Gaza Grind, Episode 5: Current Calamity
Greetings again global watchers for our final installment on the gritty Gaza grind-down. While reporting on the events in Gaza, I was invited to a Hamas hookah house party…which was a total blast. Literally! An Israeli airstrike brought the whole house down. What a rush! By the time I was unburied from the rubble and sobered up, I had missed the Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry vodka shooters. Since there is no food available here, I had to amble across to Amman to absorb some Armagnac and hit up Jordanian internet café. Long story short, we need to finish our Gaza story…
So where the hell did I leave off? Oh yes, Fatah friends and Hamas haters…and now we can point out how this situation has played out in the current debacle. Since Hamas kicked Fatah out of the Gaza Strip, Israel and all its western allies (namely the US) have basically tried to make life a living hell for Hamas. Why? Answer: To get them the hell out of power because Hamas refuses to recognize the right of Israel to exist, and therefore cannot play a part in the peace process. In other words, due to Hamas’ political ideology, Israel and ‘Team West’ simply cannot interact with them 
at all, cannot give them an ounce of legitimacy at all, and cannot play ball with them at all…not even for a backyard pick-up game of Nerf! And since Hamas also uses suicide bombers and keeps lobbing homemade rockets over the wall into Israel, they are labeled as terrorists…and thus most western governments do not want to negotiate with terrorists. It should be noted that the rockets that Hamas lobs over the wall are about as tactically effective as lobbing over Nerf balls.
So how are Israel and Team West trying to crush Hamas? Why, by crushing the entire Gaza Strip of course! That is how this whole current mess started. Israel (with complicity and assistance from the West) halted all aid, food supplies, and tax revenues to the government of Gaza after Hamas won the January 2006 elections there. And after the Hamas/Fatah showdown in Feb 2007 in which Hamas kicked the Fatah guys completely out of the Gaza Strip, Israel and the US got really serious about grinding the Gaza down….Israel slapped down the entire area with an full-on, border-sealing embargo. Sealed off the borders, cut off the electricity and stopped all movement of virtually all goods and services.
This was done for two 
reasons: 1)To punish Hamas and further demonstrate that the West hates them, and 2) To punish the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip so badly that they would turn on Hamas and stage some sort of coup. Everyone already knew #1….and #2 simply didn’t really happen. And Israel and Team West really hates that #2 didn’t happen….but don’t we all hate when an expected #2 doesn’t happen? My advice: eat more bran!
Now, there has been tit for tat, rockets thrown by both sides, back and forth, ever since. Sometimes a cease fire is enacted for a while, and things get eased, but it soon gets hot again, and the starvation tactic is kicked back in by Israel and the West. This ‘starving out’ of the Gaza Strip really reached a fever pitch again in January 2008 as the Israelis (again, with complicity from the EU and the US) started shutting off the power totally, and fully sealed the border, effectively shutting down all trade and flow of aid/food into the Gaza. You may have heard about this one too—people got so 
desperate in Gaza by Febrary 2008 that they blew a fucking hole in the wall on the Gaza/Egypt border, and spilled out en masse to buy food, fuel, smokes, and some more Nerf footballs. That’s it. That’s why it happened. And for weeks, Egypt had largely allowed this to go on, trying more to control the flow of folks as opposed to outright stopping them. However (bowing to US and Israeli pressure) they did rebuild and secure the wall…so the wall breach is officially over, for now. But this Gaza ‘break-out’ of course defeated the whole point of the embargo, and it seriously pissed off Israel, the US and most in the EU.
Things started simmering down again after that Egyptian Escape Episode and there was about a five-month cease fire and relaxing of the embargo, but as with all things in the Middle East, nothing stays quiet for long….which brings us full circle to the reason for this blog run. Shit done got hot again this November! Just in time for turkey time!
Israel launched an incursion into the Gaza to uncover a tunnel that was being dug into Israel proper…the assessment is that the tunnel was to become a conduit to kidnap Israeli soldiers and citizens, or simply to launch an offensive attack outright. This off course pissed off Hamas, who started launching rockets again…and as per usual the shit hit the fan in every direction. Israel once again tightened the embargo, and this time the ante has been upped tremendously…
All financial aid has once again ceased. All UN food aid ceased. All parts and fuel for Gaza’s only power plant have ceased to be allowed in, which means all energy is gone. All cross border trade has ceased, which means there is no economy at all. No reporters are allowed in or out of the place either, so even news has ceased. Dudes, these people are screwed.
By the way, perhaps you are wondering how Israel can so radically alter the flow of goods and services into the tiny Gaza Strip. Well, Israel did officially pull out its peoples and its military forces entirely from the Gaza back in 2005, largely to work peacefully towards the two-state solution. However, Israel maintained its total control over the border situation between Gaza and the rest of the world (with the exception of a single border crossing on the Gaza/Egypt border.) Israel controls all international aid and UN aid distributed to Gaza. Israel even controls the taxes collected in the Strip. Well, maybe other countries should just ship in supplies via boat…I mean, Gaza has coastline on the Med, right? Ummm…well, no that won’t work either….Israel controls the territorial waters off the Gazan coast too.
Israel controls the flow of people, of money, of aid, of the economy, of electricity, and even of information. Total control all the way around. The Gazans are being ground down, and here is the result:
Israel re-imposes Gaza blockade
UN chief admits Gaza crisis fears
UN agency in Gaza runs out of food
Israel’s new bid to undercut Hamas pushes Gaza toward crisis
Israel Seals Off Gaza Once Again: This Time Cutting Off Power
The UN head Ban Ki-Moon is seriously worried. Humanitarian groups are seriously worried. Relief agencies are seriously worried. In what is kind of an insult to the world, the current official Israeli response to the world concern has been to tell everyhone that nothing is actually happening….there is no crisis! There are no kids starving! All is well! The Gazans are all full of shit! Ummmm….yeah….right.
But this blog is not an Israeli smack-down. I’m just here telling you this shit so you understand the current events that are unfolding. So let me finish up with a little future predictions summary.
So the future? Not hard to predict…it is already upon us. Shit, shit and more shit to come for the Israelis, the Gaza inhabitants, and anyone who is trying to work for a single ‘Palestine’ state solution. And we won’t have long to wait to see my predictions come true, as things are turning even nastier, even faster than usual:
Talks to end Hamas-Fatah split postponed indefinitely
Analysis: Cairo concludes Fatah-Hamas chasm will not end anytime soon
Fatah would win Palestinian elections: opinion
Foreign press issues plea to reopen Gaza crossing
U.N. calls Israel’s blockade of Gaza “unacceptable”
So the Gazans feel that their backs are against a wall and that the Israeli embargo will starve them all to death, so they feel compelled to act with violence. Hamas will continue to lob rockets and dig tunnels forever. This infuriates Israel, which in turn will make the embargos even more harsh, and also to conduct air strikes in Gaza. Senior officials in Israel are now discussing the possibility of targeting all Hamas politicians. All these moves further isolate people in Gaza and make them feel that there backs are against the wall which compels them to act with violence…wait a damn minute! This is one of those vicious circle deals! This really sucks!
Full-on war is coming to this place my friends, and coming soon. I stand by the prediction I made back in the summer: the two-state solution is totally dead—meaning that the idea of a peace process between a state called Israel and a state called Palestine can no longer happen, since 
Palestine itself is fractured. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip will never reunite with the Fatah-controlled West Bank. But something is going to happen. Probably something shitty. I look for Hamas to continue to piss off Israel, which will inevitably lead to a full military invasion of Gaza by the Israelis….and I’ll even give you a sudden flash of brilliance that occurred to me on how they will do it: Watch for a fully funded Fatah army to lead such a charge, or certainly be there to mop up and take over once Israel levels the place. Just an instinct on my part, but it is no guesswork that Fatah is already being funded and vamped up by Team West to ultimately control this territory again, and from past blogs you should know why!
Some of you may be asking: “But Plaid, why doesn’t the UN just come in and take over this mess?” That is an excellent question that is worthy of another blog, perhaps you would like me to visit the UN Security Council and ask them personally?….or would you like me to head to some other hotspots to see what’s up…maybe Kenya?…maybe Chad?…maybe a XXX nightclub on the outskirts of Amsterdam? I am your humble servant my friends, so drop me a line on this blog decide where my next adventure will take me…
Until then, Party in Plaid.
-PA
