uruknet.info, February 2, 2008
Saree Makdisi
Saree Makdisi shows how Israel, with the collusion of Egypt, is systematically grinding down and now actually starving the people of Gaza because it regards Gaza's 1.5 million men, women and children as "a surplus population it would, quite simply, like to get rid of one way or the other".
The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years – the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation – and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.
Gaza's doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.
Continued . . .
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