It’s not about wheel chairs and cardamom and textbooks. "This is not a humanitarian problem," we were told repeatedly a year ago in Gaza. No, it’s a man-made problem, a political problem created by Israel and the United States: the complete denial of the right of self-determination to a people, the fact that Palestinians are not allowed to come and go, that 1.5 million people are being imprisoned because a majority voted for someone that others disapprove of.
This is the essential issue, a political impasse involving occupation; and it began, politically, 63 years ago when the Arab states were not consulted about the future of Palestine despite Roosevelt and Truman’s repeated promises that they would be. And it was compounded the following year when the refugee camps in Gaza were created by the Nakba, and the world said, Let them go back to their homes, and Truman said, Let them go back to their homes, and Israel said No, let the Arab world take care of the refugees, we like a Jewish majority here.
Is there starvation, malnutrition, and homelessness in Gaza? Yes there is. But it springs from political disfranchisement. And if everyone was fat and sheltered in Gaza, per Netanyahu’s glorious "economic peace" for the West Bank, there would still be a crisis. Of basic human rights. The American tea-party colonists who cried "Taxation without representation" didn’t need the supplies on that boat; they wanted to control their political destiny.
Ilan Pappe makes related points in the Independent
But Barak and Netanyahu, and those around them, know too well that the blockade on Gaza is not going to produce any change in the position of the Hamas and one should give credit to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, who remarked at Prime Minister’s Questions last week that the Israelis’ policy, in fact, strengthens, rather than weakens, the Hamas hold on Gaza. But this strategy, despite its declared aim, is not meant to succeed or at least no one is worried in Jerusalem if it continues to be fruitless and futile.
One would have thought that Israel’s drastic decline in international reputation would prompt new thinking by its leaders. But the responses to the attack on the flotilla in the past few days indicate clearly that there is no hope for any significant shift in the official position. A firm commitment to continue the blockade, and a heroes’ welcome to the soldiers who pirated the ship in the Mediterranean, show that the same politics would continue for a long time.
…The international response is based on the assumption that more forthcoming Palestinian concessions and a continued dialogue with the Israeli political elite will produce a new reality on the ground. The official discourse in the West is that a very reasonable and attainable solution is just around the corner if all sides would make one final effort: the two-state solution.
Nothing is further from the truth than this optimistic scenario. The only version of this solution that is acceptable to Israel is the one that both the tamed Palestine Authority in Ramallah and the more assertive Hamas in Gaza could never ever accept. It is an offer to imprison the Palestinians in stateless enclaves in return for ending their struggle.
Thus even before one discusses either an alternative solution – a single democratic state for all, which I support – or explores a more plausible, two-state settlement, one has to transform fundamentally the Israeli official and public mindset.
