From the Institute for Middle East Understanding:
Children navigate sewage in the streets of Al Sabra, a neighborhood in Eastern Gaza City on Thursday, November 14, a day after a nearby waste water treatment plant ran out of fuel. The ongoing fuel crisis in Gaza, brought on by near-total blockades enforced by Israel and Egypt, has left the 25-mile coastal strip and its more than 1.7 million Palestinians with as little as six hours of electricity per day — a situation that the UN says “will impact all essential services.”
(In his speech at Purchase College last month the deputy national editor of the NYT, Ethan Bronner, said Gaza is not as bad as you may have heard. It is a “large welfare state… It is not the most miserable place on earth.. It is not sub-Saharan Africa… There is no starvation. There are very few diseases that the poorest parts of the world suffer from. There is not that kind of misery.” Though Bronner also said that people in Gaza feel they have no future, and have little freedom of movement, the largest contrast in his speech was between Gazans’ experience and the technological splendors of Israel next door, a place that would never tolerate the conditions these children are enduring.)
This reminds me of the important need for Gaza to have public utilities. There was an incident a few years ago where an engineer from Gaza had been trained in the Ukraine to work in power plants, and Gaza hoped to operate one. A strange event occurred however where officers, apparently Ukrainian ones, captured the engineer, Abu Sisi, on a train and took him to a safehouse and renditioned him. The Ukrainians claim they do not know what happened and the institute where he studied said they absolutely do not teach people anything about rockets, yet it was on the charge of studying rocketry there that the Isr. government has imprisoned him. One may conclude that the real reason he was renditioned was because of his work towards a power plant and because of another special relationship elsewhere in the world.
This very strange case is quite surprising for those imagining that the former USSR must be pro-Palestinian, or that European countries are as well. The strange case of the allegedly “surrender monkey” France cutting negotiations with the Persians is another example of politics coming out of Europe at odds with what we might expect.
Certainly the U.S. is the closest ally, but don’t forget that Britain’s Balfour Declaration did have a role, and that the USSR had initially hoped in 1948 that the State would become one of its own allies. This international range of support explains the united decision to admit the State into the UN and other developments in the UN at that time. It was apparently out of a preference for the West’s economic system, ties in America, and acknowledgment of the US’s prowess, rather than out of necessity, that the relationship with the US developed and continues.
Except a massive disease breakout.
After the diptheria and cholera outbreaks die down, expect a large part of the population to end up on dialysis in a few years.
BTW: How come my posts are not archived like everyone else’s?
He is right on that; but what is his point?
Does someone have a video of Bronner’s speech? I have to know in what context he made those comments.
BTW: How come my posts are not archived like everyone else’s?
Amira Hass reports that the breakdown is due primaliy to a dispute between the Hamas and the PA:
http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/.premium-1.558243
Love the commenters who try to blame the victims rather than the countries – Israel and Egypt – who have Gaza under blockade. This game that is played by people like Ethan Bronner and others in downplaying the situation in Gaza is sickening. You are not willing to subject Israelis to this condition but the fact that you make excuses for how Palestinians are treated effortlessly reveals the dehumanisation and racism you subject Palestinians to.
tf7 3alaykum.