The Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” of May 31 brought the world’s attention to the collective punishment the people of Gaza are going through. But despite the much-heralded Israeli “easing” of the siege in response to a furious world, the situation in Gaza remains much the same, and even worse for businesses there.
Donald Macintyre of the Independent (UK) tells the story of the Abu Dan garment factory. The Abu Dan’s can’t export their clothes to Israel because of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This has been the situation for many businesses in Gaza since 2007, when the full blown air, sea and land closure was imposed on the Strip. But now, the garment factory is doing worse than it has been because of the flooding of the local market with cheap Israeli goods, a process that has been going on since the so-called “easing” of the blockade:
In a series of intensive negotiations with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Quartet envoy Tony Blair managed to secure a tangible change of policy. Israel agreed to allow imports to Gaza of all goods other than those on a list of items – notably cement and other building materials deemed security risks if appropriated for military purposes by Hamas – rulers of this territory of 1.5 million people.
True, Karni remained closed, and the increase in imports to Gaza only reached below 40 per cent of pre- siege levels. But the truckloads increased to around 250 a day, and previously banned consumer goods, from chocolate to children’s toys, from refrigerators to bathtaps, from window glass to cars, have flowed into Gaza. This was good news for those Gaza consumers who can afford them, for Israeli goods are at once cheaper and better than those that were previously smuggled through tunnels from Egypt. Moreover, some unbanned raw materials including cloth for the imploded garment industry slowly began to move into the Strip, allowing some production to restart – albeit at a fraction of pre-2007 levels.
Yet for companies like the Abu Dans’ – whose decades-old, $1.5m factory was the biggest clothing enterprise in Gaza – the easing of the embargo had a perverse effect. With the ban on exports still in force, the family was now hard pressed even to sell to the local market, because of its flooding by – often Chinese made – cheap clothing coming through Israel. “They talk about easing the embargo but that means allowing in finished goods which we cannot compete with. Believe me, things are worse for us now than before it happened,” says Mr Abu Dan.
In other words, what Senator Chuck Schumer of New York approvingly called the Israeli blockade–economic strangulation–remains in place.
This piece originally appeared on Alex Kane's blog.
Thanks Alex. I’d really like to hear some hard figures on the economic situation in Gaza: GDP, GDP growth or contraction, per capita incomes, unemployment levels etc.
It seems that Israel was quite successful with it’s “easing the blockade” narrative, and the only way to counter that argument is with hard facts. For example: unemployment in Gaza now (at about 40% from what I can find out) is worse than unemployment was during the Great Depression, which topped out at about 35% in the US. Watch any documentary on the Depression and you’ll be in tears, yet Obama approves of (in spite of what he says, he approves) the situation is Gaza which is much much worse, and completely man-made.
Not related to the easing, but something else I worked out recently: Palestinians in Gaza consume 1/97,000 the amount of electricity per capita than someone in the US. Israel bombed Gaza’s electricity plant in 2006 and is still dependent on Israel to supply electricity (which it buys at an inflated price).
>>I worked that out using figures from the CIA Factbook, details in the second half of this rambling post (starting with “Now I detour for a moment and mention Gaza..”):
link to mondoweiss.net
Typo: unemployment in the US during the Depression topped at 25%, not 35%.