had refused to hand over. Meanwhile, the EU was reported to have found a way to funnel cash to Palestinian teachers, doctors and pensioners while bypassing Hamas - an approach backed earlier this month by the Quartet of the EU, the US, the UN and Russia. Yet just yesterday the US House of Representatives approved the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, a set of sanctions condemned by Americans for Peace Now, an avowedly Zionist organisation, as draconian and sweeping.

The moral objections to this latest US move, and the whole international policy of denying aid to the Palestinians, are obvious: it punishes Palestinians for their democratic choice of Hamas in free and fair elections; and it's hard to explain a world where sanctions are imposed not on the occupier but the occupied: this is the politics of Lewis Carroll.

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