Nancy Murray about Nancy Murray

The Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza
lecture, World Fellowship Center, September 6, 2008

On August 23, 2008 two small wooden boats -- one called Free Gaza and the other the Liberty -- sailed from Cyprus to break the Israel-imposed blockade of the Gaza Strip. They were carrying 40 passengers, including an 84 year-old Holocaust survivor and the sister-in- law of the international special envoy to the Middle East, Tony Blair, as well as thousands of hearing aids, balloons and musical instruments. Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Minister, at first called them "pirate ships" and said they would not be "allowed to break international law." But the Israeli government decided not to intercept the ships and they were allowed to land, to a jubilant reception.

On August 28, they sailed back to Cyprus. On board was a 10-year old who lost his leg to Israeli tank fire and is seeking medical attention, as well as a Gazan family who will be reunited with relatives in Cyprus. Organizers want the boats to function as a kind of ferry service between Cyprus and Gaza, providing safe passage between Gaza and the outside world. They are urging the UN, Arab League and international community to get behind this and other efforts to end the siege of Gaza which has had a disastrous impact on its more than a million residents, half of them children 14 years and younger, and two-thirds of them impoverished refugees.

Just how disastrous is apparent in the devastating report entitled The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion. It was issued on March 6 of this year, by a coalition of human rights groups including Amnesty UK, Care International UK, Christian Aid, Medecins du Monde, Oxfam and Save the Children UK. The report concludes: "This humanitarian crisis is a direct result of on-going collective punishment of ordinary men, women and children and is illegal under international law. Isolation and poverty are breeding increasing levels of violence for which both Palestinians and Israelis are paying the price ... peace will not be achieved by locking 1.5 million people into a prison of spiraling poverty and misery ... the policy of isolation and refusal to engage with all elements of the Palestinian leadership only closes doors to negotiations while reinforcing the political and humanitarian crisis."

This is a message that has been reinforced by human rights groups around the world -- including within Israel. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross, which generally maintains a discreet behind-the-scenes profile and rarely makes public pronouncements, has joined in. Late in 2007 it issued a report called "Dignity Denied in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" which is nothing less than a clarion call for action. "The dignity of the Palestinians is being trampled underfoot day after day, both in the West Bank and in Gaza," the Red Cross writes. "Israel's harsh security measures come at an enormous humanitarian cost, leaving those living under occupation with just enough to survive, but not enough to live normal and dignified lives." I have never before seen an ICRC document which goes so far as to demand an immediate political solution to a conflict. But that is how this report ends: "Only prompt, innovative and courageous political action can change the harsh reality of this long-standing occupation, restore normal social and economic life to the Palestinian people, and allow them to live their lives in dignity."

"Dignity Denied" deals with both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It is Gaza -- referred to by the Israeli human rights group Btselem as the "largest prison on earth" -- where the humanitarian crisis is most acute. I will talk this afternoon in my capacity as President of the Gaza Mental Health Foundation, Inc. -- a 501 c 3 organization which raises funds for the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme or GCMHP which was founded in 1990 by the first psychiatrist in the Gaza Strip, Dr. Eyad el Sarraj. He pioneered a community-based family therapy in a society where mental illness has long been stigmatized. Our brochure will give you some information about the activities of the GCMHP, including its work with traumatized children (a category which now applies to nearly the entire child population of Gaza), woman who are victims of domestic violence and the victims of torture -- the Israeli group Btselem has estimated that 85 percent of Palestinian detainees are subjected to abusive treatment in Israeli prisons -- and that little has changed since the Israeli High Court outlawed torture in 1999, but left some yawning loopholes permitting it to continue. The estimate that half of Palestinian adult males have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967 suggests what a huge problem this is.

Dr. El Sarraj, who is also Commissioner General General of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights, was himself arrested on three occasions and tortured by the Palestinian Authority for criticizing its human rights record. The Palestinian Authority or PA is the body that was given limited powers of self-rule under the Oslo process of the mid 1990s. In 1997 Dr. El Sarraj received the first human rights award given by Physicians for Human Rights at its 10th Anniversary celebration in Boston.

Today, I want to do three things:
--1. give you a brief overview of the recent history of the Gaza Strip, focusing especially on the last two decades which encompass the dozen trips I have made to the region;
--2. describe the current siege that has been imposed on the Gaza Strip by Israel, with the approval of the United States;
--3. say something about what you can do to alleviate the looming humanitarian catastrophe which will impact the area for generations. After that I hope to have some time for questions.

The Gaza Strip, just 26 miles long and 4-5 miles wide, is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on the West, Egypt on the South and Israel on the North and East. Because of its strategic location Gaza was at various times besieged by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and successfully conquered by Alexander the Great. You may know the phrase "Eyeless in Gaza" -- first used by John Milton in Samson Agonistes and then the title of an Aldous Huxley book -- it refers to the story of Samson and Delila.

After World War I, the Gaza District became part of Mandatory Palestine. (MAP) In 1947 Gaza contained perhaps 80,000 people. With the creation of Israel the following year, two-thirds of the Gaza District became part of the State of Israel, and some 250,000 refugees flooded into the tiny Gaza Strip which was then administered by Egypt -- with their descendents refugees now number over half a million. Stateless from that day to this, they live in 8 refugee camps, often 10 people to a room, with sewage running down the narrow camp roads.
In 1967, the Gaza Strip, like the West Bank, was occupied by Israel, and Palestinians came under Israeli military rule. Over a thousand military decrees governed every aspect of their lives, dictating for instance, when they could plant tomato seedlings or whitewash a house.

My first trip to Gaza took place early in 1988 as part of a fact-finding mission a few months after the first Palestinian uprising began in a refugee camp in Gaza. Like most Americans, I knew virtually nothing about the Gaza Strip. I encountered one of the most densely crowded pieces of land on earth -- a spit of sand that was home to more than a million people, half of them children 14 years and younger, and two-thirds of them impoverished refugees.

The most fertile land in the Strip -- about a quarter of the total land -- was set aside for a few thousand Jewish settlers or was part of a closed military zone which was off limits to Palestinians. To give you an idea of the disparities between the two populations, while there were 166,000 Gazans per square mile in the Gaza Strip, there were 80 Israeli settlers per square mile. Even at the time of my first visit 20 years ago, the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip was experiencing a severe water crisis. I remember wondering how people could drink the salt water that came out of faucets. Meanwhile, the few thousand Israeli settlers in their midst had their own water supply with which they irrigated fields and greenhouses and kept their swimming pools full. Before Israel removed its settler population in 2005, when any of those Israeli settlers wanted to move along the main road running the length of the Gaza Strip, all cars belonging to Palestinians were forced to stop at one of the major roadblocks, often for an hour and sometimes much longer.

During my first visit in 1988, the few poorly equipped hospitals in the Strip were full of young people -- many of them children -- who had endured the "force, might and beatings" which Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered to put down what was essentially an unarmed uprising of the entire population. Beginning at 7 PM a curfew was imposed on the entire Strip confining everyone to their homes. Gazans were under curfew, which sometimes turned into a round-the-clock house arrest lasting days or even weeks at a time, for 5 straight years. Although there was no one on the street after 7 PM, all night long I would hear screams, gunshots and the wailing of ambulances.

During my early visits, I found conditions in Gaza almost unbearably grim. But compared to what Gazans face today, those were hopeful times. The people of Gaza -- like Palestinians in the West Bank -- had faith that they would be able to "shake off" (this is what the word intifada means in Arabic) Israel's military occupation which was already decades old, which was illegal in the eyes of the international community. In 1988, I heard Fatah members express their fears that Israel was secretly backing the new Islamic group Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), which was the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, in an effort to undermine support for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But at that time no one could have predicted that one day there would be open warfare between the largest group of the PLO and Hamas. In 1988, it was possible to drive from the West Bank through Israel to the Gaza Strip. Many Gazans would go to Israel to work as laborers and to the West Bank for university studies and for medical care. No one imagined that one day Israel would no longer need Palestinian labor because of the numbers of Filipino, Thai and other guest workers it could import to take their place. No one could conceive of the Strip being encircled with an electronic fence and all movement in and out strictly controlled at a few crossing points and then choked off altogether.

The Gazan economy suffered greatly during the first intifada of 1988 to 1992 (which saw a decline of 60 percent in per capita GNP) and as a result of the first Gulf War, when Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait and Gaza lost their remittances. By 1992, the economy was so bad that when the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA -- which supports refugees by providing schools and food) advertised 8 jobs for garbage collectors, it got 11,655 applications -- which represented 10 percent of the entire labor force.

But it was under the so-called Oslo "peace process" of the mid and late 1990s that Gaza was turned into a big prison and the economy throttled. Palestinian entrepreneurs who returned home to Gaza to build up the local economy soon encountered a process termed "de-development" by Sara Roy, a researcher at Harvard University and daughter of Holocaust survivors who has done the most important scholarly work on the political economy of Gaza. In her book Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Dr. Roy defines de-development as "the deliberate, systematic and progressive dismemberment of an indigenous economy by a dominant one, where economic -- and by extension, societal -- potential is not only distorted but denied ... De-development ensures that there will be no economic base -- even one that is malformed -- to support an independent indigenous economy (and society)."

Between 1993 and 1996 -- when the world still considered Oslo a promising "peace process," the Gaza Strip was entirely sealed for a total of 342 days -- a third of each year. During that time, raw materials could not be imported, and agricultural produce and industrial products could not be exported. During those years the Gaza GNP continued its downward slide.

Economic decline provided the opportunity for Hamas to win support in a society which was largely Sunni Muslim (there are also Greek Orthodox Christians in Gaza) but not particularly religious. Most Palestinians wanted -- and still want -- a secular national state, not a religious state. But Hamas provided for the essential needs if an increasingly desperate population through a network of orphanages, schools, clinics and emergency aid distribution. People also turned to Hamas in disgust at the performance of the Palestinian Authority set up under Oslo to administer what was called "autonomy" -- to run schools, hospitals, municipal services and police the population. After Yaseer Arafat returned from Tunis to Gaza in 1994, the PA was controlled by his Fatah group. It rapidly became both corrupt and authoritarian. This is the main reason why Hamas did so well in the democratic elections of January 2006, leading Israel and the US to impose collective punishment on the entire Palestinian people for voting for what they termed a terrorist group.

Hamas and some other Palestinian groups -- most notably Islamic Jihad and some militant Fatah factions - turned to violence as the Oslo "peace process" faltered in the mid 1990s and Israel continued to expropriate Palestinian land and doubled the number of its settlers. The first Palestinian suicide bombing occurred in April 1994. Hamas claimed it carried out the bombing as a response to the killing by Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein of 30 Muslims as they were kneeling in prayer in the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron.

The failure of Oslo led to a second, Palestinian uprising which has had catastrophic consequences for both peoples. Since September 2000, nearly 5,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military and settlers, some of them insurgents, but many more civilians and a quarter of them children. During the same period, over 1,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed by Palestinian armed groups and suicide bombers. Of course, under international humanitarian law, targeting civilians is absolutely prohibited. That law has been repeatedly violated by both Israelis and Palestinians.

I don't want to get into a discussion here of who is most to blame for this cycle of violence. But I would like to tell you about one particularly significant incident whose aftermath I personally witnessed. In July 2002, after the Israeli military had re-invaded the West Bank and Gaza Strip, destroying thousands of Palestinians houses and hundreds of lives, Fatah and Hamas reached an understanding that suicide bombings within Israel had to stop. Just 90 minutes before a joint announcement to that effect was to be made on July 22, the Israeli air force dropped a one ton bomb on apartment building in an intensely crowded area of Gaza City in effort to kill a Hamas leader --16 Palestinian civilians, including 11 children perished. I had arrived in Gaza on that day, and immediately went to the site of the bombing -- people in shock, kids shoes, school supplies scattered through the rubble. And the horrific suicide bombings continued.

For the past six years, Israel has sought to destroy Palestinian resistance to occupation once and for all -- and remember, under international law Palestinians DO have the right of resistance to an illegal military occupation, although that right does not include the right to attack civilians. In the Gaza Strip's Rafah refugee camp, over a thousand houses have been destroyed, leaving 20,000 people homeless. Hundreds of thousands of fruit trees belonging to Palestinians have been uprooted and huge tracks of agricultural land by Israeli bulldozers. The statistics are numbing.

I would like to read to you from a "Letter from Gaza" I published after a visit in 2004.

"I saw a landscape where guard towers, miles of razor wire and concrete slabs have replaced the buildings, greenhouses, crops and date trees "shaved" by the Israeli army in the name of "self-defence." At the checkpoint near the Kfar Dorom settlement which divides the Gaza Strip in half, vehicles can pile up for miles and wait as long as 12 hours for passage -- assuming the checkpoint opens at all. It is "normal," I was told, to wait for two to four hours. Drivers have been shot from a guard tower for opening the car door or rolling down a window to get a breath of air.

"At the southern end of the Gaza Strip is the Rafah refugee camp, bludgeoned by the Israeli army in its "Operation Rainbow" invasion in May. Parts of Rafah come under daily fire from soldiers in machine gun turrets along a 25-foot high steel wall, or from sniper nests that tower above the dunes. The press has speculated that the gunfire is remotely controlled by soldiers through high tech surveillance equipment. Or it might be automatic, triggered by any sign of movement.

"Whatever the cause, the road around us was peppered with automatic gunfire when we visited the site where on May 19 at least ten, possibly as many as twenty, unarmed demonstrators were killed by Apache combat helicopters and tanks. They were among the 3,000 old and young men, women and children who had marched from downtown Rafah towards the beseiged Tel al Sultan neighborhood carrying food, water and blankets."

The year following my 2004 visit, Israel removed its settlers from the Gaza Strip. Dov Weisglass, the advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in an interview in the October 2005 Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz stated that the purpose of the removal was to freeze the political process. "And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely."

The withdrawal -- written about as a major Israeli concession in the US press -- completed the transformation of the Gaza Strip into a maximum security prison. Gaza is totally encircled by walls, fences and towers, as Israel continues to control its air, sea and land, and who goes in and out. Once the settlers were withdrawn, Palestinians were repeatedly subjected to glass shattering sonic booms, tank fire and missile strikes, day and night. In June 2006, Israeli air strikes destroyed the only power plant in the Gaza Strip, which impacted hospitals, water and sewage systems and plunged the Strip in darkness.

The closure was tightened after Hamas won the 2006 legislative election -- so much for the promotion of democracy in the Middle East - and was transformed into a chokehold following the Hamas-Fatah clashes of June 2007 and the total Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip (to understand the CIA's role in precipitating the fighting between Hamas and Fatah, you might want to read David Rose's article in the March 2008 issue of Vanity Fair). The Palestinian economy no longer functioning. Palestinians are permitted "enough to survive, not enough to live," in the words of the Red Cross document.

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has written in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz of the starvation imposed on the Gaza Strip, and "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment ... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins ... They only know the Israeli army will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions."

That is the situation today in the Gaza Strip, which has been declared a "hostile entity" by the Israeli cabinet. Nearly 90 percent of the population now lives under the poverty line. Out of the more than 9,000 commodities that used to enter the Gaza Strip, only 12 basic items are permitted in today -- and just enough of them to keep people alive. Electricity and fuel are severely rationed and cement, soap, many medical supplies, potable water and raw materials kept out altogether. The siege has deprived Gazans of urgent medical care including access to crucial vaccines, dialysis, operating room supplies and neonatal incubators. It has prevented students from joining their universities, inflicted a serious shortage of books and other supplies on schools. According to a GCMHP psychiatrist, 99.4 percent of the children they studied recently now suffer from trauma. In a press release issued on the occasion of World Mental Health Day last October, Dr. Eyad el Sarraj reports that "a majority of civilians are suffering from feelings of anger, anxiety, panic, depression, frustration and hopelessness as a result of Israeli occupation practices, siege, and poverty." The entire population has been subjected to collective punishment, which is a war crime under international law. We often hear of famine, and starvation in various places in the world -- but I don't know of any other place where inflicting starvation on an entire people is a matter of government policy, and is being done with the collusion of the US and international community. And I don't know of any issue where the United Nations, the reach of human rights law, and human rights organizations, have been more demonstrated to be more impotent than in the matter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So what can be done -- and what can we do? In November 2007, civil society organizations in Gaza, led by the GCMHP, launched a Palestinian-International Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza. Its aim is to pressure the Israeli government to lift the siege by raising awareness internationally about the deteriorating living conditions in the Gaza Strip in hopes that people -- and their governments -- will begin to speak out. Civil society organizations are calling on people to try to come to Gaza and if they cannot enter, engage in peaceful demonstrations at the Erez checkpoint. They hope people will engage in solidarity meetings, cultural activities and other actions in Tel Aviv, the West Bank and around the world. They write: "We need the support of all people who believe in justice all over the world, to contribute to the success of this campaign ... We particularly call upon Jews whose history of trauma, discrimination and suffering should guide them to stand up today against the suffering of others." You can read their entire statement on our website, www.gazamentalhealth.org.

On January 26, 2008 Israeli peace groups answered this call, as 25 buses and more than 100 cars and trucks full of emergency supplies converged on the Erez Crossing checkpoint, where rallies were organized at both sides of the intimidating barrier. Among those who spoke movingly of the need to end the violence and break the siege of Gaza was a 17 year old resident from the adjacent Israeli town of Sderot, the chief target of Palestinian Qassam rockets. Finally, on February 19, the seven tons of humanitarian supplies were allowed to enter the Gaza.

Let me conclude by saying that unless the siege is broken and Gazans can again imagine a future in which they live a dignified life, extremist ideologies will flourish and rising generations will be conditioned to think not in terms of the potential for peace and co-existence, but only of violence and death. I am hoping that you in this room will want to make your voices heard -- you can write letters to newspapers and to your Members of Congress, speak out in your churches and synagogues. And you can make a donation to the Gaza Mental Health Foundation -- 100 percent of everything we raise is transferred to the GCMHP. Right now I am planning to be part of the "End the Siege" international conference of psychologists and other professional and medical people which the GCMHP is organizing for late October -- need funds for that. If you are interested in visiting the GCMHP and doing volunteer work with it, please contact me at numurray@comcast.net and I can put you in touch with people there. You can also visit the website www.freegaza.org and read about plans underway to expand the effort to break the siege by boat.

The critical thing is to take action -- we must not stand silently by while the people of Gaza are deprived of their dignity, their hopes for the future and all the basic requirements for a decent life.

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