UPDATED ON:
Monday, August 09, 2010
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Going organic: The siege on Gaza
By Jon Elmer
The blockade on basic foodstuffs was designed to encourage Gazans to overthrow
Hamas [GETTY]
In February 2006, following Hamas' electoral victory, a top advisor to Ehud
Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, Dov Weisglass, described the essence
of Israel's Gaza policy.
"It's like a meeting with a dietitian," Weisglass said. "We need to make the
Palestinians lose weight, but not to starve to death."
Although any Gazan will quickly point out that the blockade on the movement of
goods - and people - into and out of Gaza long predates the election of Hamas,
as the years have passed the exact date of the siege has often been, for
reasons of political expedience, recast to coincide with the Hamas takeover of
the Gaza Strip in June 2007.
Israel characterises the blockade as "economic warfare" targeting Hamas and its
constituents.
'No humanitarian crisis'
According to government documents that have surfaced in response to a lawsuit
before Israel's high court, "the limitation on the transfer of goods is a
central pillar in the means at the disposal of the state of Israel in the armed
conflict between it and Hamas".
A key white paper, entitled Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip - Red Lines,
meticulously details the minimum caloric intake required, based on age and sex,
to keep Gazans hovering just above malnutrition levels, and specifies the
corresponding grams and calories of each type of food allowed into Gaza.
The existence of the so-called Red Lines document has been known for several
years, but was only confirmed by Israel during recent court proceedings.
The blockade policy is overseen by a unit of Israel's defence ministry, the
Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).
The policy slogan, which has been repeated at several COGAT meetings attended
by Israeli journalists, states: "No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian
crisis."
While the blockade on basic foodstuffs and essential infrastructural
requirements was designed by Israel to encourage Palestinians to overthrow
their elected government, many signs point to it having the opposite effect.
"If anything, [the siege] helps Hamas consolidate itself as a ruling party and
exercise increasingly effective government," said Yezid Sayigh in a recent Gaza
study-trip report for Brandeis University's Crown Center for Middle East
Studies.
'The organic farm'
Hamas has taken steps to mitigate the impact of the siege on food production
[EPA]
Beyond the well-documented tunnel trade running under the Gaza-Egypt border,
Hamas has taken concrete steps to mitigate the impacts of the siege and further
its political administration in the coastal strip.
Hamas' agriculture minister, Muhammad al-Agha, has issued a ten-year plan
designed to side-step the blockade by increasing local food production and
agricultural self-sufficiency in Gaza.
Entitled The Plan for 2020, the document was vetted by 150 academics and
researchers, according to the agriculture ministry, and looks to respond to the
challenges imposed by Israel's blockade with local initiatives.
For example, Israel's ban on fertilisers has pushed Hamas to explore processing
sewage, which has been pumped, often untreated, into the sea off Gaza since the
failure of treatment facilities that are short of banned parts and supplies.
"When Israel started preventing the agricultural requirements, we moved to
organic agriculture to address our needs.
"What we have done is [implement] model projects for the transformation of
agricultural or domestic waste into organic fertilisers which we use then in
agriculture," said al-Agha, who is also a professor of environmental science at
the Islamic University in Gaza.
Thus far, some 1,000 dunams of land has been fertilised in this manner under
the pilot project, according to the ministry.
"What we have tried to do is change the culture of our people gradually to
organic agriculture, organic food and organic production," said al-Agha.
The plan, as The Economist recently described it, is to "turn Gaza into one big
organic farm".
Buffer zone
In previous years, Gaza's export-focused cash-cropping left the agricultural
sector vulnerable. As the strategic plan notes, export agriculture also
involved "large, consumptive use of fresh water and other inputs," and left
scarce water resources contaminated by chemical fertilisers and pesticides.
According to a recent United Nations report, the recovery of the agricultural
sector in Gaza is crucial in order to "reinstate the local population's former
access to fresh foods, including fruit and vegetables, eggs, fresh meat and
fish, which humanitarian agencies traditionally do not offer through the aid
pipeline".
But the agricultural base that Hamas has to work with is desperately limited by
an Israeli-enforced "buffer zone" inside Gaza's fenced off border.
One-third of Gaza's arable land is inaccessible to farmers and herders,
according to UN data.
In some areas, this no-go zone is two kilometres deep. Nowhere is it less than
500 metres from the border and everywhere it is enforced by live ammunition.
A report by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs notes
that the buffer zone "contains rain-fed crops including wheat, barley, beans
and various vegetables, as well as olives, almonds and citrus trees. Most of
the Gaza Strip's animal production is concentrated in the zone, which also
contains important infrastructure such as wells and roads".
'Absorbing' Israeli attacks
While the US and Israeli-backed caretaker government of Salam Fayyad in the
West Bank seeks to meet Western demands in order to maintain its foreign aid
flow, Hamas in Gaza has, in many ways, stayed its course.
A recent field report by Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace
stated bluntly: "There is [one] political actor that urges Palestinians to
worry far less about currying favour with foreigners and instead take matters
into their own hands - Hamas."
Khaled Hroub, a leading expert on the movement at the University of Cambridge,
sees the blockade as just the latest example of Hamas' ability to "absorb"
Israel's attacks to emerge in many ways even stronger.
"What we are seeing now in the Gaza blockade is just another manifestation of
the same phenomena that we have witnessed throughout the history of Hamas over
the past 20 years," said Hroub, who is the author of Hamas: Political Thought
and Practice.
"We have seen them manoeuvre their way out [of numerous Israeli challenges] and
present themselves again as more disciplined and stronger."
Indeed, of the many consequences of Israel's blockade, few appear to match
Israel's strategic intent.
Source: Al Jazeera
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