By H. Patricia Hynes
September 19, 2024
Source: Informed Comment
In late 2020, a report titled Saving Gaza Begins with its Water stated:
The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave. The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but more dangerously, it is experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline groundwater intrusion, as well as sewage pollution.
Fast forward to 2024: Gaza’s water scarcity pollution is severely worsened by its forced closure of water and wastewater treatment plants due to Israel’s blockade of fuel to Gaza to run the plants in its 2023-2024 war.
The authors of the Saving Gaza Begins with Its Water end in a cautiously positive note. The crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise, they wrote because Gaza’s water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation because one of Israel’s water sources is the same Coastal Aquifer.
But this affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any major war of the 21st century, combined with the induced famine across all of Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the recent polio virus. At the current rate of killing and death, 15 to 20% of Gaza’s people could be dead by the end of the year, a UN expert stated and almost entirely exterminated within a few years.
Prior to the current war, Gaza had 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce potable water. By mid-October 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed the drinking water desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them. Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5 percent of typical levels,
With no power to run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses. By December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under 5 in Gaza jumped 2000%, because of which children under five are over 20 times more likely to die than from Israeli military violence.
More than three quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to re-locate because of Israeli bombing. In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons and little to no running water.
Every human being in Gaza suffers soul-shattering existence from this war variably described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes) and scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Women and their children are its gravest victims: 70% of those killed are women and children. Daily in Gaza children are having one of both legs amputated without anesthesia. More than 17,000 children have lost 1 or both parents.
Recently American doctors who volunteered in Gaza and spoke at a press conference during the Democratic National Convention accused the Biden administration of “hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing the weapons massacring Gazans. They pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an arms embargo on Israel and immediate cease-fire.” The doctors attested that the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.” None has seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”
Impacts of war on women
As of early 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but lack adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, soap, running water and toilets because of the war nor privacy to manage menstrual hygiene. These conditions put women and girls in Gaza at grave risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections. The challenge of trying to find an available bathroom is especially difficult for pregnant women who have pressure on their bladder, and women who have just given birth and are going through weeks of postpartum bleeding.
By early March 2024 Relief/Web reported: there has been a steep rise in malnutrition among the more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women. Every day about 180 women give birth in unimaginable conditions, no longer having health-care facilities to deliver their babies. Many mothers who have given birth since the beginning of Israel’s war are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns.
Although mothers and adult women are tasked with sourcing food, they are the ones who eat last, less, and least.
What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war. Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with “cooperation, coordination and courage, it is achievable.” But “the war must be ended.”
Israel has sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming Palestinian land by force, apartheid conditions for Palestinians in Israel, establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now omnicide in Gaza. The only way for Israel to live in security is through a political compromise, in the spirit of Isaiah 59:8, that guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians who have lived on the land of Palestine for thousands of years. Without justice – the US ending its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent ceasefire, the UN recognizing Palestine as a state and then organizing the rebuilding of Gaza with supportive countries – there can be no peace.
Pat Hynes gave a talk on the plight of women in water-starved Gaza during a conference on Memorial Day weekend sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom entitled Water on the Frontlines for Peace. This piece is a much abbreviated and updated version.
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants' surprise attack.
Sometimes we must explicitly state what ought to be utterly obvious. Or would we rather make what is disgusting normal? Rather make every street corner a shooting gallery, every handheld device a bomb, every bomb a cemetery, every step someone’s last? Do we want to make fear the new normal? Paranoia wisdom? Do we want to ceasefire or to spread fire?
Netanyahu: You have crawled past statist elitism, past nationalistic immorality, past ignominious war making infamy, all the way to fascistic bottom feeding decrepitude. You are disgusting. And you want to drag us all after you, don’t you?
But what of those in the Israeli Defense Force? What of Israelis living life and life only throughout Israel? What of Israel’s supporters living life and life only around the world?
How should we who are nauseated by what has been and is being done to Palestinians and by what is now spreading rather than ceasing, regard Netanyahu, regard the IDF, regard Israelis in Israel who support genocide, and regard Israel’s supporters around the world who ignore, alibi, arm, and abet genocide?
Can we be horrified, outraged, and enraged but also regard the ignorers, supporters, perpetrators, and planners of the genocide hurled at Gaza’s schools, hospitals, homes, and streets without ourselves hurling dehumanizing epithets? Without ourselves becoming dehumanizers?
It is getting difficult. It really is. We don’t want to think of fellow humans much less of neighbors or relatives as planners, perpetrators, abettors, or even just ignorers of genocide. We don’t want to hate fellow humans. But can we hate the acts yet somehow recognize that those involved are like us? Can we hate the acts but not dehumanize the perpetrators?
Could Israelis’ have hated the October 7 acts yet have understood the circumstances and feelings that led to those acts? Could Israelis have not dehumanized the perpetrators much less dehumanized all Palestinians? Could Israelis have not called Palestinians vermin, not incentivized genocide against Palestinians? Could the Israelis have avoided reducing themselves to genocide perpetrators?
For that matter, can we hate repressive and even murderous policing and not call the cops pigs? Can we hate racist, misogynist Trump but not dehumanize Trump’s supporters? Can we arouse in ourselves appropriate energy to battle fascist trends but not let fascist feelings infect our own behavior?
Can we work to end the horrors in Gaza and prevent their spread? Can we see that against everything holy, everything moral, everything worthy, Israel seems literally hell bent upon mayhem and destruction until nothing remains of Palestinians—and perhaps of Israel as well? Can we also not become what we rightly reject? Isn’t that part of our task regarding ending genocide and Trumpism too?
It’s not easy to express outrage an
By Ramzy Baroud
September 20, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Never in its history of war, and military occupation has Israel been so incapable of developing a coherent plan for its future, and the future of its victims.
Even a quick glance at headlines in international media reveals the depth of the Israeli dilemma. While Tel Aviv continues to carry out a genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, it seems to have no idea what to do beyond simply destroying the Strip and its people.
Even the country’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, who could soon be officially wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), indicated on multiple occasions that Israel has no post-war plan in Gaza.
“Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the Cabinet, and have received no response,” Gallant said in the clearest possible language last May.
Others suggest that Netanyahu and his far-right government might have a plan but, in the language of the Washington Post, it is a ‘no workable plan’ or, according to Vox, “is no plan at all”.
Netanyahu’s ‘not workable’ plan, or ‘no plan’ at all, is inconsistent with the wishes of the US administration.
True, both Israel and the US are in full agreement regarding the war itself. Even after Washington had finally begun shifting its position from wanting the war to continue, to asking Netanyahu to conclude his bloody task, American weapons have continued to flow at the same rate.
The Americans, however, are not convinced that destroying Hamas, fully demilitarizing Gaza, taking control over the Gaza-Egypt border, shutting down the UNRWA refugees’ agency and the ‘de-radicalization’ of the besieged Palestinian population is the right approach.
But Netanyahu himself must have already known this, if not at the very start of the war, at least nearly a year into the genocide. His exhausted army kept moving from one phase to another, declaring ‘tactical victories’, without achieving a single strategic goal in Gaza.
The most optimistic estimation of the Israeli army is that their war, which has practically destroyed all of Gaza, has resulted in a stalemate. A more sober reading of the war, according to former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak, is that Israel must end it before “sinking into its moral abyss”.
Yet, more delusional plans, pertaining to both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, continue to be leaked to the media.
The first major leak was a taped recording of a speech by extremist and very influential Israeli minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich.
“I am telling, it is mega-dramatic. Such changes change a system’s DNA,” Smotrich told a group of Israeli Jewish settlers last June, according to the New York Times.
The minister’s “carefully orchestrated program” hinges on transferring the authority of the West Bank from the occupation army to a group of civilians under the leadership of Smotrich himself. The goal is to seize more Palestinian land, expand the illegal settlements and prevent any possible continuity of a viable Palestinian State.
In fact, the plan is already underway. On May 29, Israel appointed Hillel Roth, a close ally of Smotrich, as the deputy in the West Bank Civil Administration.
The plan for Gaza is another episode of cruelty, but also delusional. It was revealed in an article by the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on September 9.
Aluf Benn wrote that Netanyahu’s plan also consists of the hiring of an Israeli ‘governor of Gaza’, Brigadier General Elad Goren, who became the ‘Head of Humanitarian-Civilian effort’ in the Strip on August 28
Using a combination of tactics, including starvation, military pressure and the like, Netanyahu wants to drive the population of northern Gaza to the south in preparation of formally annexing the region and bringing back Jewish settlers.
These are not the only plans that have been leaked or, at times, communicated openly by Israeli officials
At the start of the war, such ideas as ethnically cleansing the Gaza population into Sinai were advocated openly by Israeli officials, and were also the main topic of discussion in Israeli evening news programs.
Some Israeli officials spoke of fully occupying Gaza, while others, like Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, floated the idea of dropping a nuclear bomb.
The plan of totally evacuating Gaza did not work simply because Palestinians would not leave, and Egypt had rejected the very insinuation that ethnically cleansing Gazans was an option. Additionally, the total depopulation of northern Gaza also did not work, partly because Israel was massacring civilians in both north and south at comparable rates.
Israel’s new plans will not succeed in achieving what the original plans have failed to achieve, simply because Israel continues to face the same obstacle: the steadfastness of the Palestinian people.
However, much can still be learned from the nature of the Israeli schemes, old and new, mainly the fact that Israel regards the Palestinian people as the enemy.
This conclusion is not only gleaned through statements by top Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog himself, when he said that “an entire nation out there (..) is responsible”.
Almost every Israeli scheme seems to involve killing Palestinians in large numbers, starving them or displacing them en masse.
This means that the Israeli war has always been a war against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians themselves know it. Shouldn’t the rest of the world also know it by now?
Can the World Save Palestine From US-Israeli Genocide?
Image by Eskinder Debebe, UN
On September 18th, the UN General Assembly is scheduled to debate and vote on a resolution calling on Israel to end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within six months. Given that the General Assembly, unlike the exclusive 15-member UN Security Council, allows all UN members to vote and there is no veto in the General Assembly, this is an opportunity for the world community to clearly express its opposition to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
If Israel predictably fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the United States then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly could go a step further.
It could convene an Emergency Session to take up what is called a Uniting For Peace resolution, which could call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against Israel – or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the procedure was first adopted in 1950.
The September 18 resolution comes in response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”
The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.
Israel’s President Netanyahu cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with a claim that, “The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those territories, or make them part of Israel.
While Israel used its hotly disputed account of the October 7th events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too.
Armed settlers immediately started seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable.
Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now killed at least 700 people, including 159 children.
The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that even the U.S. and European governments have felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations.
In Gaza, the Israeli military has been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre were to end soon.
Israel and the United States are undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide. Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”
President Biden can claim to be exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind of leadership that any American can be proud of. The United States has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide.
By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the genocide will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want, while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.
This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while in fact remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.
In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.
China has taken a more constructive approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to seat a new elected government.
Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace conference to try to end the war.
As the world comes together in the General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.
Perhaps no crisis more clearly embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the 57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in 1967. At the same time that the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, it has vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.
The ability of one Permanent Member of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system.
When this structure was first announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”
The General Assembly and the Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally the United Kingdom or another U.S. ally, against the voices of the rest of the world calling in unison for peace in Gaza.
Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights.
For many decades, the United States’ unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the Palestinian people.
In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S. military alliance with Israel involves the U.S. directly in the crime of genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.
The supply chain for the U.S. arsenal of genocide criss-crosses America, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh and bones.
The U.S. role is greater than complicity – it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas.
And it is precisely because of the essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.
Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on our own government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end the genocide.
It would certainly be unprecedented for the world to unite, in opposition to Israel and the United States, to save Palestine and enforce the ICJ ruling that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1945. Even the catastrophic U.S.-British invasion and destruction of Iraq failed to provoke such united action.
But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.
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